Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. European libraries, had, in a casual manner, come to the cognizance of the writer. Their existence was, for a long time, a sealed fact to most scholars few indeed had examined their pages brilliant with the highest art of the illuminator and of these few, none, so far as is known, had carried their studies beyond the portions devoted to the venerable game of chess. It is, moreover, less than half a century since the groups of codices at Rome and Florence, in some respects the most important of all, were alluded to in any printed publication, while the one housed within the monastic walls of the Escorial, which owes its execution to Alfonso the Wise of Spain, had never been critically treated, even as to its chess section, until within the last de cade or two; while its accounts of other table-games in use in the thirteenth century have remained up to now a field untilled by the investigator.
