El regreso de Francesch Vicent by Jose A. Garzon Add to Watch List Watching View Watchlist >

Generalitat Valenciana, Valencia, Espagna, 2005, in Spanish language, hardback, xiii+497 pp, 20x27,5 cm, 1545 grams, many b/w and color photos, and chess diagrams. Extensive bibliography.  Names index. Condition: fine.  A luxury nice edition.

In this exhaustive work, after 15 years of research the author assumes the burden of proof to prove conclusively the Valencian origin of modern chess. With two new findings he is able to date the poem definitively (Valencia 1475); this year coincides in turn with the date of the creation of the new piece, the Queen. The study of all documents on new chess allows him to define the dependency of some on others and to establish a precise chronology. His research rules out the possibility of the existence of a 15th-century document on modern chess from outside Spain. However, the most significant of his contributions is that of the appearance of Vicent’s book and its 100 problems, copied in a manuscript by its author in the early 16th century, probably when he was the chess tutor of Lucrecia Borgia. It is surprising to see how exactly this coincides with the reconstruction proposed by Averbakh 40 years earlier.

Francesch Vicent (Segorbe, 1479 – 1523) was the author of the world's first modern chess treatise. The incunabulum was printed in 1495 (May 15, at the printing press of Lope de Roca and Pedro Trincher) in the city of Valencia with the title Llibre dels jochs partits dels schacs en nombre de 100 (Book of Chess Match Games Numbered 100) in Valencian, although his family has always maintained, with a touch of romanticism, that the book was written in 1492.