Luis Ramírez de Lucena


Luis Ramírez de Lucena was a Spanish chess player who published the first still-existing chess book. He is believed to be the son of humanist writer and diplomat Juan de Lucena.

Book

Lucena wrote the oldest surviving printed book on chess, Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez con 101 Juegos de Partido, published in Salamanca around 1497. The book includes analysis of eleven chess openings but also contains many elementary errors that led chess historian H. J. R. Murray to suggest that it was prepared in a hurry. The book was written when the rules of chess were taking their modern form, and some of the 150 positions in the book are of the old game and some of the new. Fewer than a dozen copies of the book exist.
Commentators have suggested that much of the material was plagiarised from Francesc Vicent's now-lost 1495 work Libre dels jochs partits dels schacs en nombre de 100.
The Lucena position is named after him, even though it does not appear in his book. The smothered mate is in the book.