Bonus Socius


Bonus Socius is a medieval treatise on chess, trictrac and merels. The exact date of writing is not known, but it is dated second half of 13th century. Bonus Socius was created in Lombardy by an anonymous author.
It is an encyclopedia that compiles problems from older sources. It was created as a compendium of all known chess problems. It is one of two main chess encyclopedias of that time, together with, also created in Lombardy. Their themes and problems partly coincide, in some parts of the books the problems are even given in the same order, although their solutions are mostly different.
The original language of Bonus Socius is Latin, although it was translated in several dialects of French, German and Italian.
There is a manuscript in Italian, that is kept in National Central Library in Florence. It has 119 pages in quarto with 194 chess problems, 24 merels problems and 11 trictrac problems, written two per page. The problems are ordered by number of moves before checkmate.

Literature