Here's my quiet take:
First of all, I really need to distangle all that is posted on Andy's Playing card site, because its led me into strange historical waters.
Last year I finally obtained the Hofamterspiel from Piatnik in Austria with the copyright of 1976. Michael Dummett is among the historians, all European. Maybe his later book available in December on the History of Occult Tarot will bring the various threads together. In the Hofamterspiel booklet of 130 pages (65 pages in English, the other 65 in German), he and other historians compare the Hofamerspiel of 48 cards circa 1445 to Fillippo Maria Visconti's Visconti gaming pack circa 1412-1447, during this Duke's lifetime.
The Hofamterspiel is compared in context to the Visconti, Mantegna and other portraits and woodcuts and minatures--well-documented art of the time. What is also mentioned is the use of cards as divination, overtaking the popularity of dice as a game and "an allegorical means of divination". This is according to Detlef Hoffman in his essay The Hofamterspiel and its position in the historical development of gaming.
Hoffman suggests from the end of the 14th century onward dicing took second place to cards and bans on dicing were now extended to dice and cards. Fine, I think.
What he applies to divining and the Hofamterspiel is its use in allegory, taken from the tract "Das Goldene Spiel" written in 1432 from Dominican Monk Meister Ingold describing the seven most popular games, including cards and using them as the basis for moralizing, allegorical comparisons using a pack of 52 cards. In his example, the four-suited card deck has four kings with coat of arms of rose, crown, ring and pfenning (I don't know). A game of trumps where the King, Queen and Maiden maintain a social order and lower classes have Knights, Moneylender, Priests, with various associations of one trumping over the other for points. Another sermon by Geiler von Kaiserberg in 1517 described connection between the hiearchy in cards and social order in real life. The rest of the essay describes details, likens the card game to chess..
If one takes this into context, if there are missing links in history of the arrival of allegorical trump and card games in Italy, perhaps one needs to look to the origin of the Empire of the time--- the German state of the Holy Roman Empire, which ruled the lower countries of Switzerland, Burgundy, Savoy and all of Italy as far down as Rome. In the first half of the 15th century, they were still regarded as regions of this Empire. City states of Venice, Florence, Pisa, Genoa and Milan rose in power during the 14th and 15th century and while German kings may had been crowned as kings of Italy, they lost power and dominance in the later 15th century.
In some ways I think, it might explain and link for me historical threads that run in Tarot history: Petrach's triumph/trumps of human passion poetry, the Mantegna cards of Fererra and Germany (Durer), and even my D'Este tarocchi poetry research in the larger context. I don't know if this is such a silly tangent, it might not relate to the history of tarocchi/tarot and the Marseilles pack at all.
I hope this is related to the discussion and opens some interesting sidelights...it's making me look forward to the Dummett and Ronald Decker book.
Mari Hoshizaki