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Shatranj

The game as it was played from Baghdad to Cordoba for six hundred years. Slower than modern chess, and won in ways modern chess forgot.

Updated

What this variant is

Shatranj is the mediaeval Persian and Arab form of chess, and the version that reached Europe. The board is the ordinary eight by eight, and the men start on the same squares as in modern chess: rooks in the corners, then horses, then elephants, with the counsellor and the king between them and eight pawns in front.

This site follows the reconstruction in H. J. R. Murray’s A History of Chess, which rests on the surviving Arabic manuals. The rules below are not seriously disputed; where a genuine dispute exists it belongs to the earlier Indian game, and this site keeps that on the chaturanga page.

The six men

Shah (king)
Moves one square in any direction, exactly like a modern king, and can be checked and mated. There is no castling, so the shah walks to safety one square at a time.
Ferz (counsellor)
Moves exactly one square diagonally and nothing more. It stands beside the shah and is the ancestor of the modern queen. It is stuck on its own colour forever and is worth barely more than a pawn.
Alfil (elephant)
Leaps exactly two squares diagonally, over whatever stands between. It cannot move one square or three, so each alfil reaches only eight squares in the whole game, and one side’s two alfils can never defend each other.
Faras (horse)
Moves exactly like the modern knight, jumping over anything in the way. It is unchanged, and here it is the strongest piece on the board after the rukh.
Rukh (chariot)
Moves any number of squares along a rank or a file, exactly like the modern rook. With no queen or bishop to rival it, it dominates the game.
Baidaq (pawn)
Moves one square straight forward and captures one square diagonally forward. There is no two-square first move and no capture in passing. On reaching the far rank it promotes, and can only become a ferz.

What is missing

  • No castling. The shah walks.
  • No two-square pawn advance, and so no capture in passing.
  • No choice at promotion. A pawn becomes a ferz, even if you already have one and a rukh would win on the spot.
  • No long-range diagonal piece at all. The alfil leaps and the ferz crawls, so a position is far more open along ranks and files than along diagonals.

The result is a far slower game. Endgames are long, because a ferz and an alfil together are worth less than one modern bishop.

Winning

Shatranj has three winning conditions, and only the first is familiar.

  1. Checkmate. The enemy shah is in check with no legal answer.
  2. Stalemate. If your opponent has no legal move and is not in check, you win. This is the reverse of the modern rule, and a real winning method rather than a technicality.
  3. Baring the king. Capture every enemy man except the shah, leaving it alone on the board, and you win.

The bare king rule has an escape clause, and this site enforces it. If the player whose king has just been bared can bare your king in reply, on their very next move, the game is a draw instead of a loss.

Drawing

  • Agreement between the players.
  • Threefold repetition, and the fifty-move rule, both applied automatically for both sides.
  • A bare king answered by baring the opponent’s king on the very next move.

Openings, and why they were memorised

With no piece able to cross the board quickly, little can go wrong in the first dozen moves. Both sides simply march their men into a preferred formation. The Arabic writers named and catalogued these, and one such arrangement is a tabiya, from the Arabic for a battle order.

A player learned a handful of tabiyat, steered towards one, and only then did the real game begin. It is the closest the mediaeval game came to opening theory, and it is why the manuals read as collections of positions rather than of games.

Sources

Everything on this page is written from scratch. These are the works it leans on, and what each one settles.

  • H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford, 1913), chapter V

    The standard account of shatranj, assembled from the surviving Arabic manuals. It settles the piece moves used here, the three winning conditions, and the escape clause on the bare king rule.