Note.  The 37th and last Khalif of Abbaside, was dethroned and put to death by Hulaku. the son of Genghis Khan in 1258, when the Tartars were also sorely troubling part of the Christian world, and frightening the Popes.  Unluckily for Oriental Literature we are told, scarcely any of the comparatively few works of the “Golden Age of Arabian Literature” saved from destruction, have been translated or made known to us, but we may conclude that of the one hundred and sixty rulers, not a few emulating Harun, Mamun, Walid and Mutasem, were more or less like them, devoted to the game.  The powerful Abbaside Dynasty lasted from 749 to 1258, and there were 37 Khalifs of that race, the chess sayings and doings of whom alone, it is said, would fill a good-size volume, chess has had to contend against the consideration that the greatest historians and biographers, with the exception of Cunningham and Forbes, and perhaps Gibbon were not players, hence what we do possess is gathered from scattered allusion, incidental and accidental rather than sustained or connected narrative or biographical notice.  Canute the Dane, 1016-1035, William the First, and other English Kings, not so well attested, are absent from Philidor’s list.  Henry I, John, two of the Edwards, I and iv, and Charles I are identified with the chess incidents.  Accounts of Henry vii and Henry VIII, contain items of expense connected with the game.  The bluff king it is said played chess, as Wolsey and Cranmer did, and as Pitt, and Wilberforce, and Sunderland, Bolingbroke and Sydney Smyth have in our generations.  The vain and tyrant king, like the Ras of Abyssinia, who we hear of through Salt and Buckle much preferred winning, and was probably readily accommodated.  Less magnanimous and wise, these two, Henry and Ras, did not in this respect resemble Al Mamun and Tamerlane, whom Ibn Arabshah, Gibbon and others tell us, had no dislike to being beaten, but rather honored their opponents.  The chessmen of Henry VIII were last heard of in the possession of Sir Thomas Herbert, those of Charles I were with Lord Barrington.  Chess men were kept for Queen Elizabeth’s use by Lord Cecil, the Earl of Leicester, and Sir John Harrington.

In olden times as supposed, Alexander the Great, perhaps from acquaintance with India and its Kings, and their powerful Porus, 326 B.C., may have known chess and possibly Aristotle, sometime his tutor, who some say, invented chess, also played it.  The most ancient names are the renowned Prince Yudhistheira, eldest son of King Pandu of the Sanskrit chess period, the yet earlier Prince Nala of the translated poems, and further back we have the Brahmin Radha Kants account from the old Hindu law book, that the wife of Ravan, King of Lanka, Ceylon, invented chess in the second age of the world.  Associated with games not chess, but more like Draughts in China, there are Emperor Yao, 2300 B.C., Wa Wung 1122 B.C., Confucius 551 B.C., Hung Cochu, 172 B.C, and in Egypt, Queen Hatasu about 1750 B.C., Amenoph ii, 1687 to 1657 B.C., and Rameses iv 1559 to 1493 B.C.