The History of Chess

Chess began in India as chaturanga, crossed Persia and the Arab world, and reached Europe about a thousand years ago. Its modern rules took shape in Spain at the end of the 15th century, when the queen gained her long-range move. The first official world champion was crowned in 1886, and in 1997 a computer beat the reigning champion for the first time.

How Old Is Chess?

Chess can be traced back about 1,500 years, to chaturanga in India. Sources differ on the exact century: some place it in the 6th century, others in the 7th. Anything older is guesswork, because no earlier game is known to have had both of the features that make chess what it is: pieces with different powers, and a game that turns on the fate of one piece, the king.

The game you play today is younger. Its pieces took their modern moves in Spain around 1475, and details such as castling, en passant, and the rule that White moves first were only settled between the 17th and the 19th centuries.

Chaturanga and Shatranj

Chaturanga means "four divisions", the four arms of an Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots. They became the pawn, the knight, the bishop, and the rook. Chaturanga is also thought to be the ancestor of xiangqi in China and shogi in Japan.

From India the game passed to Persia, where by around 600 it was called chatrang and formed part of a noble's education. After the Arab conquest of Persia it became shatranj, and spread across the Muslim world with most pieces keeping their Persian names. The piece that would become the queen was the ferz, or vizier, a weak piece that moved just one square diagonally.

Chess Reaches Europe

Chess came into Europe through Moorish Spain and through Italy, and by about the year 1000 it had spread across the continent. Europeans renamed the pieces as they went: the vizier became a queen, and the pieces took the shapes of kings, bishops, knights, and foot soldiers. In the 13th century a Spanish manuscript, the Libro de los juegos, described chess alongside backgammon and dice; it is the earliest European treatise on the game, and its chess rules were still close to those of shatranj.

The New Queen of 1475

Until the late 15th century the queen and bishop were short-range pieces. Around 1475, in the Kingdom of Valencia in Spain, the queen gained her modern move along any rank, file, or diagonal, and the bishop its full diagonal reach. The first document to show the new queen is Scachs d'amor, a Catalan poem written in Valencia in 1475. The faster game was nicknamed queen's chess, and less kindly, madwoman's chess.

Printing spread the new rules quickly. The oldest surviving printed chess book, Luis Ramirez de Lucena's Repeticion de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez, came out in Salamanca in 1497. Other details followed more slowly. The pawn's two-square first move arrived between the 13th and 16th centuries, and en passant captures appear in the 16th-century book of the Spanish priest Ruy Lopez de Segura, whose name the Ruy Lopez opening still carries. Castling grew out of the medieval king's leap and took its present form in the 17th century.

The last pieces fell into place in the 19th century, when the convention that White always moves first was established. Before then, either side could open the game.

Tournaments and World Champions

The first international tournament was held in London in 1851, organised by the English player Howard Staunton, whose name the standard chess set now carries. The German Adolf Anderssen won it. The American Paul Morphy then beat every leading player he met, Anderssen included, in a short career between 1857 and 1863.

In 1886 Wilhelm Steinitz beat Johannes Zukertort in the first match accepted as being for the world championship. Until 1946 the champion set the terms for any challenge. FIDE, the international chess federation, was founded in Paris in 1924, and after the reigning champion Alexander Alekhine died in 1946 it took over the championship, starting with a tournament in 1948. FIDE also writes the Laws of Chess used in tournaments today.

Computers and Stockfish

IBM's Deep Blue played Garry Kasparov, then world champion, in two six-game matches. Kasparov won the first, in Philadelphia in 1996, by 4 to 2. Deep Blue won the rematch in New York in 1997 by 3.5 to 2.5, the first time a reigning world champion lost a match to a computer under tournament conditions.

Stockfish, the engine behind our board, is free and open source. It grew out of Glaurung, an engine the Norwegian programmer Tord Romstad released in 2004; Marco Costalba forked it, and Stockfish 1.0 came out in November 2008. Since 2020 it has judged positions with a neural network. Our board runs Stockfish 17.1 inside your browser and lets you choose how strongly it plays, from Beginner to Maximum.

Chess History Timeline