Well, it’s a good thing he didn’t, because they’re not older. The oldest playing cards (Italian-suited) are from the early 15th century, and the oldest tarot cards are from at best the early 16th century.
Furthermore, tarot cards weren’t used for cartomancy until the 18th century. Before that, and for that matter to this day in France and Italy, they were used for games. The most familiar one is jeu de tarot, for which you can still buy packs for in France. The “minor” suits are the familiar French hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds, and the “major” suit has 22 cards like a tarot deck, only with secular images.
Essentially, the tarot deck was created as an extension of the regular deck, not the other way around. Before tarot, card games didn’t have a “trump” suit. (You can see the trumpless feature in older games like Piquet.) The tarot deck was a combination of our familiar deck plus an old suit-less Italian deck now lost to antiquity. The “major” suit served as the first trump suit. The “Knight,” or Chevalier in jeu d’tarot, was not unique to the tarot deck either. Many 15th-century decks contained 52 or 56 cards.
And there’s no direct connection between the Fool (l’excuse in jeu de tarot) and the Joker. The Joker was an American invention of the 19th century. It eminated from Poker, when some players started using the “blank card” (i.e., the card placed in many decks to replace a torn or lost card) as a wild card. Eventually, playing-card manufacturers started putting the figure of a clown on a card–really, more like a court jester, to fit the theme of nobility on the picture cards. That it became similar to the Fool of tarot cards was a happy accident. In France, where tarot packs are widely used, few “standard” decks carry the Joker.
Lastly, the Knave and the Jack are the same card. Both names were used for the card to the 19th century (Jack was considered “lower class”), but “Jack” won out when cards started carrying corner indices. “J” differentiated it from the “K” for King.
My sources: A History of Card Games, David Parlett; Collecting English Playing-Cards, Sylvia Mann.