page_title: Minchiate
section_title: Deck
hierarchical_section_title: Minchiate / Deck
caption_attribution_description: English: Original Minchiate cards and suits
context_page_description: Minchiate is an early 16th-century card game, originating in Florence, Italy. It is no longer widely played. Minchiate can also refer to the special deck of 97 playing cards used in the game. The deck is closely related to the tarot cards, but contains an expanded suit of trumps. The game was similar to but more complex than tarocchi. The minchiate represents a Florentine variant on the original game.
context_section_description: The minchiate deck differs from other tarot decks in several features. The first and most obvious difference is that the trumps have almost doubled in number; there are 40 trumps in the minchiate, in addition to the unnumbered card the Madman, The Fool or the excuse. Minchiate uses additive Roman numerals for its trumps. Due to the large number of trumps, players generally called them by their number with the exception of the arie.
  Minchiate decks come in two standard patterns, earlier and later, which coexisted for almost two centuries. Earlier Minchiate dates from the early 16th century or even the late 15th century. There are the four standard Latin suits of swords, batons, coins, and cups; these contain pip cards from ace to ten, and four face cards: a jack, a knight, a queen, and a king. In the minchiate deck, however, in the suits of cups and coins, the "knaves" or "pages" (Italian fanti) have been replaced by "maids" (fantine).  The knights, mounted figures in the tarot of Marseilles and similar designs, are centaurs or sphinxes in many minchiate decks. The suits follow the Portuguese pattern with the exception of the batons which follows the northern Italian suit-system. This pattern died out around 1900.
  The Republic of Lucca produced their own version of Minchiate decks which were very similar to the ones used in nearby Florence but with several graphical differences. Kings are seated under arches, knights are humans riding horses, all knaves are male, and the Fool is playing with a dog. This pattern died out in the eighteenth century.
  The Later Minchiate pattern appeared around the early 18th century as a luxury edition. In this version, the eight highest trumps lose their red backgrounds. Around 1820, this pattern was redesigned to give it a flatter, plainer appearance with changes to a quarter of the trump and court cards while restoring the red background to the high trumps. This pattern survived in Liguria until the 1930s.
  The trumps of the minchiate deck, and their corresponding tarot of Marseilles cards and the esoteric Rider-Waite tarot deck are:
  By comparing the Rosenwald sheet with 16th century trump lists, the Popess (II) was likely dropped in the late 15th century which shifted every trump above the first down one rank. The Empress, Emperor, and Pope became the new II, III, and IIII respectively, the latter now wearing a secular crown as opposed to a papal tiara. Since the five lowest trumps were collectively known as the papi (popes), Love was added to this group after its demotion. The identification of middle papi was largely forgotten for centuries as players generally called cards by their number (pope 2, pope 3, etc.) French writer Romain Merlin (1869) is the only source that called trumps II, III, and IIII the Grand Duke, Western Emperor, and Eastern Emperor.
  Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance were three classical "cardinal virtues" depicted in the more familiar tarot trumps. The minchiate supplies the remaining cardinal virtue — Prudence — and inserts them with the three theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity.  The only other deck to have the theological virtues was the Cary-Yale deck. This is the only deck to include all seven virtues.
  Minchiate is a southern tarot pattern so it shares many qualities with the Bolognese and Sicilian tarots as opposed to the western patterns like the tarot of Marseilles. While the Tower is called The House of God in the Marseilles tarot, it is called the House of the Devil or Hellmouth in the minchiate deck  and it depicts a nude woman fleeing a burning building. The Moon depicts an astrologer studying the moon instead of the tarot of Marseilles howling dogs and lobster. The card corresponding to the Hermit is often called Time, or the Hunchback; it depicts an elderly man on crutches with an hourglass in the background. Like other southern decks, the final card in the series is not the World, but Judgement. The minchiate completes the series by adding all the zodiac signs (in random order) and the four classical elements.
  The eight highest ranking trump
caption: Earlier Minchiate cards, 17th century, from Smithsonian Digital Collections[15]
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