Seeing that chess was known in the East by a term signifying the Four Kings, and that it was a favorite amusement with the higher classes in Europe in the reign of Edward I, there can scarcely be a doubt that this was the game to which Walter Sturton's entry relates. If cards were indeed known in Europe in the early part of the reign of Edward the First, the silence respecting them, of all contemporary writers, for about a century afterwards, must be admitted as conclusive, though negative, evidence of their not being in common use. Petrarch, though he treats of gaming in one of his dialogues, never mentions them; and though Boccacio and Chaucer notice various games at which both the higher and lower classes of the period were accustomed to play, yet there is not a single passage in the works of either, which can be fairly construed to mean cards. From the following passage, which occurs in a work on the 'Government of a Family,' in manuscript, composed by Sandro di Pipozzi,[76] in 1299, it has been concluded by Breitkopf that cards were at that period well known in Italy: "Se giucherà di denaro, o cosi, o alle _carte_, gli apparecchieria la via, &c." Zani, however, opposes to the authority of the manuscript, the negative evidence of Petrarch, who flourished at a subsequent period, and who, he thinks, would not have failed to have mentioned cards if they had then been known among the various games which he enumerates in the first dialogue of his treatise 'De Remediis utriusque Fortunæ.'[77] Mons. Duchesne also remarks, in his 'Observations sur les Cartes a jouer,' that, as the copy of Sandro di Pipozzi's work, cited by Taraboschi, and examined by Zani, is not of an earlier date than 1400, there is reason to believe that the express mention of cards in it, was the interpolation of a transcriber. That such interpolations were frequently made both by printers and transcribers, will appear evident from the following observations on several works, both printed and manuscript, which have been cited in proof of the antiquity of card-playing in Europe.[78]