The idea of trumps appears to be a European invention which first appeared in the 1420s, in the German game of Karnöffel. Tarot was probably created 10-15 years later, around 1440, somewhere in northern Italy. The earliest surviving Milanese Tarot decks and Ferrarese references to Tarot both come from that period. As noted, the Tarot deck consisted of a regular 56-card deck, augmented with a hierarchy of 22 allegorical trump cards. This created the standard 78-card Tarot deck, originally referred to as carte da trionfi, cards with trumps. Each trump triumphed over (trumped) the lower-ranking trumps in the manner of the popular trionfi motif, which also appeared in art, literature, religious processions, festival pageants, and so on.
The subjects pictured on the allegorical cards appear to have been standardized from the beginning. The vast majority of all Tarot decks in the 15th through 17th centuries share that design, and the occasional variants all appear to be derived from that archetypal standard. The series of images was similar to cycles of didactic Christian art of that era, most notably, the Triumph of Death and Dance of Death works popular from the time of the Black Death in the mid-14th century.
Tarot quickly became popular and spread in northern Italy, with Milan, Bologna, and Ferrara being early centers of the game. Richly painted decks with gold and silver leaf backgrounds were commissioned by the wealthy, while printed decks were used by commoners and nobles alike. (A record from 1436 indicates that the d'Este court at Ferrara had their own printing press for making cards.) The sequence of the trumps was altered in minor ways as Tarot spread to new locales, and the iconography was also varied somewhat. Moreover, a few complete redesigns are known, such as the classicized Sola Busca deck and the literary Boiardo deck, but they were dramatic exceptions. Changes of iconography, whether simplifying the original designs or conflating the Tarot images with other subject matter, usually left the underlying standard subjects recognizable.
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