It would appear that cards was a common game at the court of Henry the VII, even with the royal children; for, in 1503, his daughter Margaret, aged 14, was found playing at cards by James IV of Scotland, on his first interview with her, after her arrival in Scotland for the purpose of being married to him.[114] James himself is said to have been greatly addicted to card-playing; and in the accounts of his treasurer there are several entries of money disbursed on account of the game. On Christmas night, 1496, there are delivered to the king at Melrose, to spend at cards, "thirty-five unicornis, eleven French crowns, a ducat, a ridare, and a leu"--in all forty-two pounds. On the 23d August, 1504, when the king was at Lochmaben, he appears to have lost several sums at cards to Lord Dacre, the warden of the English marches; and on the 26th of the same month, there is an entry of four French crowns given "to Cuddy, the Inglis luter, to louse his cheyne of grotis, quhilk he tint at the cartis,"--to redeem his chain of groats which he lost at cards.[115] M. Duchesne, in his 'Observations sur les Cartes à jouer,' says, somewhat inconsistently, that cards are of Italian origin, and that it was either at Venice or at Florence, that the Greek refugees from Constantinople, first made them known. M. Duchesne is as incorrect in his chronology, as he is singular in his notions with respect to the Italian origin of playing cards,--first brought to Venice or Florence, by Greeks.[116] The refugees to whom he apparently alludes were the Greeks who sought an asylum in Italy, when Constantinople was taken by the Turks, in 1453, which is sixty years after the time that we have positive evidence of cards being known in France. But though no evidence has been produced to show that cards were first brought into Europe from Constantinople, it is yet certain that they were known to the Greeks, before the end of the fifteenth century; for Ducange, in his Glossary of Middle-Age Greek, under the word "XAPTIA, Ludus chartarum,[117] quotes the following verse from a manuscript of Emanual Georgillas on the Plague at Rhodes: "Και τα ταυλια, και τα χαρτια, και ζαρια κατακαυσουν" "Burn the tables, cards, and dice." "It appears from this," says Ducange, "that the game of cards, the origin of which is uncertain, was at least known in 1498, the year in which this mortality happened." In the 'Journal des Dames,' for the 10th April, 1828--a publication, which I have not had the fortune to see, but which is referred to by Brunet the younger, in his 'Notice Bibliographique sur les Cartes à jouer,'--there is a detailed account of the modern Greek cards manufactured at Frankfort.[118]