The Chess Motif for all of the World - Feature Article

Alexandra Kosteniuk's Chess Blog for Daily Chess News and Trivia (c) 2013

Hello everyone,

Bobby Fischer, seated, ponders his next move as challenger Samuel Reshevsky paces during the 1963 U.S. Championship in New York. (Associated Press)

Sometimes art imitates life; some games do so as well. In the case of chess especially, the parallels with power politics are many and uncanny, persisting over the centuries. Originating on the Asian subcontinent, chess moved to Persia (“checkmate” comes fromshah mat, “the king is dead”) but really began to diffuse widely during the great age of Arab conquest, starting in the 7th century of the Common Era. The structure and rules of the game remained consistent for centuries within Muslim domains, but in Christian countries to which chess spread, innovations emerged.

The most important change, introduced in the West some 500 years ago, granted greater directional flexibility and longer range to the Muslim “vizier,” renamed the queen, perhaps to reflect some of the great queens of the Middle Ages, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, as scholar Marilyn Yalom suggests in her highly entertaining Birth of the Chess Queen. The relabeled piece combined the capabilities of rook and bishop and, from a central position, could now exert influence over nearly half the board’s 64 squares, a ten-fold increase in power over the vizier.

This occurred on the chessboard at almost the same time that the long-range sailing vessel armed with heavy guns emerged, heralding the West’s rise to world mastery. Muslim powers never truly imitated this innovation — as they had failed to empower the vizier/queen along Western lines. Thus began their long decline in world politics. Now the real competition was between European powers. Spaniards, much of whose land had been occupied for centuries by Muslims, produced the earliest Western masters of the game in the 16th century — most notably Ruy López, for whom a famous, still popular, opening is named — and at the same time created the first globe-spanning empire.

In the following centuries, however, France and Britain produced the strongest chess masters — while simultaneously challenging and ultimately overmatching Spanish power on land and sea. The French no doubt picked up the game due to Spain’s proximity; the British may have had chess brought over by Norsemen, as the famous 12th century Isle of Lewis set — made of walrus ivory — features Viking “berserkers” as rooks. The Anglo-French competition proved exceptionally fierce, over the board and throughout the world. So while French and British troops contended, roughly evenly, over the futures of the Asian subcontinent, North America, and elsewhere, their chess masters, the best in the world, were of roughly equal strength as well. A chess figure of Napoleonic stature did arise — the famed Philidor — in the decades just before Bonaparte, but his death in 1795 kept the contending chess powers in balance. In the wake of Waterloo, the era in world politics known as the Pax Britannica was equaled in chess by the triumph of the Englishman Howard Staunton — the standard tournament chess piece design is named after him — over France’s Pierre de St. Amant.

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