Charlemagne chessmen

The Charlemagne chessmen on display in the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris: mounted knights, elephants and kings and queens seated in little canopied pavilions, all carved from ivory. Charlemagne never touched them. They were made between 1050 and 1100, probably in Salerno in southern Italy, more than 200 years after his death. Of the 30 pieces recorded at the Abbey of Saint-Denis in 1598, 16 survived the French Revolution, and their rooks are chariots, a clue to how the game's pieces were still being imagined.