prize13-3, Exercise 1: Several routes

Model answer (check the details):

The evidence comes in scraps from different places and times. Contact between the Islamic and Christian worlds in Spain and Sicily gave one route. Byzantium and the trade routes across eastern Europe, linking Russia and Scandinavia with the east, gave another. Pilgrims, crusaders and merchants carried the game too. Early references in Latin poems and treatises, and finds of pieces, turn up in many regions with different dates.

Because no single document records a first arrival, and because a "first" reference only shows that the game was known by then, a historian speaks of routes over some centuries rather than one date and place. A claim to the first chess in a given country needs a named source.

Care: the order and relative importance of the routes is debated.