Worldwide

Few human habits are as old, or as persistent, as gambling. Long before coins existed, people were casting bones to see what fortune held, and long before there were states to regulate it, there were rulers trying to stop their subjects from doing it. The history of gambling is therefore also a history of control: of kings, emperors, churches and city councils attempting to channel a pastime that refused to go away.

This article traces that story from the knucklebones of the ancient world to the opening of the Venetian Ridotto in 1638, often described as Europe's first public casino, and its closure in 1774. Along the way it meets dice-obsessed emperors, Germanic warriors who staked their freedom on a throw, and crusading kings who tried to ration how much their armies could lose. Where the sources are legendary rather than historical, that is noted.

Knucklebones and the first dice

The earliest gambling tools were not manufactured at all. Astragali, the ankle bones of sheep and goats, have four distinct sides when thrown, which made them natural tools for both games and divination. They turn up at archaeological sites across the ancient Near East, Egypt and the Greek world, and they were still being used in Roman times.

The ancients themselves were unsure who invented gaming. Herodotus (Histories, 1.94) records a Lydian tradition that games of dice and knucklebones were invented during an eighteen-year famine, so that people could spend one day eating and the next day playing to forget their hunger. It is almost certainly a legend, but it shows that by the fifth century BC games of chance were already old enough to need an origin story.

Cubic dice appear surprisingly early. Examples have been recovered from sites in the Indus Valley and eastern Iran dating to the third millennium BC, while the famous Royal Game of Ur, now in the British Museum, used tetrahedral dice around 2600 BC. By the classical period, six-sided dice with opposite faces adding to seven were standard across much of the Mediterranean.

Rome: dice, emperors and the lex alearia

The Romans played with both tali (knucklebones) and tesserae (cubic dice), usually shaken in a cup called a fritillus. The best throw with four tali, in which every bone landed on a different side, was called the Venus. The worst, four ones, was known as the dogs.

Gambling for money was officially illegal for much of Roman history. A law against dice, the lex alearia, is already mentioned by the playwright Plautus around 200 BC, and later legislation repeated the prohibition. The exception was the Saturnalia festival in December, when gambling was openly permitted. In practice, enforcement was weak, and the law seems to have been used mainly against the poor and the disreputable.

The elite, meanwhile, played freely. Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars is full of gambling emperors. Augustus, in a letter quoted by Suetonius (Augustus, 71), cheerfully reports losing twenty thousand sesterces at dice during a festival. Claudius was so devoted to the game that he wrote a book about it and had his carriage fitted with a board so he could play while travelling (Claudius, 33). Nero is said to have staked four hundred thousand sesterces on a single point (Nero, 30). And of course Julius Caesar, crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC, reportedly declared that "the die is cast" (Julius, 32), borrowing a phrase from the Greek playwright Menander.

The contrast is striking. The same society that outlawed dice for ordinary citizens celebrated them in the language of its most famous political gamble.

Germanic peoples who staked their freedom

One of the most dramatic descriptions of gambling in the ancient world comes from Tacitus. In the Germania (24), written around AD 98, he claims that the Germanic peoples played dice soberly, as a serious business, and with such recklessness that when everything else was lost they staked their own liberty on the final throw. The loser, Tacitus says, went into voluntary slavery, allowing himself to be bound and sold even if he was younger and stronger than the winner, and the Germans called this keeping faith.

How far this can be trusted is debated. Tacitus never visited Germania, relied on earlier reports, and often used the Germans as a mirror to criticise Roman decadence. Still, the passage reflects something real: in many early societies, debt and gambling losses could lead to bondage, and a man's word given at the gaming board was treated as binding.

Medieval Europe: crusaders, kings and bans

Gambling did not disappear with the Roman Empire. Dice games remained popular in taverns, army camps and castles across medieval Europe, and the Church repeatedly condemned them as a source of blasphemy, quarrels and ruin.
One of the most detailed regulations comes from the Third Crusade. According to chroniclers, Richard I of England and Philip II of France agreed an ordinance at Messina in 1190 that strictly limited gambling in their armies. Nobody below the rank of knight was allowed to play for money. Knights and clerics could gamble, but not lose more than twenty shillings in a day and night, while the kings themselves were exempt. Servants caught breaking the rules faced public punishment. It is a vivid example of rulers trying not to ban gambling outright, but to keep it within limits that would not destroy an army's discipline.

Other rulers went further. Louis IX of France issued ordinances in 1254 forbidding dice games and even the manufacture of dice. In England, laws such as the Unlawful Games Act of 1541 banned ordinary people from playing dice, cards and bowls, partly to encourage archery practice instead. Like most gambling bans, these were widely ignored.

Cards arrive in Europe

Playing cards reached Europe in the later fourteenth century, probably via the Islamic world. By the 1370s, they were common enough for city authorities to take notice, and Florence was among the cities that issued bans on a new game called naibbe in 1376 and 1377. Within a century, card games had spread across the continent, and the tarot deck had developed in northern Italy.

Lotteries offered rulers another way to profit from the urge to gamble. In 1567 Elizabeth I authorised England's first state lottery to raise money for harbours and other public works, with prizes that included plate, tapestries and cash, and tickets were sold across the country before the draw in 1569. Lotteries quickly became a favourite tool of governments across Europe, funding everything from bridges to, later, colonial ventures. They represented a decisive shift: instead of simply banning games of chance, the state could organise them itself and keep the profits, an approach that the Venetian Republic would take one step further.

The Ridotto: Europe's first public casino

In 1638 the Great Council of Venice made a remarkable decision. Rather than continue trying to suppress gambling, the Republic opened its own gaming house in the Palazzo Dandolo, near the church of San Moisè. Known as the Ridotto, it operated during the long Venetian Carnival and is often described as Europe's first public, state-sanctioned casino.

The Ridotto was carefully controlled. Its card tables, where games such as basset and biribissi were played, were run by members of the impoverished nobility, the barnabotti, who held the bank. Players were expected to wear masks, which allowed people of different ranks to mingle and helped preserve the fiction that gambling was an anonymous entertainment rather than a public scandal. The Republic, meanwhile, profited.

For more than a century the Ridotto was one of the sights of Venice, frequented by locals and grand tourists alike, including Giacomo Casanova. But by the eighteenth century, concerns about debt among the nobility had grown serious. In 1774 the Great Council voted to close the Ridotto, though gambling in Venice simply moved into private houses and smaller clubs known as casini.

From the Ridotto to today

The Ridotto's model of a regulated, state-approved gaming house would eventually spread. In the nineteenth century, German spa towns such as Baden-Baden and Bad Homburg became famous for their gaming rooms, and in 1863 the principality of Monaco opened the casino that would turn Monte Carlo into a byword for high-stakes play.

Today the setting has changed again. Gambling has moved from palaces and spa towns into licensed venues and onto the internet, where online casinos such as Revery Play offer card and dice games that a Roman emperor or a masked Venetian noble would recognise. The debates, too, would be familiar: governments still try to balance tax revenue against the harm gambling can cause, and the question of who should be allowed to play, and how much, is as live now as it was in 1190.

Conclusion

From the knucklebones of the ancient Near East to the masked tables of the Ridotto, the history of gambling reveals a remarkably consistent pattern. People have always been drawn to games of chance, and rulers have always tried to control them, through bans that were ignored, limits that were bent and, eventually, state-run houses that turned the vice into revenue. The Roman lex alearia, the crusaders' twenty-shilling limit and the Venetian Ridotto were all attempts to answer the same question: how far should a society allow its people to stake their fortunes on the fall of a die?

Images and text copyright © 2026. Content supplied by an external professional marketing service. The History Files accepts no responsibility for any external links on this page.