Knight of Pentacles

The Knight of Pentacles belongs to the suit the Italian packs call coins (denari). The four Italian suits, batons, coins, cups and swords, probably descend from the Mamluk playing cards of the Islamic world, though that link is probable rather than proven. In the French tradition of the Tarot of Marseilles the suit is Deniers, and its coins are drawn as distinct round objects.

The Knight is one of four court ranks that older tarot packs share: King, Queen, Knight (Cavalier) and Jack (Valet or Knave). Court cards were not fixed everywhere. The Cary–Yale pack of the Visconti-Sforza group, made in the mid-15th century in Milan, has six court ranks, including a Damsel and a mounted Lady, and its coin suit includes a mounted lady. In the Brera–Brambilla set, commissioned in 1463, a Knight of denari survives, together with a Jack of denari. The pip cards of these early decks are plain suit signs, not scenes.

The first deck in which every suit card is illustrated is the Sola Busca tarot, engraved around 1490 and hand-painted around 1491, now kept in the Brera Museum in Milan. Its court cards carry names from classical and biblical sources, and its Knight of Coins is named Sarafino. The Tarot of Marseilles, the pattern named for the city, keeps the usual four court ranks; the earliest surviving Marseilles-pattern cards are attributed to Philippe Vachier of Marseilles in 1639.

Pamela Colman Smith drew the Rider-Waite-Smith deck under A. E. Waite’s direction, and William Rider & Son of London first published it in December 1909. Earlier tarot packs, with a few rare exceptions, showed numbered cards as plain suit signs. In this deck every card in the Minor Arcana is a scene, including the Knight of Pentacles.

Waite’s book describes the card briefly, as a rider on a heavy, slow horse who holds up his pentacle but does not look at it. Some scholars think Smith took ideas for her Minor Arcana scenes from the Sola Busca tarot, whose photographs were given to the British Museum in 1907 and which she and Waite probably saw there. Examples usually named are cards of the swords and wands suits; the sources reviewed do not connect that deck to this particular card.