Chess

The oldest surviving text to describe today's chess rules is Scachs d'amor, a poem written around 1475 in Valencia — a collaboration between three poets, discovered in 1905. Here, for the first time, the queen moves any number of squares in any direction, the bishop becomes stronger, the pawn can advance two squares on its first move, and en passant appears. Before this, the queen — the piece called the alfil-era queen (alferza) — was a weak piece that could only move one square diagonally. So why did the queen become the strongest piece? The story often told is that it was inspired by the power of Queen Isabella I of Castile. But the main foundation for this theory is historian Marilyn Yalom's book (2004), and even she does not state it as fact; reviewers have called it plausible but circumstantial. There is also a counterargument — the bishop grew stronger at the same time, and that has nothing to do with a queen. So this map does not decide, and I leave both on the page.