King of Swords

The suit of Swords comes from the Italian suit system (spade), which itself follows Mamluk playing cards, where the swords were scimitars. The tarot pack is believed to have been invented in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century, and each suit has four court cards. In the later Tarot de Marseille the ranks are Valet, Cavalier, Dame and Roi, so this card is the Roi d’Épées. The Marseille swords are drawn in a stylised way, as curved lines with one or more fully drawn blades. The earliest surviving Marseille-pattern cards were made by Philippe Vachier of Marseille in 1639.

A King of Swords survives from the Visconti-Sforza group of hand-painted decks made in Milan around 1450 by the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo. A copy held by the Morgan Library is dated about 1450 to 1480. It shows a seated, crowned man in armour with a sword.

In the Sola Busca deck, an engraved and painted Italian deck of the late fifteenth century (probably Venice, about 1491, though the artist is unknown), the court cards carry names of classical figures. The King of Swords is titled “Alecxandro M.”, which is read as Alexander the Great. The Sola Busca is the earliest fully surviving 78-card tarot with figures on the numbered cards as well.

Pamela Colman Smith painted the Rider-Waite-Smith deck for A. E. Waite, and William Rider & Son first published it in December 1909. Earlier decks mostly showed plain designs on the numbered cards, but Smith drew scenes for all of them. Photographs of the Sola Busca cards were given to the British Museum in 1907, and Waite and Smith probably saw them there, so that deck is a likely influence on Smith’s work. The King of Swords is a court card, and it keeps the older pattern of a seated, crowned king with a sword.