In a German book printed at Augsburg in 1472, called “Gülden Spiel,” or “The Golden Game,” written by a Dominican friar of the name of Ingold, it is stated that cards had been known in Germany since 1300. As this is by no means contemporaneous testimony, it is probable that the German vanity which claims the honor of inventing the art of printing wishes, with no more reason on its side, to appropriate to itself the invention of playing-cards, which in plain words is laying claim to the invention of wood-engraving, as many of the early German packs are engraved and not stencilled or painted. This rather suspicious assertion may therefore well be ignored, and we may only credit the one made by the Italian author of Viterbo, which is apparently more authentic. Unfortunately, the latter gives no details about the kind of cards which he mentions. He only states that cards made their appearance in 1379 in Europe, and came from Arabia under their original name. In the “Livre d’Or” of Ulm, which is a manuscript preserved in that city, there is an ordinance, dated 1397, forbidding all card-playing. These are the only authentic witnesses that can be brought forward by which the approximate time of the introduction of playing-cards into Europe may be fixed. [Illustration: Plate 8.] A German author by the name of Heniken claims for his country the birthplace of cards, and brings forward many ingenious but hardly satisfactory deductions in support of his pretensions. He says that _Briefe_, which is the name that cards bear in his country, means “letters,” and that the common people do not say, “Give me a pack of cards,” but “Give me a _Spiel-briefe_” (a pack of letters), and they do not say, “I want a _card_,” but “I want a _Brief_” (letter). “We should at least have preserved the name _carte_,” he says, “if they had come to us from France; for the common people always preserve the names of all games that come to them from other countries.” Unfortunately for this argument, it has been discovered that cards were called _Karten_ in Germany before they were called _Briefe_. It may be claimed that cards were carried into Germany by the Crusaders, who had learned their use during the wars with the Saracens. They might also have made an ingenious use of the cards during their long absences in the East, and diverted them from their original purposes, writing letters to mothers, wives, or sweethearts on them, or chosen them to send to the young folk at home to serve for their amusement, as the pictures of the Kings, Knights, etc., rude though they probably were, would have undoubtedly proved both novel and entertaining; and from this fact the name of _Briefe_ may have been given to the _Naïbi_ of the Orient. The Eastern origin of the cards is plainly pointed to, as there are no Queens in ancient packs of German cards.