A woman will be king.
—medieval Zoroastrian (retro)prophecy, from C. G. Cereti,
A Zoroastrian Apocalypse
Officially acknowledged female sovereigns have been extremely rare throughout most of recorded history. As recently as 1980 a cross-cultural survey found women as heads of government in only 0.5 percent of all organized states.1 At the same time, women rulers seem ubiquitous if one looks carefully enough. Regardless of how rigidly any highly organized monarchical state or empire tried to prohibit female government, officially acknowledged women rulers will appear in its history if it endured for more than a few centuries. Because of its extreme rarity, official female rule has yet to be studied as a distinctive historical phenomenon; and for the same reason, studying it adequately requires an extremely long chronological frame. Officially acknowledged female rule can and did occur almost anywhere—even where it was supposedly prohibited—so studying its early history, before Latin Europe began producing several female sovereigns about seven centuries ago, also requires a global perspective. Only in this way can one accumulate a critical mass of trustworthy evidence about early experiences of official female rule in highly organized states that will help identify both long-term continuities and changes in its exercise.
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 VII 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 image 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
Why did early Japan, unlike the early Chinese empire from which much of its culture derived, produce so many female tennos? One possible explanation involves religion. Although various major religions have accepted official rule by women, Buddhism seems the most accommodating, and its early record in East Asia, especially in Japan, is remarkable. Suiko, Japan's first undeniably historical female tenno, had taken vows as a Buddhist nun before becoming a heavenly sovereign. During the decade after Japan's official recognition of Buddhism in 594, her rule saw such major achievements as the opening of diplomatic relations with China and the adoption of an official rank system. Female tennos who ruled during Wu Ze-tian's Buddhist-supported personal reign in China built Japan's first true royal palace in 694 and promulgated a law code in 702, while later female tennos moved Japan's capital, sponsored its first official chronicle, and introduced silver and copper coins. Only the last of these six women, Koken, was never a regent; as she later noted, she became her father's heir “even though a woman.” Forced to abdicate in 758 after nine years on the throne, she shaved her head and dressed as a Buddhist nun. Six years later she was restored under a new name, and she made a Buddhist monk her chief minister.13 Her second term ended in confusion, and her successor, a distant relative, moved Japan's capital.
In Korea, the Silla dynasty also adopted Buddhism before unifying the peninsula from the seventh to the tenth century. It produced three female sovereigns. The first, Seondeok (r. 632–47), was the eldest of three daughters of a king with no sons. Although rebellions and wars marked her reign, she sent scholars to Tang China and built the first known observatory in the Far East.14 A female cousin, Jindeok, succeeded her for seven years. The third woman, Jinseong (r. 887–97), followed two childless brothers as the final ruler of a unified Silla. During her reign domestic government collapsed; Jinseong died shortly after abdicating, as independent kingdoms arose in other parts of Korea.15 Overall, Silla-dynasty women ruled Korea nearly 10 percent of the time, well below women's official share of rule in pre-Heian Japan but far above that anywhere outside of eastern Asia during these centuries.
Female Monarchs Outside of Europe, 1000–1300
In the first three centuries of the second Christian millennium, no female rulers appeared in East Asia, while the most prominent women monarchs governed either Orthodox Christian or Islamic states. After 1170 a mother and daughter, Tamar and Rusudan, governed Georgia for over fifty years. Between 1236 and 1258 two women issued coins as rulers of major Muslim states in India and Egypt; afterward, other Muslim women holding minor titles in thirteenth-century Iran also issued coins. Meanwhile, Latin Europe, which would dominate the global history of female sovereignty after 1300, remained unimportant: from 1150 to 1300 none of the half dozen female monarchs who issued coins ruled a Latin Christian kingdom.
Female rule flourished even in the unlikely atmosphere of a medieval warrior-state like Georgia. In this small Orthodox Christian kingdom of central Asia, where Byzantine, Muslim, and Persian cultures converged, both Tamar and Rusudan described themselves on their coins as “Queen of Kings and Queens, Glory of the World, Kingdom and Faith, Champion of the Messiah, [may] God increase her victories.” Both women were married, but their coins clearly illustrate their political predominance. Tamar's coins displayed her monogram (a theta) on top of her husband's (see fig. 3), while her daughter's coins simply omit her husband's name.16
Tamar, who ruled jointly with her father in 1178–84 and in her own name until her death in 1213, remains locally famous as the monarch presiding over Georgia's Golden Age, when her kingdom reached its maximum territorial boundaries and produced its greatest epic poetry. Shota Rustaveli, Georgia's premier poet, described an aging king crowning his daughter and commented that “a lion cub is just as good, whether female or male.” An Arab chronicler noted that Tamar sent envoys to Saladin after the capture of Jerusalem in 1187 and claims that she outbid the Byzantine emperor to obtain the relics of the True Cross.17 Many centuries later Georgia's Orthodox church would canonize her, and she remains locally popular; in 2008 Tamar was the second most common name given to girls born in Georgia.
Tamar was exceptionally fortunate politically in two ways. First, she had an early apprenticeship, not only being proclaimed as official heir by her father but also crowned and employed for six years as his surrogate. But Georgia had never had a female ruler, and both her influential aunt Rusudan and Georgia's patriarch, or catholicos, intervened to have Tamar crowned a second time after his death. Second, her kingdom enjoyed unusually favorable political circumstances—that is, if she could find a suitable husband to command its army and assure dynastic succession. Once she did this Tamar expanded Georgia's borders while both of its great neighbors, Persia and Byzantium, encountered political turmoil. But this window of political opportunity soon closed, and a quarter century after Tamar's death her unfortunate daughter Rusudan could not prevent Georgia from collapsing under Mongol attacks.
Tamar faced considerable opposition during her first years on the throne. Georgia's nobles chose the queen's first husband, Yuri, an exiled Russian prince living among Georgia's neighbors. Although a capable soldier, Yuri proved to be an impossible husband and soon quarreled violently with his wife. Three years after her accession the patriarch and chancellor died, and Tamar persuaded her council to approve a divorce, accusing Yuri of chronic drunkenness and sodomy. Removing an inconvenient royal husband was extremely difficult. Assisted by several Georgian aristocrats, Yuri made two unsuccessful attempts to overthrow Tamar before disappearing into obscurity after 1191. Tamar herself now chose a second husband, David Soslan, a minor prince and capable military commander who had defeated Yuri's supporters. They had two children, a son, born in 1191 amidst great celebrations, and a daughter born a few years later.
Ten years after Tamar's death, her daughter Rusudan succeeded her childless brother. Her reign began well; a year after her accession Rusudan married a Seljuk prince who agreed to accept Christian baptism. They had a son, David, and a daughter, Tamar, who eventually married a Seljuk cousin, a sultan. In 1230 Rusudan issued a coin with a Georgian inscription reading, “In the name of God, struck in the K'oronikon year 450” and an Arabic text translated as “Queen of Queens, Glory of the World and the Faith, Rusudan daughter of Tamar, champion of the Messiah” its central cartouche contains her abbreviation, RSN. Yet she enjoyed little of her mother's good political fortune, and military setbacks undermined her reign. The Mongols invaded Georgia and conquered it within five years. In 1242 Rusudan became a vassal of the Mongol khan, paying him an annual tribute of fifty thousand gold pieces. When she died three years later the remnants of her kingdom were divided between her son and her nephew.
During Rusudan's lifetime another woman, Razia-ad-Din, ruled a major Muslim state in north India from 1236 to 1240. Like Tamar, Razia had been named as successor and employed as a surrogate by her father, but before obtaining her inheritance she had to overcome even greater obstacles than Tamar. Minhaj, a relatively dispassionate chronicler writing in Persian, experienced Razia's reign as sultan of Delhi. He began his account by remarking that the first woman to rule a major Muslim state, “may she rest in peace, was a great sovereign, and sagacious, just, beneficent, a patron of the learned [Minhaj notes that Razia named him to head a college], a dispenser of justice, the cherisher of her subjects, and of warlike talent, and was endowed with all the attributes and qualities necessary for kings. But,” he then asked with exquisite irony, “as she did not attain the destiny of being counted as a man, of what advantage were all these excellent qualifications to her?”18
Like a few Turkish Seljuk princesses of that era, Razia ignored customary female behavior and showed aptitude for public business. However, in India opposition to acknowledging a politically experienced but unmarried heiress exceeded even that in Georgia. After her highly respected father, Sultan Iltutmish, died, northern India's Muslim political elite ignored his wishes and elevated Razia's young half brother Ruknuddin to the throne while his mother, Shah Turkan, dominated public business. After six months, Razia staged a coup d'état. She appealed for public support against her stepmother and brother at Friday noon prayers, provoking a riot which first slaughtered Ruknuddin's mother and then Ruknuddin himself. In the aftermath, local notables reluctantly agreed to make Razia ruler of Delhi, although Minhaj notes that the wazir refused to acknowledge her, “and this opposition continued for a considerable time.”
Razia preferred to be called sultan and behaved like one. Minhaj assures his readers that she “donned the tunic and assumed the headdress of a man” and subsequently kept her face unveiled when riding an elephant into battle at the head of her army. She reportedly patronized schools and libraries that included ancient philosophers and some Hindu works alongside Muslim classics. Minhaj considered her a shrewd, broad-minded politician who tried to divide the hostile emirs and sought local support by appointing a converted Hindu to an official position. Her confirming of Yaqut, a former Ethiopian slave, in the important office of superintendent of the stables provoked a rebellion by several provincial governors, including a childhood friend named Altunia. In the ensuing battle Yaqut was killed and Razia taken prisoner; her youngest half brother, Bahram Shah, was proclaimed sultan. To escape death Razia married Altunia. When they tried to recover power in October 1240 both were killed after being defeated in battle.
The other woman to govern a major thirteenth-century Muslim state remains incredibly mysterious. We know neither the personal name nor the ethnic origin (probably Armenian) of the beautiful, clever, and ambitious servant known as Shajar al-Durr, or “tree of pearls,” a name taken from #958–62 of the Thousand and One Nights. After an Egyptian crown prince purchased her in 1239, her rise to power, like the name by which she is known, also reads like something from the Thousand and One Nights. When her owner, Ayyub, became sultan of Egypt in 1240, Shajar al-Durr followed him to Cairo, where she became not only his sole wife, a remarkable development for a Muslim sultan, but also his most trusted adviser. Although their son died in 1246, later documents, including Ayyub's testament, continue to call her Umm Khalil, or Khalil's mother. She was Egypt's official ruler for three months in 1250, during which she became the only Muslim ruler ever to ransom a Christian saint. Afterward, as the second wife of her second husband, she may actually have governed Egypt even longer than Razia ruled the sultanate of Delhi. Early Arab sources uniformly describe her as Egypt's real ruler during this period, during which she made her only recorded royal decision.19
Umm Khalil's fairy-tale political rise includes several Machiavellian twists. Her political preeminence began in 1249, when Ayyub fell gravely ill as Louis IX, the Frankish crusader-king and future saint, attacked Egypt.20 His crusaders captured Damietta at the mouth of the Nile and advanced upstream. When Ayyub died in late November, Umm Khalil concealed his coffin and summoned her stepson Turanshah from exile, while the chief eunuch forged orders from his dead master. However, the Franks learned of the sultan's death and attacked the Egyptian camp, killing its commander. When her stepson reached Egypt in February 1250, Umm Khalil announced Ayyub's death and had Turanshah proclaimed sultan. Proceeding to Al-Mansurah, where the crusaders were besieged, he crushed them in April 1250 and captured their king.
Immediately after this splendid success, the new sultan began replacing his father's officials and ordered Shajar al-Durr to hand over his father's treasure and jewels. Complaining about ingratitude, she fled to Jerusalem, and some equally angry Mamluks soon assassinated Turanshah. When Ayyub's widow returned to Cairo, the political elite, unable to agree on a new ruler, finally proposed her. An eyewitness, the chronicler Ibn Wasil, noted that “all the business of state began to be attributed to her and documents began to be issued in her own name and to bear her own signature in the form “Khalil's mother” the khutba was read throughout Egypt in her name as Sultan. “An event like this,” he concluded erroneously, “was not known to have occurred previously in Islam.”21
Her rule was brief but eventful. An old emir negotiated with their royal captive, and Louis IX agreed to pay half the ransom originally proposed. When the money was rapidly raised, the king and his crusaders departed, unaware that they had been dealing with a woman. However, an emissary of the caliph of Baghdad rejected her title because women could not govern Muslim states, and Syrian rebels took advantage of the unconventional situation by invading Egypt. Ibn Wasil reported that Egypt's emirs “said that it was impossible to defend the country when the ruler was a woman”22 she then abdicated and they chose a Mamluk named Aybak as their commander. The caliph endorsed him as sultan, beginning a period of Mamluk rule that would last over 250 years. Not long afterward Shajar al-Durr became the second wife of Egypt's new sultan, and they governed Egypt jointly.
Shajar al-Durr's story ends badly. By 1257 she was concealing public business from Aybak and insisted that he divorce his original wife; instead, he took a third wife from a clan hostile to Shajar al-Durr. She then had her servants murder Aybak in his bath, claiming he had died accidentally. Suspicious Mamluks arrested her servants, who soon confessed under torture. While Aybak's teenage son became the new sultan, his mother's house servants beat Shajar al-Durr to death. Their victim had already erected a superb tomb for herself, which still stands inside a school for girls that she had reportedly founded.
One year later (1258), the Mongols deposed and murdered the caliph who had refused to recognize Shajar al-Durr. Mongol leaders soon accepted Islam and proved vastly more accommodating than caliphs toward women rulers; as Gavin Hambly noted, they assumed that “sovereignty could be exercised by a woman as well as by a man, without any of the constraints which seem to have inhibited Muslim women at other times and places from participating in active politics.” For example, Absh Khatun enjoyed a long reign (1263–87) and had coins struck as a Mongol client-ruler of Shiraz, a Persian province. The Mongols even allowed Padishah Khatun — who was reportedly raised as a boy, composed poetry, and had originally married a Buddhist — to govern another Persian province, Kirman. She remarried a former stepson and intimidated him into naming her as official ruler. Her gold coins were inscribed Khadawand ‘Alam. Since Khadawan means “sovereign” in Turkish and ’Alam means “world” in Arabic, the ruler of this obscure province described herself as “sovereign of the world.” Padishah Khatun, after ruling for four years, was murdered in 1295.23
Female Monarchs in Europe, 1100–1300
Medieval Muslim women rulers could lead an army on a war elephant or ransom a crusading king, but their female counterparts in Latin Europe boasted no such accomplishments. Not because its queens were overly modest or passive; for example, a chronicler described Sarolt, a tenth-century Hungarian queen and mother of St. Stephen, as a woman who “drank excessively, mounted horses like a man, and even killed a person in a fit of rage.” After 1000, queens in Latin Europe possessed one privilege their Muslim and Orthodox Christian counterparts lacked, but it was an abstract one: they became represented on chessboards as the second most valuable piece alongside the king—although these pieces lacked the remarkable powers of Europe's modern chess queens, first described in the Spain of Isabel “the Catholic” in 1496.24
Before 1300, women affected the political history of Latin European monarchies only as wives and mothers of kings; very few ruled important states in their own names, and only a handful claimed to govern kingdoms. The architectural historian Therese Martin sums it up best: “In the central Middle Ages, reigning queens were a brief anomaly of the twelfth century, a not altogether successful experiment.” Her three examples, from England, Spain, and the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, “all had turbulent reigns, brought on by parallel situations” when “powerful opposition to the new queens arose after their fathers’ deaths.” All three were succeeded by their sons, but only the Spanish queen remained on her throne throughout her lifetime.25
Coins and charters suggest that Europe's most successful female monarch of the high Middle Ages was Urraca, who ruled the united kingdoms of León and Castile in 1109–26. She was the oldest legitimate daughter of Alfonso VI, a famous king who had ruled León and Castile since 1072 and conquered Toledo in 1085. Urraca claimed her father's throne because (after six marriages!) his only acknowledged son had predeceased him. A twelfth-century Galician chronicle remarked, “She governed tyrannically and like a woman [tirannice et muliebriter] for seventeen years.” As ruler of what was then Spain's largest Christian state, she issued eighty-eight charters in her own name as “Queen of Spain” and three more as “Empress of Spain” a few of them claimed she ruled “by the grace of God” (Dei gratia regina). The first Latin Christian woman ever depicted on coins with a royal title, Urraca also made adroit use of ecclesiastical patronage. Martin has established her as the principal builder of the great Romanesque monastic church of San Isidoro in León, which she greatly expanded “precisely because her precarious position required a monumental declaration of her legitimacy.”26
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 younger 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.