A recent article on medieval gambling reveals that it was a popular pastime but what you could or could not do often depended on which town you were in.
In her article, ‘Ludus zardorum: Moral and Legal Frameworks of Gambling along the Adriatic in the Middle Ages,’ Sabine Florence Fabijanec examines how gambling was practiced and regulated in towns such as Dubrovnik, Trogir, Rijeka and Ancona. She finds that dozens of games were played in this region, often involving dice or cards. For example, in the game called Zare, three players would each role a dice – the lowest number would be the zara. The players would call out a number and the winner would be the one who threw the sum he had called, while the loser would be the person who rolled the zara.
Fabijanec examined local laws from towns along the Croatian coast and that each place had its own regulations. She writes:
Gambling was strictly forbidden only in Split [except during the Christmas season and Carnival], as was any kind of game of chance, but playing cards, that is “the usual card games” was allowed. In contrast, in Rijeka and its whole district, all games were forbidden in general: dice, cards and corrigaloe. But, the city acknowledged the need to play for entertainment, so three types of games were legal: ronfa and trionfa, while basseta (played for profit) was only allowed under the condition that a bet did not exceed 4 shillings and that no player was allowed to exceed the upper daily limit of bets, which was set at 6 pounds in total; the fine was 5 pounds. In Dvigrad it was apparently also forbidden to play cards and gamble; the innkeepers and their staff were authorized to keep order in their places and in the port on Lim bay; thus, they could fine individuals who played these games. In Dubrovnik, gambling and playing cards per se were not forbidden, but if games of chance included the possibility of giving something in pawn, then the people were fined who lent money to the players. In Skradin, gambling at night was punishable, but there was no special regulation of gambling during the day. In Kotor, according to the regulation of 1421, it was forbidden to play “in a cave” and in secret places and games in which someone lost while others gained, however, playing games with dice was allowed – alea, as well as “honest public games.”
Some of the common elements of these and other regulations was to make sure that gambling, if it was allowed, took place in public areas and that the money involved would be relatively modest. There was also a concern that conmen might be deceiving people with their games. A statute from the town of Sibenik reveals that there was at least six methods of rigging dice
- they were not entirely cubical
- material was added
- they were mildly dented
- they had the same number on two sides
- they were filled with led or mercury
- they were rubbed with a magnet
Meanwhile, some civic officials saw a benefit in allowing gambling – in the Italian city of Ancona, where gambling was legal, the commune collected taxes on the winnings and collected special rents from the houses where it was played. Fabijanec adds that is was possible that Croatian towns also found a way to make money by permitting gambling.
The laws and attitudes towards gambling in this region of Adriatic were not out of line with other parts of medieval Europe. While in the early Middle Ages games of chance were harshly condemned, by the High Middle Ages attitudes had changed. Scholars including Thomas Aquinas believed that gambling was permissible as long as it was for modest sums and was entirely voluntary. Those who worried about the sins from making money from gambling could have them redeemed by giving the ill-gotten gains to charity. These attitudes made gambling a popular pastime during the later half of the Middle Ages – as Fabijanec states: “In short, everyone played games of chance.”
She adds that it was “in the sixteenth century, with the Reformation, the viewpoints once again became stricter and the Counter-Reformation, in a desire to restore the contested Catholic authority, prosecuted the world of gamblers from the ecclesiastical sphere. Games of chance were the first to be attacked by the ‘new’ moral principles.”
The article ‘Ludus zardorum: Moral and Legal Frameworks of Gambling along the Adriatic in the Middle Ages,’ appears in At the Edge of the Law: Socially Unacceptable and Illegal Behaviour in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, edited by Suzanna Miljan and Gerhard Jaritz (Medium Aevum Quotidianum, 2012). Sabine Florence Fabijanec teaches at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
See also: The Beginning of Card Games