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The evidence goes like this -

Playing Cards are not mentioned before 1377. Maybe that doesn't sound strange at first, but Petrarch (1366) doesn't mention them though he mentions lots of other games. Boccacio (1370) goes out of his way to mention long lists of games played by the people and he doesn't mention them either.

All of a sudden, in 1377 there are 4 references (Florence, Paris, Basle, Sienna) - a couple of them call them the "new game". Then between 1377 and 1390 there are 19 references to Trionfi - (Italian for Playing Cards). More important, none of these early 19 references are to Tarocchi (Italian for Tarot).

So the evidence is that the Cards arrived between 1370 and 1377.

A lot of the details were worked out in a series of articles in the Playing Card, the journal of the International Playing Card Society and the best overall summary is in Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (unfortunately out of print)." - Courtesy of Bob O'Neill 1998/05/22

The following was taken from:

INTERNATIONAL PLAYING CARD SOCIETY

Playing-Cards are believed to have arrived in Europe from the East, specifically as developments of the Cards used by the Mamelukes of Egypt. An almost complete pack of Mameluke playing-Cards was discovered in the Topkapi Sarayi Museum in Instanbul by L.A. Mayer in 1939. His discovery remained little known until his original paper was posthumously published in book form in 1971. By this time it was possible to include details on the fragment of a similar Card subsequently identified in a private collection. This pack itself does not predate 1400, but the `private' fragment is tentatively dated to the 12th or 13th centuries. The reconstructed pack consists of 52 Cards, with suits of swords, polo-sticks, cups, and coins, numerals from one to ten, and courts labelled `malik' (King), `naib malik' (Deputy King), and `thani naib' (Second Deputy). This is virtually identical with the Italian variety of Latin-suited pack, and the date of the other fragment clinches the argument that the Mameluke pack came first. Furthermore, the Arabic word naib, `deputy', suggests the origin of Italian naibbe and Spanish naipes for the name of the game -- `the Game of Deputies'
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