Bishop (chess)
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King |
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Rook |
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Bishop |
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A bishop (♗,♝) is a piece in the board game of chess. Each player begins the game with two bishops. One starts between the king's knight and the king, the other between the queen's knight and the queen. The starting squares are c1 and f1 for White's bishops, and c8 and f8 for Black's bishops.
The bishop has no restrictions in distance for each move, but is limited to diagonal movement. Bishops, like all other pieces except the knight, cannot jump over other pieces. A bishop captures by occupying the square on which an enemy piece sits.
The bishops may be differentiated according to which wing they begin on, i.e. the king's bishop and queen's bishop. As a consequence of its diagonal movement, each bishop always remains on either the white or black squares, and so it is also common to refer to them as light-squared or dark-squared bishops.
The bishop's predecessor in medieval chess, shatranj (originally chaturanga), was the alfil, meaning the elephant, which could leap two squares along any diagonal, and could jump over an intervening piece. As a consequence, each fil was restricted to eight squares, and no fil could attack another. The modern bishop first appeared shortly after 1200 in Courier chess. A piece with this move, called a cocatriz or crocodile, is part of the Grande Acedrex in the game book compiled in 1283 for King Alfonso X of Castile. The game is attributed to "India", then a very vague term. About half a century later Muḥammad ibn Maḥmud al-Āmulī, in his Treasury of the Sciences, describes an expanded form of chess with two pieces moving "like the rook but obliquely".
Derivatives of alfil survive in the languages of the two countries where chess was first introduced within Western Europe—Italian (alfiere) and Spanish (alfil). It was known as the aufin in French, or the aufin, alphin, or archer in early English.
The term "bishop" first entered the English language in the 16th century, with the first known written example dating back to 1560s. In all other Germanic languages, except for Icelandic, it is called various names, all of which directly translate to English as "runner" or "messenger" (e.g. in Norwegian "Løper", in Danish "Løber", in Swedish "Löpare", in German "Läufer" and in Dutch "loper"; in Finnish, the word is "lähetti", and in Polish, "goniec", both with the same meaning). In Romanian, it is known as "nebun" which refers to a crazy person (similarly to the French name "Fou" (fool) which is most likely derived from "Fou du roi", a jester). In Icelandic, however, it is called "biskup", with the same meaning as in English. Interestingly, the use of the term in Icelandic predates that of the English language, as the first mentioning of "biskup" in Icelandic texts dates back to the early part of the 14th century, while the 12th-century Lewis Chessmen portray the bishop as an unambiguously ecclesiastical figure. In The Saga of Earl Mágus, which was written in Iceland somewhere between 1300–1325, it is described how an emperor was checkmated by a bishop. This has led to some speculations as to the origin of the English use of the term "bishop".
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