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Giacchino Greco,
also known as Il Calabrese, was born around 1600 in
Celico, which is near Cosenza in Calabria. Calabria had already
produced such players as Leonardo di
Cutri and Michele di
Mauro. Greco was considered by many as the
4th unofficial world champion during the 1620's.
Already in 1619,
Greco started keeping a notebook of tactics and particularly
clever games and he took up the custom of giving copies
of his manuscripts to his wealthy patrons.
In Rome, Monsignor Corsino della casa Minutoli
Tegrini, Cardinal Savelli, and
Monsignor Francisco Buoncompagni all received copies (of
which there are extant copies, dated 1620 in the Corsiniana
library in Rome, under the title, Trattato del
nobilissimo gioco de scacchi).
Despite his popularity in
Rome, in 1621 Greco took off to test himself against the
rest of Europe leaving this paper trail as he went. In 1621
he left a fine copy of his manuscripts with Duke Enrico of
Lorraine in Nancy. He traveled to Paris where he played
Arnauld de Corbeville,
Enrico di Savoia (the Marquis
of St. Sorlin and the Duke of Nemours and Geneva) and
others. He had apparently been quite successful because in
traveling from Paris to England he was waylaid by robbers
who divested him of 5,000 scudi, a princely sum. Finally
making it to London, he beat all the best players. Sir
Francis Godolphin and Nicholas Mountstephen were given
copies of his manuscripts. While in London, Greco developed
an idea to record entire games, rather than positions, for
study and inclusion in his manuscripts.
He returned to Paris
in 1624 where he rewrote his manuscript collection to
reflect his new ideas. He then went to Spain and played at
the court of Philip IV. There he beat his mentor and the
strongest player of the time (other than himself), don Mariano Morano. He finally returned to Italy where he was
enticed to traveling to the New Indies, the Americas, by a
Spanish nobleman. He seemingly contracted some disease there
and died around 1630 (possibly 1634) at the young age of 30
(34). He generously left all the money he earned at chess to
the Jesuits.
Greco stood head and shoulders above his
contemporaries, a feat seldom duplicated. David Hooper, in
The Oxford Companion to Chess, states that Greco
probably made up the games in his manuscripts. The question
of whether he actually played the games or invented them is
rather moot since if he invented them, he was perfectly
capable of playing them. |
