The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  Urraca provides the first (and for a long time the only) evidence from Latin Europe that a daughter could not only inherit a kingdom but also govern it, even in opposition to a husband. During her father's lifetime Urraca married a minor ruler in Galicia and in 1105 bore a son who would eventually succeed her. After her husband's death two years later, she became regent of Galicia. Shortly after her father's death in 1109 Spanish nobles arranged her disastrous remarriage to an exceptionally bellicose and brutally misogynistic king of Aragon and Navarre nicknamed “the Battler.” It rapidly degenerated into prolonged civil war as Urraca claimed sole rule over her father's kingdoms. But it took her until 1114 to obtain a legal annulment of her marriage from the pope—an even more cumbersome process than Tamar's dissolution of her first marriage in Orthodox Georgia eighty years later.

  After three more years Urraca had reclaimed most of her inheritance from her husband before negotiating a durable truce with him in 1117. During these struggles Urraca maintained a liaison with a prominent noble, Count Pedro Gonzalez de Lara, who witnessed most of her charters and fathered her last children. Although she never married Lara, Urraca discreetly acknowledged their illegitimate son in 1123; like Catherine the Great's illegitimate son over six centuries later, he would play no significant political role. Urraca's oldest son, knighted in 1124, inherited León and Castile two years later when she “concluded her unhappy life,” according to a contemporary chronicler, “in giving adulterous birth” at the age of forty-four.

  In addition to prolonged conflict with her second husband, Urraca waged war against her younger half sister Teresa in 1116 and 1120–21 over their mutual claims to Galicia. Widowed at the age of eighteen with a young son, Teresa began governing the frontier country of Portugal in 1112. Her inheritance, recently expanded southward by conquests from Muslims, became as large as many other Iberian kingdoms, and after 1117 she issued several documents as queen. After her conflicts with Urraca were finally resolved Teresa held Portugal as a fief from her sister; in 1139 Teresa's son Afonso would make it an independent kingdom.27

  From 1139 until 1148 Matilda, the lone surviving legitimate child of King Henry I of England, attempted to occupy her father's throne. He had twice made his vassals acknowledge her as his heir, and England's major contemporary chronicler supported her claim. Matilda's coins boasted an imperial title from her first marriage; her state seal, copied from those of German empresses, depicted her enthroned with crown and scepter; after 1141 her charters ended with the formula et Anglorum Domina. Nevertheless, her nephew Stephen managed to seize power while Matilda delayed her arrival in England in order to bear her children; and when she finally entered without either husband or children she was unable to depose Stephen or stage a coronation. After governing parts of England for several years she finally returned to Normandy.28

  Urraca enjoyed greater political success than Matilda, but each heiress experienced serious obstacles in attempting to govern a kingdom. Both had legitimate sons (Matilda's came from a second marriage to a much younger man) who assumed power unopposed after their mother's death. Urraca's ambitious sister Teresa had far worse luck. During their conflict over Galicia in 1120 Teresa became allied to a powerful Galician nobleman, the count of Trava, who abandoned his wife for her. Like her rival Urraca, Teresa had an illegitimate child, and the scandal ruined her political authority. In 1128 Teresa's legitimate son deposed his mother, forcing her into exile with the count of Trava in Galicia, where she died two years later.

  High-medieval Latin Europe saw several dowager regents governing major kingdoms for their sons, while several women who governed nonroyal states issued coins. In the Low Countries, the wealthy County of Flanders was officially ruled by two sisters for over seventy years after 1205. However, royal heiresses remained extremely rare. By 1300 female rule seemed in retreat in Europe's most prestigious states: women could no longer become regents in the Holy Roman Empire (as they had been when chess queens were invented), and they would soon be formally excluded from inheriting its largest kingdom, France.

  Patterns of Female Rule

  Until fairly recently women had only two ways to become the official rulers of any monarchy. The more common way, as it would also be in Europe after 1300, was through inheritance from fathers. Although royal or imperial daughters rarely inherited directly, one encounters such heiresses in places that were widely scattered both geographically and chronologically. The most prominent early example is Cleopatra VII of Egypt, who always called herself Philopatro, “father-loving.” From 600 to 1300, daughters succeeded their fathers to rule monarchies which were officially Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Orthodox Christian, and Muslim—and once in Latin Christendom. Two sisters successively inherited Sassanid Persia in order of seniority. In East Asia, daughters inherited once in both Japan and Korea. Eleventh-century Byzantium experienced a brief joint official rule by two “purple-born” sisters, and medieval Georgia even had a mother–daughter succession.

  But even when powerful monarchs chose daughters as their heirs, they were never formally installed without considerable opposition from all-male governing elites. Cleopatra VII was deposed early in her reign and returned from exile to be restored, largely by seducing Julius Caesar. Subsequently, Tamar needed a second coronation in Georgia. In the Muslim world, Razia's father had similarly made her his deputy, but Delhi's emirs chose a younger male instead. She had to foment an uprising that killed her half brother and his mother before being reluctantly accepted as ruler, but then she managed the almost impossible achievement of ruling without needing to marry.

  For royal heiresses, marriage seemed almost inevitable, but at the same time it posed almost insoluble problems. Following Ptolemaic tradition, Cleopatra VII was married to two younger half brothers, both of whom she had murdered. In Sassanid Persia, Azarmidokht's refusal to marry a prominent general soon led to her rape and murder. Both Urraca of León-Castile and Tamar of Georgia experienced huge difficulties trying to dissolve marriages imposed on them by the political elites of their kingdoms. Even Razia-ad-Din accepted marriage to a subordinate prince in order to regain power after being defeated in battle. Thirteen centuries after Cleopatra VII, Shajar-al-Durr also arranged the murder of her coruler and husband when he threatened to repudiate her.

  Women's alternative path to sovereignty was to become guardian for a young male heir and eventually usurp his place. Although far less common than inheritance by daughters, this tactic is nevertheless important because it describes the only women who exercised supreme authority in their own names for at least five years in three long-lived major empires: Egypt, China, and Byzantium. All three women had been longtime guardians of young male heirs, accustoming public opinion to their de facto authority before they proclaimed themselves de jure rulers. Hatshepsut had governed as her stepson's regent for at least seven years; Wu Ze-tian and Irene of Athens, who had no royal blood and thus no claim to govern except through their sons, waited much longer before taking supreme sovereignty themselves. Both were forcibly deposed although not physically harmed. Hatshepsut also died a natural death, but her stepson Thutmose III later erased all of her titles and images that had been visible to the general public.

  Successful female usurpers occurred only in major empires, and only Hatshepsut had royal ancestry. The closest approximation elsewhere occurred when a sizable state, including modern Egypt and Syria, was briefly ruled by a female sultan with neither royal blood nor a living son. If inheritance by daughters was never unproblematic, any woman who usurped sovereignty successfully needed a rare blend of shrewd judgment, extreme ambition, and ruthlessness at decisive moments—a combination that also describes the greatest female usurper in Western history, Catherine II of Russia (r. 1762–96). The most important historical counterexample to such female regent-usurpers is pre-Heian Japan, where numerous female tennos generally promoted quasi-maternal patterns of female rule; one Japanese mother–daughter succession served a combined seventeen years while their son and you
nger brother grew to maturity. Once their wards had become adults, these female tennos almost always abdicated into dignified retirement—but one should not forget that Japan's male tennos also seem far likelier than their counterparts elsewhere to abdicate voluntarily.

  The extreme rarity of women rulers in major states required some extraordinary forms of self-presentation in order to justify their rule and facilitate acceptance among officials who were exclusively male. One significant tactic was to endow a female ruler with a metaphysical ‘body’ to complement her physical body. This practice can be glimpsed as far back as ancient Egypt, where the divine aspect of royal identity was called the royal ka. Describing a cycle of divine birth scenes commissioned for a temple about thirty-five hundred years ago by Egypt's first major female pharaoh, Joyce Tyldesley noted that it closely resembles the only other elaborate royal birth cycle, made a few centuries later for an unusually young male pharaoh: “We … see the royal baby and her identical soul or Ka being fashioned on the potter's wheel by the ram-headed god Khnum. The creation of the royal Ka alongside the mortal body is of great importance; the royal Ka was understood to be the personification of the office of kingship. … At the climax of her coronation ceremony, she would become united with the Ka which would have been shared by all the kings of Egypt, and would lose her human identity to become one of a long line of divine office holders. Hatshepsut consistently placed considerable emphasis on the existence of her royal Ka, even including it in her throne name Maat-ka-re.”29

  More than two thousand years later in Tang China, Buddhists offered a related metaphysical explanation for female rule. Wu Ze-tian's propagandists faced a far more daunting task than those justifying the authority of Hatshepsut, who was the daughter of semidivine rulers; this woman, as everyone knew, had begun as a low-ranking palace concubine. In 688, shortly before Wu claimed the throne, her nephew conveniently discovered a mysteriously inscribed stone tablet prophesying that “the Sage Mother comes among men—an imperium of eternal prosperity.” However, an obscure Buddhist sutra served even better to convince Wu's subjects that a woman could obtain the Confucian Mandate of Heaven. The doctrine of reincarnation had sufficient flexibility to suppose that a divine being could manifest itself at some point in a woman's body. Where the Great Cloud sutra said, “You will in reality be a Bodhisattva who will show and receive a female body in order to convert beings,” Wu's supporters drew the conclusion that “we humbly believe that what is said in the Prophecy of Confucius, ‘Heaven generates the Saint [who comes] from grass’ does not refer to a man; here in fact with obscure words it is predicted that Shen-huang [Wu's current title] would govern the world.” Ultimately, a reincarnated Buddha must be male. Later in this sutra the disciple asks when she will “be able to change this female body” and Buddha explains, “You must know that it is an instrumental body and not a real female body.” Like the Egyptian pictorial description of the royal ka, Buddha's remark about an “instrumental body” assumes that a female ruler's physical body requires some form of metaphysical double in order to establish its legitimacy. A grateful Wu promptly rewarded her exegetes by creating special temples to expound their doctrine, and two of the master texts used in them have been preserved.30

  Almost nine centuries later an unmarried European female monarch still found it politically convenient to possess a doppelgänger. In tracing the origins of an obscure British legal doctrine known as the king's two bodies, which distinguished between the physical and metaphysical aspects of royal authority, the great medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz overlooked the significance of the ruler's gender. Kantorowicz knew that it first emerged in print in 1562, early in the reign of Elizabeth I; but like every other medievalist of his generation he considered kings as necessarily male (which the overwhelming majority of them certainly were), and his research agenda thus ignored the peculiarity of the monarch's physical body. However, the circumstances of its formulation suggest that the doctrine emerged when it did precisely because this king was a woman; it coincided with the first time any major west European kingdom had a crowned but unmarried adult female monarch, and it was applied most often during her long reign.31

  What links Hatshepsut's Egyptian temple artists and Wu Ze-tian's Buddhist acolytes to crown lawyers explaining the queen's two bodies in Elizabethan England is that all three types of propagandists used considerable ingenuity to adapt variants of a common enterprise to their particular time and place. All three were projecting some form of supernatural double on a royal body whose political authority was unusually problematic precisely because it was a female body. Each age leaves its own forms of historical evidence, and these three instances span three thousand years, but they all had to explain unprecedented, yet divinely ordained, female monarchs.

  2

  Europe's Female Sovereigns, 1300–1800

  An Overview

  If women had been universally excluded from exercising the sovereign authority, Elizabeth, Joanna of Naples, Christina, the two Catherines, and many others which might be named, would not have … obtained from their grateful country and the world at large, the title of great men.

  —Alexandre-Joseph-Pierre de Ségur,

  Women, Their Condition and Influence in Society (1803)

  After 1300, female sovereignty in highly organized states became centered in Christian Europe and remained there for many centuries. With Confucius now the master text of East Asian courts, officially acknowledged women rulers vanished from Chinese and Korean history for a thousand years and almost disappeared from Japanese history: in the eleven centuries from the Heian era until women were officially prohibited from ruling Japan, only two more women became tennos and both abdicated as soon as adult male replacements became available. In the Muslim world Sati Beg (r. 1338–39) issued numerous coins in Iran, mainly using masculine language (sultan but sometimes sultana). She evoked praise from Ahmadi, a fourteenth-century Ottoman poet; “Although she was a woman,” he began, “she was wise / She was experienced, and she had good judgment. / Whatever she undertook, she accomplished. / She succeeded at the exercise of sovereignty.” But she did not succeed at exercising it for very long; after a year Sati Beg was deposed and forced to marry her successor. Afterward, a Turkish scholar, Badriye Uçok Un, identified seven women who were named as rulers at Friday noon prayers and also had their names on coins. However, they governed only two minor states: three ruled the Maldive Islands for forty years after 1347, and four ruled consecutively in northern Sumatra from 1641 to 1699, despite a fatwa from Mecca declaring that it was forbidden by law for a woman to rule.1

  The contrast with Europe's increasing accommodation to rule by women monarchs during these same centuries is truly remarkable. From the late Middle Ages to the French Revolution both the numbers of female monarchs and the length of their effective government reached unprecedented levels. Two dozen women were officially acknowledged as sovereigns in kingdoms scattered throughout Latin Christendom, and four more governed the Westernizing Russian Empire in the eighteenth century (see preface). A comprehensive overview suggests an improving record between 1328, when a young heiress was invited by her subjects to rule Europe's smallest kingdom, and 1796, when the last female Russian autocrat died. Several of these women, like the first one, shared sovereignty with their husbands; but most, like the last one, ruled alone.

  Unlike almost all of their female predecessors, several of Europe's female monarchs enjoyed lengthy reigns in very important states. Previously, documented women rulers since the time of Cleopatra VII had rarely governed officially anywhere for as long as twenty years; no female tenno except the very first remained on Japan's throne for ten consecutive years. The longest recorded medieval female reign, almost thirty years, occurred in the relatively small kingdom of Georgia. But after 1300 Latin Europe produced four female monarchs (one in seven, a lower proportion than among male kings) who governed major states for at least thirty years: Isabel the Catholic in Castile (1474–1504), Elizabeth I in England (15
58–1603), Maria Theresa in both Hungary (1741–80) and Bohemia (1743–80), and Catherine II in Russia (1762–96). Only Isabel ruled jointly with her husband; the others ruled alone. In addition to them, four women ruled important European monarchies by themselves for at least twenty years, while five governed alone for at least ten years and another five ruled jointly with their husbands for over a decade.

  In Christian Europe, by contrast with the greatest empires of antiquity, no female guardian ever seized power officially from a young male. The closest approximation occurred in Russia in 1686, when the regent Sofia Alekseevna attempted, via both state decrees and coins, to promote herself to coruler alongside her younger brother and half brother; three years later, her half brother forced her to enter a convent. The sharpest mother–son conflict in Latin Europe ended in 1617, when Louis XIII of France overthrew the government of his mother, Marie de Medici, after seven years of her rule; yet she would remain influential for at least another decade. European regencies produced such bizarre arrangements as France's double state correspondence during fourteen years of nominal rule by young king but de facto government by his mother, Catherine de Medici. Nevertheless, the formal illusion that the male heir ruled was never erased—at least not until 1762, when Catherine II of Russia immediately disabused those supporters who expected her to govern temporarily as a regent for her eight-year-old son.