ABSTRACT
Boredom during downtime is an experience familiar to soldiers throughout history. From early on, games of the type which, to quote a thirteenth-century Spanish manual of games, “are played while sitting” were one of the most common ways for combatants to fill free time.1 It is not by accident that, from Antiquity on, myths connected the invention of specific games with warfare. According to Sophocles, for instance, Palamedes invented dice during the siege of Troy.2 The propensity of
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in July 2012. I would like to thank the audience of my paper and the two anonymous reviewers of Crusades for their most helpful suggestions.
