Libro de Los Juegos - Legacy

Legacy

In 1217, Alfonso had captured the Kingdom of Murcia, on the Mediterranean coast south of Valencia, for his father, King Alfonso IX, thereby unifying the kingdoms of Castile and León, bringing together the northern half of the Iberian Peninsula under one Christian throne. With the Christian re-conquest of the Peninsula underway, inroads into Islamic territories were successfully incorporating lands previously held by the taifa kingdoms. The arts and sciences prospered in the Kingdom of Castile under the confluence of Latin and Arabic traditions of academic curiosity as Alfonso sponsored scholars, translators, and artists of all three religions of the Book (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) in his chanceries and scriptoria. Clerical and secular scholars from Europe turned their eyes to Iberian Peninsula as the arts and sciences prospered in an early Spanish "renaissance" under the patronage of Alfonso X, who was continuing the tradition of (relatively) enlightened and tolerant convivencia established by the Muslim emirate several centuries earlier.

As an inheritor of a dynamic mixture of Arabic and Latin culture, Alfonso was steeped in the rich heritage of humanistic philosophy, and the production of his Libro de juegos reveals the compendium of world views that comprised the eclectic thirteenth century admixture of faith and science. According to this approach, man’s actions could be traced historically and his failures and successes could be studied as lessons to be applied to his future progress. These experiences can be played out and studied as they are lived, or as game moves played and analyzed in the pages of the Libro de juegos. It is a beautiful and luxurious document, rich not only in workmanship but also in the amount of scholarship of multiple medieval disciplines that are integrated in its pages.