Gioachino Greco
Chess had been played for nine hundred years before Gioachino Greco, but it is with him that the record begins speaking in whole games. A Calabrian who made his living at the board, he carried a manuscript through the courts of Europe — Rome, Nancy, Paris, London, Madrid — writing out the sharpest lines he knew for the patrons who kept him. What he left behind is the oldest body of complete games in the literature, and the first sustained demonstration that an attack could be planned rather than merely stumbled upon.
◈The manuscripts
Greco did not write a treatise so much as assemble a portfolio. From about 1620 he produced a series of manuscripts for wealthy patrons, each a collection of openings and short illustrative games, each presented in exchange for patronage. Versions survive from Rome, Nancy, Paris and London, growing and changing as he travelled.
The games in them are almost certainly constructions rather than transcripts of play — the opponents go unnamed, the losing side obliges at every turn, and the point is always the lesson. That is exactly what makes them valuable. They are the earliest chess in the record written to be understood, and for two centuries afterwards they were how Europe learned to attack.
◈What he taught the game
The patterns Greco set down are still the first things a player is shown. The bishop sacrifice on h7 that drags a king into the open is called the Greek gift after him; the counter-gambit 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 f5 carries his name; and the trap in which a queen takes a rook in the corner and never gets out again is his as well.
He was published in England as The Royall Game of Chesse-Play in 1656, more than twenty years after his death. The engraved portrait on that title page is of King Charles I, to whom the edition was directed — it is not, as it is widely reproduced today, a picture of Greco. No likeness of him is known to exist.
◈The end
He appears to have gone to the West Indies in the service of a Spanish patron and to have died there around 1634, in his mid-thirties. The account that has come down is that he left what he had to the Jesuits.
The games outlived him by a wide margin. They were copied, translated, pirated and reprinted across Europe for the next two hundred years, and were still standard teaching material when Philidor was a boy.
“He recorded some of the earliest chess games known in their entirety.”
◈Legacy
Greco is where the written record of real chess begins. Whether his games were played or composed matters less than what they did: they turned the opening from a list of first moves into a body of ideas that could be taught, argued with and improved. Every attacking pattern in the modern beginner's canon runs back through him, and the earliest games this archive can show are his.