The documentary record of the tarot is unusually good for a Renaissance game, and it points in one direction. The earliest secure evidence sits in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century: a treatise by Marziano da Tortona, written before 1425 for Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan, describes a deck of gods and birds ancestral to the trump idea, and account books of the Ferrarese court record payments for carte da trionfi, cards with triumphs, in the 1440s. The luxurious hand painted decks made for the Visconti and Sforza families survive in part, and their trump subjects, the Pope, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hanged Man, Death, the World, belong to the ordinary imagery of Italian civic processions and moral allegory, the trionfi of Petrarchan pageantry. For three centuries every mention of the pack, in sermons against gaming, in city statutes, in rule books, concerns a trick taking game, played from Italy through France and Switzerland into central Europe.
There is no document connecting the cards to Egypt, to the Kabbalah or to divination before the eighteenth century; cartomancy with tarot appears in Bologna and Marseilles records only in the 1700s, shortly before Antoine Court de Gebelin declared the pack an Egyptian book in 1781 without offering evidence. The gap between what the archive shows and what the esoteric tradition asserts is the entire subject of this study, and it remains the sharpest known case of a documented object acquiring an undocumented past.