Developing Your Pieces: [??]

The Pawns are poor men. Their move is straight, except when they take anything: so also the poor man does well so long as he keeps from ambition.

— Innocent Morality, John of Waleys, thirteenth century

François-André Danican Philidor, 1749

The official rules of chess are not called rules. They're called laws. Article 5.6 of The Official Laws of Chess (Collier Books, MacMillan Publishing Company, New York, 1986) describes the moves of the pawn. (a) is simple: "The pawn may only move forward." (b) is slightly more difficult:

Except when making a capture, it advances from its original square either one or two vacant squares along the file on which it is placed, and on subsequent moves, it advances one vacant square along the file. When capturing, it advances one square along either of the diagonals on which it stands.

So begins the difficulty of the game.

The history of chess can be loosely understood through the history of pawns. In the beginning, almost everything moved like a pawn. The most common chess-origin myths claim the game was invented as a tool for instruction in war, an effigy of battle. The actual origin is lost, but the war-game myth and metaphor is apt enough to have influenced its evolution: Early piece movements were limited just as the movement of men and animals in early combat was limited, and as war technology advanced so did chess pieces. The pawn captures on the diagonal, it has been suggested, because foot soldiers kill by thrusting their swords sideways.

When chess arrived in Christendom around the year 1000 it struck Europeans as intriguing but slow. The game had hopped the information divide between Europe and Arabia, but not much instructional literature came with it. Still, Arabian chess — shatranj — flourished on the new continent.

Arabia had played the game differently, however. Arabian players rushed their first few moves to what was called a battle array — ta'biya. Each player would make a dozen or more moves without considering their opponent's moves too closely. In modern chess, this would be unthinkable. The Arabians blitzed to their pet arrays, and the game of slow, alternating moves didn't properly begin until a capture was made. Europe didn't know of this, and they played the slower game from the outset. The difference of opening style was apparent even as late as 1865, when Vincenz Grimm, a Hungarian chess player, visited Syria:

For the first time that I played with an Arab and invited him to commence the game, he made with incredible rapidity 10 or 12 moves one after the other without in the least troubling himself about my play. When I asked in astonishment, "When does my turn come?" he rejoined in just as much astonishment, "Why are you not moving?"

Arabian chess produced and analyzed a broad range of ta'biyat and gave them colorful names — The Torrent, The Strongly Built, The Slave's Banner — a contrast to the modern practice of naming openings after players. But even the great Muslim masters, beginning with as-Suli, expressed doubt over playing so quickly through the opening. As-Suli had tapped into the subtle art of deep strategic play. But the Muslim game was steeped in tradition, and his suggestion that it was careless to rush to ta'biyat went unheeded. The reluctance to evolve would contribute to the death of shatranj. Now, it's chess's lost civilization.

In Europe, they did not know of ta'biyat. But without even playing cards to compete with, chess was popular even though it was slow. Still, it was not long before the adventurous Christians began to experiment with the pieces. The pawns, perhaps as early as the thirteenth-century, acquired the option of moving two squares on their initial move instead of one. The game was accelerated. The double move created the incongruous situation that a pawn, moving two squares instead of one, might skip past a square that was controlled or attacked by an opposing pawn. Quite wrong. Thus was born a new law, en passant, in passing, the right to capture a pawn that moves two squares on the square that it skips. The law reads nearly as gibberish. Initiated in the fifteenth century and not universally accepted until as late as 1880, the en passant law demonstrates the unruliness of chess, its heinous incomprehensible baggage, and its habit of defying simple translation into language.

The Arabic word for pawn had been baidaq — foot soldier. This was directly translated into a number of European languages, and continued to evolve from there: Latin, pedinus; Italian, pedona; Spanish, peon; English, pawn. The names of the pieces and their movements weren't the only changes the Europeans made to the game. The writers of the moralities were quick to recognize the allegorical potential of chess, not simply as metaphor for battlefield melee, but for abstract conflicts as well. Depicting chess accurately in literature took a backseat to using it to score philosophical points. In Les Eschez amoureux, a fourteenth-century morality in which a woman plays a game of chess with the devil, the conflict is moral and religious with a theme of temptation. Here, the pawns represent not foot soldiers but opposing character traits: The lady's pawns are charity, humility, loyalty, love of God, etc., and the devil plays with inconstancy, slander, perjury, blasphemy, and fiction. The moralities helped to change the understanding of chess's main metaphor — the allusion grew to a vision of the chess array as representative of the nation-state. The Game and Playe of Chesse of Jacobus de Cessolis, copied so frequently that it rivaled the Bible, explained the pieces and pawns as representing society's economic stratum, the board a miniature Babylon. Each pawn now stood for a different element of human infrastructure: labourers of the erthe, physicyens and cirugiens, tauerners and hostelers, drapers and makers of cloth, etc. Chess would eventually...