Queen of Batons

A queen in a 15th-century Italian pack was a luxury. The ordinary decks people played with in Milan had three court figures to a suit, king, knight and knave, all of them male, and the Italian regional packs sold today still do. The painted decks made for the Visconti court added a queen to each suit, which is one of the things that separated a court pack from a tavern one. She is the only queen left in this deck, and her suit is batons, one of the four Latin suits, with cups, coins and swords, that Italian and Spanish players kept when the French replaced them with hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs. The baton she holds is the suit sign itself, the same club a player counted in his hand while the game ran.