The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  Such a global reconnaissance yields reliable historical evidence about approximately two dozen women who were acknowledged as sovereigns of important monarchies or empires in various parts of the world (primarily in Asia) before A.D. 1300. Almost none of the women in this sample exercised sovereignty more than two thousand years ago because, except for the many reconstructed statues and frescos depicting the female Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut (r. 1479–1458 B.C.), contemporary sources offer almost no trustworthy information about them. However, starting with another female ruler of Egypt, Cleopatra VII (r. 51–30 B.C.), reliable contemporary historical evidence survives about several women who became official sovereigns of important states in various parts of Asia, Europe, and north Africa during the next thirteen centuries. This hard evidence is first and foremost numismatic. For over two thousand years the issuing of coins has been a universally recognized method for both male and female sovereigns to proclaim their official status. In combination with more conventional kinds of historical evidence from contemporary chronicles and charters (both of which become more abundant about a thousand years ago), this information enables one to identify two principal paths—inheritance from fathers and usurpation by regents—through which ambitious women could become officially acknowledged sovereigns. It also suggests that, like male rulers who ordinarily claimed divine approval and support, these extraordinarily rare and widely separated female rulers required supernatural doubles in order to explain and legitimate their authority.

  The Problem of Evidence

  In attempting to analyze early historical experiences of formal female rule, it seems prudent to avoid not only a priori assumptions about women's capacities as rulers, but also any written testimony that was not recorded until centuries after the ruler's death. Supposedly historical evidence about very early female sovereigns is often intertwined with legendary elements that sometimes overwhelm it. For example, Jewish and Muslim scholars have produced a rich exegetical literature about a female monarch who is mentioned in both the Bible and the Koran, and Christians have also commemorated her: a medieval Ethiopian fresco depicts her en route to Jerusalem, riding with a man's sword under her saddle and a lance in her hand.2 For all three monotheistic religious communities, unassailable authority identifies this woman's royal rank (accepting the historical existence of a female monarch thus becomes an act of faith); unfortunately that same unquestionable authority never provides her name, making corroborative evidence about her almost impossible to obtain. Muslim scholars later named her Bilqis, and expeditions still try to locate her royal palace in Yemen, so far unsuccessfully.

  Until the past two millennia, what is claimed to be known about female rulers usually contains more disinformation than information. With her numerous statues and temple inscriptions now restored (see fig. 1), Pharaoh Hatshepsut is the exception that confirms the rule. However, Hatshepsut's existence remained unknown to educated Europeans until after 1800. Instead, mythical (or at any rate, unverifiable) early female rulers still crowd people's cultural baggage, as they did a few centuries ago. Like the unnamed Queen of Sheba, some of the early female rulers most familiar to classically educated Westerners, such as the Amazons or Dido of Carthage, lack any corroborative historical evidence. With Semiramis, Europe's second most often mentioned early female ruler behind Cleopatra, the situation improves only slightly. The abundant tales about her recorded by Greeks many centuries later can be corroborated by one or two inscriptions on stelae that link to a similarly named Assyrian woman (r. 812–790 B.C.) who may have served as regent.

  Greek legends about Semiramis “invariably stress two things: the ‘extraordinary’ nature of everything about her, and also her use of trickery to attain political supremacy, censuring in more or less veiled terms, behavior stigmatized as luxurious, corrupt, and especially, without limits.”3 They depict an Assyrian woman whose spectacular transgressions, particularly her usurpation of power literally in male disguise and her subsequent marriage to her son, run systematically counter to normative female behavior in Greco-Roman sources (when Jocasta marries Oedipus, neither is aware of their kinship, and she does not rule). But the Assyrian woman's reported behavior fits well with even earlier evidence from Hatshepsut, who often appears with a false beard and who seized power from her stepson. Despite or perhaps because of such transgressive behavior, these same tales also insist that Semiramis, like Hatshepsut, ruled successfully for many years, as her stelae appear to confirm.

  A millennium after Semiramis, Japan records a parallel instance of successful transgressive female rule. Its earliest chronicle, the Nihon shoki, or Annals of Japan, composed by order of a later female ruler, named as Japan's fifteenth ruler Jingu, de facto head of state from her husband's death in A.D. 209 until her son ascended the throne many years later. Jingu reportedly led an army into Korea and returned victoriously three years later; more remarkably, her son, conceived before Jingu's husband died, was not born until after her return. The only evidence of an early Japanese presence in Korea around this time is a stele discovered in the late nineteenth century on the Yalu River between Korea and China, the interpretation of which is even more hotly disputed than that of the Assyrian stele mentioning Semiramis. Modern Japan remains unsure of how to commemorate Jingu. In 1881 she became the first woman featured on a Japanese banknote, but after the Meiji restoration officially prohibited female rule in 1889 she was reclassified as legendary. Nevertheless, tourists can still visit her officially designated misasagi, or tomb, in Nara, an old capital founded by a later female ruler.

  Misogyny has a long history, and much undisguised hostility to female rule can be found in early texts from diverse cultural traditions. In Confucian China an early Han dynasty chronicler wrote, “Where women conduct government, peace will not reign.” The rebellion of Zenobia of Palmyra (r. A.D. 270–72) lasted barely a year, but a Roman source complained that “she ruled longer than could be endured from one of the female sex.” An early Muslim hadith predicted that “those who entrust power to a woman will never enjoy prosperity.” The great epic poem of Persia, the Shahnameh, or “Book of Kings” (c. A.D. 1000), introduced the first historical female ruler of Persia by asserting that “affairs go badly under the domination of a woman” but then praised her achievements.4

  If a woman had ruled shrewdly, her circumstances were transformed. Another epic poem, composed shortly after the death of a Muslim woman ruler in thirteenth-century Cairo and still widely read today, reverses the Cinderella story. Its heroine, a real-life servant, purchased as a concubine by a future Egyptian sultan, became the spoiled daughter of a great caliph of Baghdad, who gave her a dress made entirely of pearls (her nickname translates as ‘tree of pearls') and granted her Egypt to rule. Ironically, the real-life caliph ridiculed the Egyptians for choosing a woman as their ruler and refused to recognize her as sultan.5

  Surviving physical evidence should offer invaluable assistance in cutting away such luxuriant fictional overgrowth about early historical female rulers. Yet it is difficult, for example, to find an authentic tomb of any early female monarch that provides useful evidence about her. The ruins of the elaborate mausoleum built by Cleopatra VII, where she was presumably buried with her famous Roman ally Marc Antony, remain underwater in the harbor at Alexandria. On the other hand, an almost equally famous female emperor of ancient China, Wu Ze-tian (r. 690–705), is buried in a fairly well preserved but still unexcavated mausoleum. It is China's only joint imperial tomb, holding both her and her husband, Gaizong. She wrote his epitaph, but none of her successors dared to compose one for her: it remains the only imperial tomb in the country with a blank inscription space. No one has yet located the tomb of Tamar (r. 1191–1213), who ruled Georgia in its Golden Age.

  Authentic portraits of early women rulers are similarly elusive. Official statues and paintings of Hatshepsut survive in abundance, but all were stylized and most were defaced or smashed to pieces not long after her death. Much later, her Egyptian successor Cleopatra V
II had herself depicted in similarly stylized fashion on a temple wall, together with her young son by Julius Caesar (see fig. 2). Where the appropriate religious edifices survive, the few near-contemporary portraits of early female rulers portray them, unlike Hatshepsut, who is often shown with a false beard, as clearly female. One of the two earliest portraits of Wu Ze-tian, both preserved in a Buddhist temple outside her capital, shows her as a frail, white-haired old lady. The largest number of surviving near-contemporary portraits—five, all in her kingdom's monasteries—depict Tamar of Georgia. Only one, located in a Spanish cathedral, depicts an early European female monarch, Urraca of León-Castile (r. 1109–26).

  The most politically useful physical evidence left by early female monarchs comes from their coins. Cleopatra VII was the first woman ruler who put both her image and her titles on numerous coins struck both in Egypt and in several parts of the eastern Mediterranean. Just as her Egyptian predecessor Hatshepsut provides by far the largest collection of statues left by any early female ruler, Cleopatra VII provides by far the richest trail of numismatic evidence left by any female ruler during the next thirteen centuries. While Cleopatra's posthumous reputation rests overwhelmingly on much uniformly hostile Roman propaganda, and few papyrus documents survive from her reign, Cleopatra's coins constitute the best contemporary source for studying her as a ruler, offering an antidote to the legends transmitted by her Roman enemies and by the Jewish historian Josephus. She had four children, all by Roman fathers, but none had Roman citizenship because they lacked a Roman mother, and she never officially ruled alone. However, her theoretical corulers, two younger brother-husbands, at least one of whom she had murdered, never appear on her coins, while her oldest son appears only as an infant on a Cypriot coin from 46 B.C. A decade later her head appears opposite Marc Antony's on a series of coins from Phoenician cities. The most remarkable of these, a silver Roman denarius of 34 B.C., celebrates one of his victories with a bust of Cleopatra on the reverse, accompanied by the Latin inscription Cleopatrae reginae regum filorum regum (of Cleopatra, Queen of Kings, and her sons who are Kings).6

  After Cleopatra, imperial Rome encountered one other female ruler, Zenobia of Palmyra, and defeated her also. Zenobia had coins struck in her name only in Egypt, from whose rulers she claimed descent and where female monarchs were well known. Her kingdom was a Roman satellite; in 270 its coins depicted her son jointly with the emperor Aurelian, but the following year Egyptian coins portrayed “Zenobia Augusta.” A year later she was captured by Aurelian and paraded in triumph at Rome.7

  During the next thousand years coins became essential markers for legitimate rulers, spreading from the Roman Empire and its successor states throughout much of the ancient world. As with Cleopatra VII and Zenobia, the political messages later female rulers engraved on their coins can be compared with what chroniclers later recorded about them. By A.D. 1300 ten more female rulers of monarchical states with various official religions, including Zoroastrian, Greek Christian, Latin Christian, and Muslim, had issued coins in Persia, Byzantium, northern India, the Caucasus, and, once again, Egypt. Only one identified herself as the ruler of a European kingdom.

  A Political Trace Element in Great States

  In major states, periods of official rule by autonomous women, reflected most accurately through their coins and their titles on state decrees, have not only been extremely rare but also generally brief. The records of the world's three longest-lasting empires—Egypt, China, and Byzantium—reveal officially acknowledged female rulers as a political “trace element,” governing each of them less than 1 percent of the time. Ancient Egypt possesses the earliest and longest set of official dynastic records; they cover three thousand years, divided into thirty-one dynasties in the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, and include approximately three hundred acknowledged pharaohs. Three of them are women; but although Hatshepsut governed both Upper and Lower Egypt for about twenty years around the middle of these thirty-one recorded dynasties, the combined reigns of its three female pharaohs cover less than 1 percent of ancient Egyptian history.

  Much the same can be said of the political history of imperial China, which lasted for almost two thousand years. Like Egypt, it contains many politically active female regents, including a very important one barely a century ago; its early history includes at least eight Han-era dowagers between 206 B.C. and A.D. 220 who were so politically prominent that official chroniclers subsequently invented the euphemism “appear in court and pronounce decrees” in order to describe their actions without acknowledging them as official rulers. However, China had only one female emperor, Wu Ze-tian. She had spent almost thirty years as a regent, first for her incapacitated husband and then for two of her sons, before declaring herself the sovereign at the age of sixty-five. Wu Ze-tian created what is arguably the greatest political success story of any woman ruler anywhere, and perhaps the ugliest as well; there is plenty of blood on her hands. A low-level palace concubine, she rose to become the principal wife of the emperor Gaozong after arranging the deposition and sadistic deaths of her two most highly placed female rivals. In 667 Wu became her husband's official spokesman when he suffered a debilitating stroke. After he died in 683 Wu suppressed a rebellion and instituted a lengthy reign of terror, directed primarily against traditional supporters of the Tang. She remained at the center of power, deposing her older son in favor of his younger brother before deposing him also and making herself emperor.

  Wu enjoyed considerable support among Confucians by greatly strengthening the meritocratic examination system for choosing officials. She promulgated her most daring and imaginative reforms—making the official mourning period for mothers equal to that for fathers and reforming the way several characters of the Chinese alphabet were written—even before she became official head of state.8 There was no organized opposition even when Wu announced that her reign had begun a new dynasty; but it ranks among the shortest in Chinese history, ending with her deposition shortly before her death. As in the case of Egypt's three female pharaohs, the fifteen years of Wu's official rule occupy less than 1 percent of China's imperial history.

  From its foundation by the first Christian Roman emperor until the Ottoman conquest eleven centuries later, Byzantium offers a third long-lasting major empire with a trace element of official female rule. Several female regents also governed it for lengthy periods. As Judith Herrin has emphasized, two of them exercised crucial influence on Byzantine religious policy by officially overturning the iconoclastic policies of seventh- and eighth-century emperors and restoring image worship.9 Only one Byzantine woman, Irene of Athens, eventually deposed an allegedly unworthy son and replaced him on the throne, as her coins confirm. After five years in power, a period during which Charlemagne, Latin Europe's greatest monarch, declared that the imperial throne was vacant and had himself crowned at Rome by the pope, Irene was deposed by a bloodless coup in 802. Subsequently, Byzantium was officially ruled by two sisters, Zoe and Theodora, for two months in 1042. This unique situation in the recorded history of a major state lasted just long enough to produce a gold coin with the heads of both sisters on the front. In 1055 the seventy-year-old younger sister, Theodora, emerged from her monastery to govern the Byzantine Empire for eighteen months. Together, these three episodes of official female rule occupy less than seven years during the eleven centuries of Byzantine history, thus placing this empire also below the 1 percent threshold of official female rule.

  Some less durable major early states, such as Sassanid Persia (A.D. 205–651), also replicated the trace element pattern of official female rule. Its twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh rulers, shortly before it was overthrown by Arab caliphs and converted to Islam, were daughters of a famous shah, Khusrau II Parvez (r. 590–628). In her sixteen-month reign, the older sister, Boran, attempted to revive her father's glorious memory and prestige. After executing the murderer of her nephew, Boran negotiated a peace treaty with the Byzantine Empire. She also made a golden dinar on which her ima
ge resembled her father's, but she never completely restored central authority. Her younger sister, Azarmidokht, became the next Sassanid monarch. Ambitious to “make herself mistress of the world” and promising to be a “benevolent father” to loyal followers, she ruled about six months, making coins closely imitating those of her father. Later chroniclers report that when a Sassanid general proposed to marry her she had him murdered; his son then captured the capital and ordered that Azarmidokht be raped, blinded, and then killed.10 Ancient Iran's two female rulers also accounted for under 1 percent of Sassanid history.

  Mohammed considered female rulers an indication of Persian weakness, but the Islamic world has never been completely impervious to this phenomenon. Like the popes, their analogues in Latin Christendom, its supreme religious leaders, the caliphs, were exclusively male; yet much like early medieval Christian states, early Muslim states included a few acknowledged women rulers. The first to have their names and titles pronounced as lawful rulers jointly with their husbands in khutbas at Friday noon prayers governed Shi'ite Yemen (the home of the Queen of Sheba) around A.D. 1100.11

  Female Rule in East Asia, A.D. 500–900

  From the sixth through the tenth centuries of the Christian era the region where major states seemed least resistant to officially acknowledged female rulers was East Asia. Two special problems complicate this picture. The first is that regional coinage offers no assistance for the study of early female rulers. Although coins have been abundant in the Far East for over two thousand years, unlike coins from other regions they did not carry the names and titles of the rulers who issued them. The other problem is ideological. Confucianism, the region's most important governmental philosophy, has a well-deserved reputation for being deeply opposed to the idea of female rule. Soon after the creation of a durable empire in China over two thousand years ago, an edict specifically forbade women from involving themselves in politics. Nevertheless, Tang China (618–907) saw a female emperor, while between 590 and 900 no fewer than nine other women became paramount sovereigns in Japan and Korea, two East Asian neighbors both heavily dependent on classical Chinese culture. Before the Heian era (794–1180) Japan avoided naming immature boys as monarchs, and six of their adult female relatives, women who in other parts of the world would have been considered regents, ruled here as tennos (a noun with no specific gender, usually translated as “heavenly sovereign”). Pre-Heian female reigns actually include eight tennos because two women each ruled twice for several years under a different official name. The first female tenno, Suiko (r. 593–628), reigned longer than any other Japanese sovereign for the next twelve centuries. In combination, their reigns cover 30 percent of the two centuries before the Heian era, a ratio never approached by any other early major state.12