Luis Ramírez de Lucena

A page from his book

Luis Ramírez de Lucena (c. 1465 – c. 1530) was a Spanish chess player who published the first still-existing chess book. He was probably the son of the humanist writer and diplomat Juan de Lucena, from a family of Jews who converted to Roman Catholicism.[1]

Book

Lucena wrote the oldest surviving printed book on chess, Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez con 101 Juegos de Partido ("Repetition of Love and the Art of Playing Chess"), published in Salamanca around 1497[2]. The book contains analysis of eleven chess openings but contains many elementary errors that led chess historian H. J. R. Murray to suggest that it was prepared in a hurry.[3] The book was written when the rules of chess were taking their modern form (see origins of modern chess), and some of the 150 positions in the book are of the old game and some of the new. Prior to the analysis stands an antifeminist diatrib[4]. Fewer than a dozen copies of the book exist.

Commentators have suggested that much of the material was plagiarised from Francesc Vicent's now lost 1495 work Libre dels jochs partits dels schacs en nombre de 100.[5]

Chess positions

The Lucena position is named after him, even though it does not appear in his book. (It was first published in 1634 by Alessandro Salvio.) The smothered mate (later named Philidor's legacy) is in the book.[6]

References

  1. ↑ (it) Article by Daniele Ciani about Luis Lucena, on the web site Chess Archeology
  2. ↑ Matulka 1931, p. 5.
  3. ↑ H.J.R. Murray, A History of Chess, 1913/2012, p=786
  4. ↑ Matulka 1931, p. 6.
  5. ↑ M. C. Romeo. "Lucena - a mystery after 500 years". Archived from the original on July 2, 2009.
  6. ↑ See the image of p. 201 of the book
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