Paul Charles Morphy (b. 1837 - d. 1884) World champion: 1858 to 1862

One claim often heard is that before Steinitz and Zukertort each began to call himself the world chess champion at about the time of Paul Morphy’s death in 1884, the concept of a world chess champion did not exist.

Wrong. On April 14, 1859, during a banquet at the London Chess Club in honor of Paul Morphy, club president Augustus Mongredien proposed a toast to “the champion of the chess world.” When Morphy returned to the United States following his triumphs in Europe, American chess fans in Boston and New York feted him as “the chess champion of the world.”

On both sides of the Atlantic, leading chess personalities stated that Morphy was either champion of the chess world or chess champion of the world. No one appeared to be making even a casuistical distinction between the two claims. Indeed, the claim made by Mongredien on behalf of Morphy might have been made in slightly altered form for various players since the rise of modern chess in the late 15^th century. From about 1475 to 1575, the leading players of Spain (say, Francesch Vicent and Ruy Lopez) were the leading players of the chess world. From 1575 to about 1650, the leading players of Italy (say, Leonardo da Cutri and Alessandro Salvio) were the leading players of the chess world.

Then came a hiatus. In the 100 years following the deaths of such leading Italian players as Pietro Carrera (1647) and Giulio Polerio (1612), not to mention Salvio (c. 1640) and Gioacchino Greco (c. 1634), no player assumed a special position. Perhaps chess masters fell out of fashion in polite parlors. Perhaps the royal courts of Europe ceased picking up chessmen in favor of picking up the socio-economic pieces following the Thirty Years War (1618 - 1648), Europe’s most destructive conflict until the 20th century.

Philidor Playing Blindfold at Parsloe's Engraving from the Sporting Magazine, 1794

Not until Andre Philidor (1726 - 1795) triumphed easily over Phillip Stamma (+8 -1 =1) in 1747, following up this triumph with the publication of his famous L’analyse du jeu des Echecs (Analysis of the Game of Chess), was there a widely recognized new champion of the chess world. Philidor became the finest player of France, which became the center of chess until nearly the mid - 19th century.

Before Philidor, chess records are too scanty to distinguish among the leading masters of a given period. There is no way to argue at length or even to enjoy a brief and rollicking BS-session about the probable outcome of a match between Greco and Salvio or da Cutri and Polerio. But Philidor? We know that he was conceded a special status by nearly all players of his time. He held in spades the kind of “exceptional position” that Jacob Loewenthal accorded Wilhelm Steinitz more than a century later after the young Austrian triumphed at London 1872 and then later the same year destroyed Zukertort (+7 -1 =4) in their lesser known first match. “Mr. Steinitz,” opined Loewenthal, “may be fairly regarded as the present occupant of the exceptional position formerly held by Mr. Morphy.”

Note the implication in Loewenthal’s statement, a notion which was apparently not widely shared at the time, that Morphy’s great feats of 1858 and 1859 had yielded by 1872 to the twin ministrations of ruthless time and another master’s subsequent, if not equally enormous, successes. The concept that time undermines every throne, chessic and otherwise, will be important when evaluating Bobby Fischer’s claim to have won the world championship in 1972 and to have defended a meaningful title in his match with Boris Spassky in 1992.

Wilhelm Steinitz (b. 1836 - d. 1900): World champion: 1886 to 1894

Clearly, a case can be made for extending the title line back beyond Steinitz to Morphy and eventually to Philidor. To include players earlier than Philidor runs up against a paucity of information about the relative strengths of various masters, though there is no telling what future researches may yield.

Yet there are embarrassing intellectual problems with extending the title line back beyond 1886. Why, for example, would not Zukertort figure as co-champion with Steinitz after his triumph at London in 1883? If Anderssen is to be considered world champion after winning London 1851, should not Zukertort get the same honor after London 1883, especially since Steinitz accepted him as an equal negotiating partner for their title match in 1886? And since we are here accepting Steinitz as world champion from 1866, we would logically have to accept Zukertort as co-champion from 1883 to 1886, especially since Steinitz claimed no pride of place over his opponent in their negotiations.

There is no answer to the above line of reasoning except to note that Stenitiz demolished Zukertort in their 1872 match and that no one has hitherto come up with the argument given in the preceding paragraph. The conventional wisdom is that Zukertort was never world champion and that Steinitz became the first world champion in 1886. We think that there is enough minority authority to buck the conventional wisdom about 1886, but we quake at being the first to include Zukertort among the world champions. The giggle factor is too daunting.