Pope Julius (card game)

Pope Julius, sometimes recorded as Pope July, is a gambling card game of the sixteenth century played by four or more players, known today only through a small number of surviving written references dating from roughly 1521 to 1596. Historical accounts associate the game with the English royal court, noting that it was a favorite pastime of King Henry the Eighth and of Anne Boleyn, which has helped keep the game's name alive in later scholarship on Tudor era leisure and gambling despite the almost complete loss of its actual rules. Because so little direct description of play survives, most of what is understood about Pope Julius comes from scholars comparing its scattered mentions to better documented card games of the same period rather than from any single detailed rulebook or contemporary manual. In particular, researchers have speculated that Pope Julius may have served as a forerunner to the later card game Pope Joan, a trick taking and gambling game that became popular in England and elsewhere from the eighteenth century onward, though the exact relationship between the two games, if any, remains a matter of scholarly conjecture rather than settled fact.