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 (1558–1603), 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.
Numismatics as a Litmus Test for Sovereignty
Ever since the time of Cleopatra VII numismatic evidence has offered admirably clear and precise guidance for deciding whether or not to consider a woman as the reigning sovereign of a particular kingdom or major independent state, either alone or jointly with a man (two female co-sovereigns appear on the same coin only once, in eleventh-century Byzantium, and the arrangement lasted less than two months).2 Minting coins had become a prerogative of legitimate sovereigns throughout Europe long before women began acquiring thrones in significant numbers. As female sovereigns became less uncommon in late medieval Europe, their coins express their claims to possess exactly the same divine right status as their male counterparts; immediately following the ruler's name on the coin's face comes the phrase Dei Gratia Regina, “Monarch by the Grace of God.” The custom spread quickly to autonomous subroyal women rulers like Joanna of Brabant, who ruled a major duchy in the Low Countries for half a century after 1355; she even issued coins during her husband's lifetime calling her Duke (Dux) of Brabant by the Grace of God.3
Between 1350 and 1800 almost two dozen European women, including several named jointly with their husbands, issued coins with some form of D.G. Reg. after their names. The small size of many of these coins required other abbreviations, particularly for joint reigns that used both names. One from early fifteenth-century Navarre used “J(uan) + B(lanca) Dei Gra(tia) Rex + R(e)g(in)a Navarra” only the name of their kingdom was spelled in full. Of course, a woman ruling alone also needed abbreviations if she held many possessions. Some small coins from the eighteenth-century Habsburg Netherlands are inscribed M.T.D.G.R.IMP.G.H.B.REG.A.A.D.BURG, for “Maria Theresa by the Grace of God Roman Empress in Germany, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduchess of Austria and Duchess of Burgundy” (those minted for use in Luxembourg end with D.LUX.). The only words even partially spelled out are “Empress,” “Queen,” and the location of her local mint, in this case “Burgundy.”
In addition to providing thousands of pieces of evidence from many parts of Europe affirming that women sovereigns governed by divine right, coins offer both iconographic and diachronic advantages to political historians. Those made of noble metals, gold or silver, often provide metallic portraits of female rulers. Until the very end of the fifteenth century few of Europe's female monarchs put their effigies on their coins, and none seem as realistic as some of Cleopatra VII's effigies. Afterward, every European female sovereign did so, sometimes with husbands but more often alone. After 1550 coins usually carry dates, making it possible to pinpoint changes in the official status of such sovereigns as Mary Tudor and Mary of Scotland when they married during their reigns; in the case of Mary of Scotland they reveal even changes in her husband's legal status during their marriage.
Even the most obscure and unfortunate late medieval royal heiresses, including very young women who were rapidly overthrown, have left numismatic testimony to the legitimacy of their claims. Only three known silver coins bear the name and effigy of the unfortunate princess Beatriz, a preadolescent Portuguese heiress totally dependent on Castilian aid who rarely saw her father's kingdom after his death in 1383. Ninety years later, more surviving coins bear the name of the equally unfortunate princess Juana, a juvenile Castilian heiress heavily dependent on Portuguese aid in her unsuccessful struggle against her now-famous aunt Isabel of Castile. Because coins faithfully reflect the official, but not necessarily the real, sovereigns, they occasionally send misleading messages. The most extreme example is Isabel's successor Juana the Mad, who never functioned as Castile's ruler during her last forty-nine years; however, because she remained Spain's official or ‘proprietary’ monarch, her name and titles and sometimes her effigy appeared on millions of Spanish coins. Since Juana's oldest son was Spain's de facto ruler for almost forty years, she also became the only female monarch in Europe whose name appears on millions of coins together with that of a man other than her husband.
Numismatic evidence also helps clarify the complex status of two women in this sample, Mary of Burgundy and her great-great-granddaughter Isabel Clara Eugenia, who became sovereigns in the Low Countries, western Europe's most important nonroyal state. Through their marriages both women were archduchesses of Austria; but the first had inherited these possessions and governed them in 1477–82 as a duchess of Burgundy, while the second ruled from 1598 to 1621 as a Spanish infanta. In population and certainly in wealth, Mary's legacy in fifteenth-century Burgundy outranked all but the very greatest monarchies of the time. Her father had narrowly missed becoming a king in 1473; four years later his only child, a daughter, still unmarried at nineteen, inherited his vast possessions. His heiress soon married the son and heir of the Holy Roman emperor, but her numismatic privileges remained intact. One day after their wedding all provincial mintmasters were instructed to omit his name from her coins, and these guidelines were scrupulously observed until her death.4
The other female sovereign of the Low Countries suffered from three major disadvantages compared to her great-great-grandmother. First, under the terms of her father's will, Isabel Clara Eugenia had to marry her Austrian archduke before claiming her inheritance in the Low Countries, and he could claim sovereign status only after marrying her; thus, as their coins confirm, they had to reign jointly. Second, the Archdukes, as they are still popularly known, governed barely half of Mary of Burgundy's possessions, essentially only present-day Belgium and Luxemburg. Third, both would lose sovereign status if either of them died childless. Numismatic evidence confirms that their names and images disappeared abruptly from regional coins after Isabel's husband died in 1621, although she continued to serve for twelve years as its governor general.5
Not all of Europe's major female sovereigns between 1300 and 1800 who are listed in the preface were monarchs. If both archduchesses who issued coins in the Low Countries were one formal rank lower, four other women were one rank higher. Emperors of either sex outranked kings, and these eighteenth-century Russian women issued coins proclaiming them Imperatritsas, empresses, and autocrats. Numismatics thus offers a uniform criterion for identifying a total of thirty female sovereigns, including empresses and archduchesses, whose coins claimed that they ruled major European states “by the grace of God” between 1300 and 1800. Coins by themselves obviously reveal little about how or even if a sovereign actually governed, but the sample they provide seems sufficiently large to permit some meaningful observations about the evolution of female rule throughout Europe across these five centuries.
There is even an exception to confirm the general usefulness of numismatic criteria for identifying de jure women sovereigns. Margaret of Denmark, who is generally accepted as having been monarch of two late medieval kingdoms, Denmark and Norway, for over a quarter century (1386–1412), never issued any coins bearing her name, although her adopted male successor was issuing coins even before her death.6 While it is always difficult to explain something that did not happen, it seems pertinent to note that Margaret, the younger daughter of a Danish king and the wife (and later, widow) of a Norwegian king, had no hereditary claim to either kingdom. In Denmark she usually referred to herself as “the king's daughter” or as the only living child of its previous king and thus the “rightful heir” instead of the son of her deceased older sister. After 1376 she became regent of Denmark for her young son, adding Norway after her husband, the boy's father, died in 1380. When her son died unmarried in 1386, Margaret received authority to continue governing both kingdoms alone, indefinitely, as a sort of permanent regent with the right to designate her successor. She neither called herself a monarch nor claimed to rule by divine right: thus, although functioning as a monarch for all practical purposes, she lacked the right to strike coins. Another peculiar late medieval female monarch—Catherine Cornaro, a Venetian noblewoman and widow of the previous king, nominally sovereign of the kingdom of Cyprus in 1474–89—had pseudodynastic silver coins calling her Catherine of Venice, with the usual D.G. Reg.
Neither queens nor female regents—not even Margaret of Denmark—possessed this essential privilege of sovereignty. Unlike some Roman emperors, European kings never named their wives on their coins. Even Isabel of Castile, who enjoyed some unusual privileges in her husband Ferdinand's kingdom, is not named on coins from Aragon, while his name always appears on hers in Castile. As this example illustrates, joint rule posed numismatic problems for any married royal heiress. Only once, in mid-fifteenth-century Cyprus, did both the heiress and her husband issue separate silver coins after his coronation, and many more survive with his name than with hers. Joint effigies of husbands and wives rarely appear on the same coin before 1497, when Castile's new high-value excelentes depicted both Isabel and Ferdinand crowned and facing each other. This motif was copied immediately by the less famous joint monarchs of a small neighboring kingdom, Navarre. Until the eighteenth century, high-value coins of married female sovereigns provide many similar examples of joint effigies, always with the husband's name first and his face on the left. As late as 1689–94 England's high-value coins even half-conceal the face of Mary II behind that of her husband, William III.
At the same time, numismatic evidence suggests an increasing degree of personal autonomy among early modern female monarchs, who as early as 1553 were shown enthroned majestically on gold coins called sovereigns. Thirteen years later, another woman put her name ahead of her husband's on coins called royals. In the mid-seventeenth century Christina of Sweden wore a laurel wreath instead of a crown on her coins. After 1700, starting with Mary II's younger sister Anne, the coins of European married royal heiresses no longer depict or name their husbands—except the last one. D. Pedro III of Portugal was a paternal uncle of his wife, Maria I, and had received an auxiliary coronation; they were thereafter depicted on Portugal's high-value coins, but, in an exact reversal of William III and Mary II, her profile overshadows his. Numismatic evidence illustrates how the role of prince consort became a royal institution, one which has lasted until the present.
Female Sovereigns: When and Where?
If one divides the list of Europe's thirty female sovereigns given in the preface at the chronological midpoint of these five centuries, 1550, it splits them into equal halves and reveals some significant differences between the earlier and later groups. Most of the first group were younger women who generally ruled in close association with and often politically subordinated to their husbands. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe contained approximately twenty autonomous kingdoms, although their numbers were gradually contracting. Female inheritance, previously rare in Latin Christendom, occurred frequently as fifteen women acquired sovereignty in twelve kingdoms. Most of them were youthful: two-thirds inherited before their twentieth birthday. Many had husbands who received joint coronations and inherited if their wives died childless, which happened on four occasions. However, by the late fourteenth century an older woman ruled a large kingdom alone for twenty years, while Margaret of Denmark governed two kingdoms even longer and became regent of a third. A century later the very active Isabel of Castile ruled a major European kingdom jointly with her husband for thirty years.
In the second half of this period (1550–1800) relatively few monarchies that permitted female inheritance remained. The last small kingdoms in western Europe, Scotland and Navarre, lost their autonomy after a son of their final heiress also inherited a major neighboring kingdom. By 1620 Europe contained few separate kingdoms: England-Scotland, France-Navarre (which prohibited female inheritance), Denmark-Norway, Sweden (which prohibited female inheritance from 1654 until 1683 and after 1720), Poland-Lithuania (elective after 1572), Hungary, Bohemia (also theoretically elective), and Spain (Castile-Aragon, which also prohibited female succession after its acquisition by a French prince in 1700). Portugal lost its autonomy in 1580 but regained it in 1640. In 1713 Prussia, a Germanic state that excluded female rulers, became the first new monarchy in Europe since the Middle Ages.
Despite such restrictions, after the midpoint of these five centuries eleven women claimed thrones in eight kingdoms (Maria Theresa had coronations in two kingdoms), and four more ruled the Russian Empire. Few women in this group inherited before the age of twenty, but they generally governed for longer periods than the previous group. After 1550 Europe saw fewer female figureheads than before, and each of its nine genuine royal heiresses governed her kingdom autonomously for at least part of her reign. After 1566 few of them had husbands as joint rulers, although it was still possible for a husband to succeed his wife as sole ruler as late as 1694. Three of them, including the last to inherit as a young girl (in 1632), preferred to avoid marriage.
These examples reinforce clues from numismatic evidence that the political autonomy of Europe's royal heiresses increased between the late Middle Ages and the eighteenth century. At first, most of them inherited very young, married very early, and frequently played only minor roles in governmental records; by the end of the old regime, husbands played subordinate roles in western Europe and were completely absent in the Russian Empire. Even the styles of overthrowing an established ruler changed. In the late Middle Ages it was occasionally possible for illegitimate males to oust royal heiresses (Portugal 1385, Cyprus 1463); by the mid-eighteenth century it became possible for female usurpers to overthrow officially proclaimed male heirs (Russia 1741, 1762).
Geographically, as the map of Europe circa 1400 shows (see preface), female monarchs were scattered very widely around today's European Union, from Scotland in the northwest to Cyprus in the southeast, and they even extended to Europe's eastern geographical limit in Russia. At the same time, despite the vast geographical area that acknowledged female monarchs, this map reveals that a large core zone of old Europe remained impermeable to female sovereignty. It included the three most prestigious parts of Latin Christendom: the temporal lands of the papacy, an elective office which claimed superiority over all secular powers; the equally elective Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the only secular power in Christendom capable of creating new kingdoms, which it never did until 1713; and the kingdom of France, which by 1300 claimed preeminence over other kingdoms after acquiring the title of Very Christian King from the papacy. Curiously, while France remained the outstanding example of female exclusion from a hereditary monarchy, French remained the language most widely shared among Europe's female monarchs from the fourteenth century through the eighteenth.
The corner of Europe with the richest tradition of women rulers before 1800 does not appear on this map because it never reached the formal status of a kingdom until 1815. Conventionally known as the Low Countries or Netherlands, it was located along the frontier between Europe's two most important female-exclusionist states, where the northernmost edges of France encountered the northwestern boundary of the Holy Roman Empire. In this region a series of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Burgundian dukes eventually shaped a network of duchies, counties, and minor polities into the richest and most important subroyal hereditary state of Europe. Some of these territories were vassals of the empire, others of France; parts of Flanders, its single richest unit, belonged to each. Although both overlords prohibited female inheritance themselves, women frequently governed the borderlands between them. When Mary of Burgundy inherited a vast collection of provinces in 1477, nearly all of those acknowledging French suzerainty were reclaimed by the French crown, but the rest remained loyal to her.
After the Burgundian Netherlands became the Habsburg Netherlands, a tradition of female rule persisted in the region, beginning with Mary's daughter and continuing through five generations of female Habsburgs descending from Mary's son. Between 1507 and 1793, present-day Belgium and Luxemburg were governed for a total of 115 years by no fewer than six female regents, all appointed for indefinite terms because of their presumed governmental skills.7 Most of them died in office; the first to govern jointly with her husband outlived him and served alone until her death twelve years later. Only one, Margaret of Parma, who resigned in 1567, was not politically successful, but she was also the only one with male descendants, and her son soon governed the region extremely successfully for fourteen years. However, selective amnesia about previous experience of female rule seems far from uncommon in European history. Although no other region of Europe could match this long-term record, in 1831 the new kingdom of Belgium excluded women rulers by adopting France's Salic law.
Female Inheritance and Its Discontents
How did women establish legitimate claims to govern so many European kingdoms between 1300 and 1800? Regardless of their actual size, kingdoms outranked everything except empires in prestige; and, with the notable exception of France, they usually followed rules of dynastic succession that opened possibilities for women to become monarchs “by the Grace of God.” In reality, only four general principles governed dynastic successions to major states almost everywhere in Christian Europe. In order of descending importance, they were (1) legitimate birth, (2) masculine priority, (3) direct over collateral descent, and (4) primogeniture. All but the last came directly from Roman law. These fundamental guidelines seemed so obvious and uncontroversial that contemporaries rarely bothered to put them in writing. The most comprehensive discussion of female rule fills only a few pages of an obscure treatise, written in French by a Protestant Scot named David Chambers and printed at Paris in 1579. It asserts that in kingdoms and lesser hereditary governments “it is a general rule that women succeed in the absence of males,” adding with some exaggeration that “their government in such cases is universally received at all times and approved by all nations"—unless, as was the case in the place it was printed, “some great consideration by a special positive law orders the contrary.”8
Useful information about how the rules of dynastic succession were actually applied must therefore be sought in evidence from a few unusually complex situations. These include royal prenuptial contracts involving succession rights of future children born to spouses from states with differing customs, for example, Elizabeth I's premarital agreement with a French crown prince; final testaments of monarchs with children from different marriages, especially Henry VIII of England, who had successively delegitimized and relegitimized his daughters; disputed successions like that of Portugal in 1580, where the three leading claimants were the son of an elder royal daughter, the daughter of a younger royal son, and an illegitimate son of a younger royal son; England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, when a legitimate royal son had to be bastardized and a usurping foreign prince learned that a royal daughter took precedence over a royal nephew; and Habsburg family compacts, among which the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 became exceptionally important because, by placing territorial unity above everything else, including gender, it made possible the amazing inheritance of the then-unborn Maria Theresa.
Moreover, if legitimate female inheritance is the dominant part of this story, it is far from being the only part. Europe's female regents never usurped thrones, but European political history between 1300 and 1800 includes several ambitious women who successfully pushed aside either female or male rivals with better dynastic claims. At least eight of the thirty women in this sample, including Isabel the Catholic in Spain and all four Russian empresses, were technically not legitimate heiresses. Three of the eight women boasting the longest reigns between 1300 and 1800 had seized power through either coups d'état or civil war.
For such reasons conventional political theory provides little guidance to a historian of female sovereignty. Even the first and most important feminist author of the old regime, Christine de Pizan (1365–c. 1434), had a blind spot about female sovereignty. She explained why women were capable of governing and pointed out that they had done so in antiquity; she also offered modern examples of women who exercised authority temporarily as regents. But for all of her intellectual daring, she never raised the possibility of modern women governing as monarchs. Two reasons probably lurk behind de Pizan's prudent silence on this topic. First, she was writing in France, where female exclusion was already so well entrenched by 1400 as to be beyond criticism by anyone with connections at its court. Second, she loathed the most famous European female sovereign of her lifetime, Joanna I of Naples, and excluded her from the City of Ladies because she believed that Joanna had arranged her first husband's murder. Male authors did no better in explaining either de jure or de facto female sovereignty. If one can infer a few basic rules affecting female inheritance, only Machiavelli's The Prince dared to propose guidelines for usurpers—but the author's republican background prevented him from seeing that a woman like his famous contemporary Isabel the Catholic would fit his description of a new prince better than her husband.
Europe's most successful female usurper, Catherine the Great, offers an especially illuminating example of the practical difficulties involved in codifying rules of succession. In composing her guidelines for Russia's legislative assembly of 1767, she wanted to replace Peter the Great's precedent that each dying emperor name a successor. The question seemed extremely important because Montesquieu, her principal guide, considered a law of succession to be the most fundamental of all laws. Catherine therefore wrestled with a problem that defeated even a clever, well read, and usually resourceful empress. An undated, unfinished draft, notes her greatest modern expert, Isabel de Madariaga, shows that Catherine II was unable to write a law of succession that would legalize her own position. She began by paraphrasing Montesquieu: “The first principal law of this sovereign realm is the stability of the throne and a fixed succession,” adding, “The throne can never be vacant,” the venerable doctrine that the king never dies. “On my death,” Catherine continued, “my son will inherit” then, “after my son, if his son is already 21 years old, then his eldest son will inherit; if he is less than 21 years old, then his mother should be concerned, and let her reign for the rest of her life, for a minority of the sovereign would be dangerous for the empire; if there is no male heir, then let the eldest daughter [inherit] …” Catherine abandoned the attempt.9 Her forty-two-year-old son, Paul, did indeed follow her and promptly decreed a far simpler rule of succession: no woman could ever again occupy the throne of Russia. It was his most important piece of legislation, lasting until the Bolshevik Revolution.
The most basic general principle of royal succession throughout Europe, so fundamental that neither Chambers nor Catherine II bothered to mention it, was legitimate birth. Once marriage had become generally recognized as the seventh sacrament in the high Middle Ages, the heir to a major Christian polity had to be born to parents who were legally married; Catherine II, who also had an illegitimate son, ignored him when discussing her order of succession. The next most important principle of monarchical succession, acknowledged by both Chambers and Catherine II, was that male children of any age preceded females of any age—but this principle came second because legitimate females preceded illegitimate males. Several illegitimate sons attempted to seize royal thrones until the eighteenth century, but only two were successful, both of them relatively early and under truly exceptional circumstances. The last such instance, in 1460, required the assistance of a Muslim jihad (see chapter 3); after this usurper's death ten years later, a Venetian fleet commander rebuffed a plea from the dispossessed heiress that it was his Christian duty to restore her, retorting that the previous king was legitimate because the Egyptian sultan (although not the pope) had recognized him.10
The four general principles applied to both sexes almost everywhere except France, which shortly after 1300 consistently barred any claim involving female succession rights. As Chambers said in 1579—in French and at Paris—if a deceased king anywhere else left legitimate daughters but no legitimate sons, the oldest surviving daughter took precedence over more distantly related males. The most troublesome problems usually occurred if a dying king left only very young daughters but had younger brothers who were already adults. This was precisely the situation in 1316 when Capetian France infringed the third general rule and began a progressively more strident insistence on female exclusion. However, when a similar situation arose only fourteen years later in a large kingdom ruled by a French dynasty, Robert the Wise of Naples awarded his entire inheritance to a four-year-old granddaughter and excluded his two younger brothers from a regency council.
The second outcome proved typical. Although various major French thinkers of later centuries, men as original and as different as Jean Bodin, Michel de Montaigne, and Montesquieu, claimed that France's Salic law was eminently reasonable and deserved universal application, the overall record of the rest of Latin Christendom presents a very different picture. Outside of a few French satellites like eighteenth-century Bourbon Spain, Chambers's assertion of 1579 was substantially correct: daughters of kings without surviving sons inherited ahead of the former king's younger brothers or more distant male kin. One kingdom, Sweden, usually a French ally, reversed its position on female inheritance, permitting it twice and forbidding it twice between 1593 and 1720 before permitting it again in 1980.
A few European kingdoms, including its most prestigious unit, the Holy Roman Empire, were elective rather than hereditary. This amounted to a de facto bar against female rule because no woman would be freely elected to head any European government until Margaret Thatcher in 1979. However, in old Europe no elective monarchical state, including the empire, ever prospered politically. Poland became consistently elective after 1572 but soon declined in power and significance before being erased as a state in 1795. Only one woman ever campaigned in any Polish royal election: in 1668 the papacy proposed the former queen Christina of Sweden for its vacant throne, but she received almost no support, even among a devoutly Catholic nobility.11 Bohemia occasionally behaved like an elective kingdom, exercising this privilege in 1618 and 1740, both times with highly unfavorable consequences for its political elite. By 1743, under military occupation, Bohemia was compelled to crown a Habsburg heiress.
Demographically, because monarchies made considerable efforts to produce sons as dynastic heirs, daughters inherited only about once in every seven or eight royal successions. On the other hand, only one European kingdom, Denmark, was inherited by twelve consecutive generations of sons after 1440. Like their three beleaguered twelfth-century predecessors, female monarchs in Latin Europe between 1300 and 1800 were overwhelmingly (twenty of twenty-four, or 83 percent) daughters of kings without surviving sons. They include several who followed childless siblings, most often a brother (Naples 1414, England 1553, Sweden 1718) but sometimes a sister (England 1558, 1702). The exceptions included a permanent regent of two kingdoms (Denmark and Norway 1386) and a royal usurper crowned jointly with her husband (England 1689), while Castile needed a lengthy civil war after 1474 to decide between an aunt and her niece. All of these women were also daughters of kings, but each faced major impediments to her claims. The Scandinavian ruler had an older sister whose son promptly claimed his grandfather's Danish throne; both Castilian female claimants had been disinherited at different times by the previous king; and the English usurper had a very young half brother whom she slandered as a changeling. The only complete aberration was the widow of a royal usurper (Cyprus 1474), and she possessed almost no personal authority.
Did Women Rule Differently from Men?
Despite an abundant prescriptive literature preaching female subjection, once a woman had established a valid claim to rule a particular kingdom of Latin Christendom she governed it by divine right and faced no fundamental objection from its all-male political elites on grounds of her gender. King may have no female form, but political power has no sex. As Simone de Beauvoir once noted, Europe's most successful women rulers “were neither male nor female—they were sovereigns. It is remarkable that their femininity, when socially abolished, should no longer mean inferiority.”12 Women monarchs could govern effectively in most places at most times because most men adapt quickly to obeying orders from a legitimate commander who happens to be female. Today, in what is probably the closest approximation to absolute rule among civilians in a democracy, male crew members will unquestioningly obey a female airline pilot. Her voice sounds different, but the messages it transmits are not.
Throughout the five centuries after 1300, for all the talk about female inferiority and frailty, having a woman as divine-right sovereign made very little practical difference in the way governments actually operated. Again, the voice was different but its messages were the same. It is true that women rulers demonstrated greater flexibility, both political and personal, than male rulers; women, but not men, occasionally served as regents after having been sovereigns (see chapter 4), and women, but not men, sometimes changed both their personal names and their religion before becoming rulers (see chapter 7). But this flexibility did not extend to personal appearance. It seems significant that Europe's female rulers rarely felt any need or desire to dress like men in order to rule like men. The unusually tall Mary Stuart of Scotland reportedly wore male clothing in occasional private escapades and even staged one escape dressed as a man;13 but to the best of my knowledge, no European female monarch ever put on men's clothing in public until Peter the Great's equally tall daughter Elisabeth held cross-dressing masquerades in mid-eighteenth-century Russia, and no woman wore military clothing in public until her spectacularly brazen successor Catherine II staged her coup d'état.
Because women rulers had been so extraordinarily rare in most parts of the world, they had not interacted with each other. But the early twelfth-century armed conflicts between Urraca of León-Castile and Teresa of Portugal suggest that when they did, female rulers behaved exactly like male rulers. After 1300, whenever Europe had two or more women ruling nearby kingdoms simultaneously they interacted no differently from their male counterparts. In 1386 a sister ruling in Poland (now officially a saint) seized two disputed border provinces from her older sister, who had been temporarily deposed as Hungary's sovereign and was then imprisoned. In the fifteenth century two women disputed the same throne and waged war against each other. Although husbands were deeply involved in both early cases, the women themselves were the official protagonists. In the sixteenth century a female monarch ordered the execution of another female monarch, something male kings never did to each other in the early modern era. In mid-eighteenth-century Europe two women, both sole sovereigns of major states, made a military alliance and waged a long and often successful war against the greatest warrior-king of the time, Frederick II of Prussia.
Women and men conducted nearly all royal business, from making minor appointments to conducting international diplomacy, in essentially identical fashion. Female sovereigns declared wars and ended them; exactly like their male counterparts, they held daily consultations with their principal advisers and made occasional formal public appearances. Both female and male monarchs also managed what was invariably the largest household in their kingdom, the royal court, and directed its official entertainments. Here, women and men sponsored the same kinds of coeducational activities, although, overall, female rulers probably held relatively fewer hunts and more dances and card games.
Old Europe first adapted to the anomaly of female monarchs by investing them with male attributes. As Albertus Magnus remarked in the thirteenth century, “There is no woman who would not naturally want to shed the definition of femininity and put on masculinity,” and the women who exercised kingship coded themselves as men whenever this tactic seemed convenient.14 Male mimesis was most blatant in the late fourteenth century among Europe's earliest successful female sovereigns: Joanna I of Naples appeared on some of her gold coins with a coat of armor and a man's bare legs, and Margaret of Denmark became the husband of two kingdoms (she was essentially a permanent regent, and her peculiar-sounding title becomes more comprehensible if husband is regarded as a verb rather than a noun). Traces of the transformation of female monarchs into honorary men persisted for centuries; in seventeenth-century Sweden and eighteenth-century Hungary heiresses were still acclaimed as rex rather than regina at their coronations.15
Female rulers could bend standard gender roles. A useful example compares the indirect audacity of Isabel of Castile with the more direct role of Maria Theresa in manipulating chivalric orders that formally excluded women. In 1476, during her civil war against her niece, Isabel, surrounded by loyal prelates and jurists, personally entered a plenary election meeting of the Knights of Santiago, one of Spain's three great chivalric orders; speaking through male surrogates, she intimidated the assembled knights into electing her husband as grand master, thereby acquiring the order's considerable revenues for her treasury. Three centuries later, after Maria Theresa's husband refused to head an honorary Hungarian order which she had revived, she herself presided over its first meeting as grand master, “by virtue of the masculine status which she acquired at her coronation,” as her master of ceremonies explained.16 All four eighteenth-century Russian empresses had themselves painted wearing the blue sash of St. Andrew, Russia's most prestigious chivalric order, created by Peter the Great, although its statutes expressly forbade awarding it to women.
After 1500 a linguistic factor, the widespread use of conveniently gender-neutral forms for addressing them, facilitated the acceptance of numerous women as rulers. Such terms as Your Majesty and Your Royal Highness were increasingly adopted in all principal European languages simultaneously with the unprecedented multiplication of female rulers, both monarchs and regents, in the mid-sixteenth century. Even Elizabeth I, sometimes considered the creator of a specifically feminine ruling style, often called herself a prince; as she told the new Venetian ambassador a few weeks before her death, “My sex cannot diminish my prestige nor offend those who treat me as other Princes are treated to whom … Venice sends its ambassadors.”17 Because the basic meaning of king and queen (as king's wife) never changed, such ungendered forms of address either promoted or at least reflected the increasing acceptance of female rule in Europe during the second half of this period. The subject deserves further investigation now that our capacity to digest massive amounts of information permits a cross-national, multilingual, and diachronic comparison of the official forms of address employed by and for Europe's female kings.
Although my account emphasizes that, overall, Europe's female rulers had some long-term overall improvements in their ability to rule autonomously between 1300 and 1800, such advances were neither linear nor uniform, nor did all of these women rule successfully. Far from it. About one in three—a much higher rate than among male monarchs—suffered some form of political catastrophe. Before 1500 their collective record is littered with depositions. Three female monarchs were deposed during the 1380s (Naples 1381, Portugal and Hungary 1385); afterward, another woman was deposed (Cyprus 1463), and a fifth abdicated involuntarily (Cyprus 1489). In 1479 the woman who lost Castile's civil war was forced to enter a convent.
Various forms of female political failure also occurred after 1500. In 1506 Castile's widowed heiress refused to exercise any of her political responsibilities; although she never lost her official titles, she was effectively imprisoned for nearly fifty years. In mid-sixteenth-century England a teenage female puppet known as the Nine Days’ Queen was deposed and beheaded. Another young female monarch abdicated involuntarily (Scotland 1567), while two did so voluntarily (Sweden 1654 and 1720); an older woman suffered an irreversible mental breakdown (Portugal 1792). All four of these women lived for at least twenty years after they had ceased to govern. Royal statistics should not be pushed too far, but it seems evident that the political “casualty rate” was much higher for female than for male monarchs. Between 1500 and 1800, while five of sixteen female sovereigns ceased governing prematurely, a sample of well over a hundred male European kings (a ratio of about eight men to every woman) produced a larger number but a much smaller ratio of sudden endings. Only men experienced violent deaths in battle (Portugal 1578, Sweden 1632 and 1718), by assassination (France 1589 and 1610), or were beheaded by rebellious subjects (England 1649, France 1793). However, only five male monarchs were deposed (Sweden 1568 and 1599, Holy Roman Empire 1609, Bohemia 1619, England 1688), and only three men abdicated voluntarily (Spain 1555 and 1724, Poland 1668).
Even in the enlightened late eighteenth century, no matter how bizarre their behavior, Europe's divine-right sovereigns, male or female, were almost never officially removed because of insanity. In 1772 King Christian VII of Denmark (r. 1766–1808) had to be replaced for twelve years of de facto regency by his stepmother and his physically disabled half brother until his son could become the legal regent. When Frederick's brother-in-law, George III of England, appeared to require a regent because of insanity in 1788, he was pronounced cured shortly afterward.18 In 1792 the same physician who cured George III tried but failed to help Maria I, the mentally disturbed female monarch of England's close political ally, Portugal. However, Maria's adult son did not become official regent of Portugal until seven years after his mother had ceased to govern.
The life expectancy of Europe's female monarchs was no greater than that of their male counterparts. Most died from natural causes but few lasted into extreme old age. Three late medieval heiresses died in their midtwenties, but only one succumbed to the aftereffects of childbirth; the other two died from riding accidents. However, only two heiresses outlived Elizabeth I, who died at seventy, and neither was ruling: Juana of Castile, who died at seventy-five, had exercised no political responsibilities for almost half a century, while Maria I of Portugal, who died at eighty-one, had been insane for twenty-four years. Only two adult female monarchs died violent deaths: one was murdered by her male successor in 1382 and the other was beheaded in 1587. On the other hand, three (Naples 1345, Scotland 1567, and Russia 1762) were widely suspected of arranging the murder of their politically inconvenient husbands.
As political leaders the most noteworthy trait of Europe's female monarchs is that they appear even more deeply enmeshed in Christendom's religious politics than most of their male counterparts. The subject is vast enough to deserve a separate volume, and only a few highlights can be sketched here. In Orthodox Christianity religious preoccupations emerged as early as the Empress Irene of Byzantium, who promoted the restoration of icon worship, and, much later, the future saint Tamar of Georgia, who patronized distant Near Eastern shrines. Religious politics similarly dominated the architectural legacy of Latin Christendom's first female monarch, Urraca of León-Castile, who, like Tamar, patronized famous distant shrines. Religious politics became even more vital among fourteenth-century female monarchs. Only consistent support from her papal suzerains enabled Joanna I to govern an important Mediterranean kingdom for almost twenty years, and her role in the Great Schism of 1378 fatally compromised her rule.
While no male monarch has ever been seriously proposed for sainthood since 1297, when Louis IX of France was canonized less than thirty years after his death, two female monarchs have been nominated in the twentieth century, one of them successfully. Jadwiga of Poland, who enthusiastically promoted the eastern expansion of the Latin church, was first proposed for this honor during her husband's lifetime, but it took almost six centuries after her death in 1399 before a Polish-born pope finally made her a saint. In 1496 Isabel of Castile owed her new papal title of Catholic king not just to a successful crusade against Muslims in Granada and her persecution of converted Jews through Spain's new state-run Inquisition, but also to the major religious reforms she carried out in her kingdom. After 1970 a serious effort by Spanish reactionaries to beatify her was quietly buried by the papacy.
After the Protestant Reformation religious politics became a primary concern of all the numerous mid-sixteenth-century women rulers. Two famous examples were half sisters: Mary and Elizabeth Tudor each overturned England's established church in opposite directions within a single decade (1554–63). Conversion to Reformed Protestantism led Jeanne III of Navarre to overturn her husband's authority in her hereditary kingdom in 1562. Two female Catholic regents adopted quasi-monastic behavior. Juana of Castile wore a veil while governing Spain as a secret Jesuit in 1554–59 and retired young to build a convent; her niece Isabel Clara Eugenia later dressed as a Franciscan nun while governing the Low Countries in 1621–33. In 1654 conversion to Catholicism became the decisive factor in the early abdication of Christina of Sweden, heiress to a solidly Lutheran kingdom.
Even in the century of Enlightenment female sovereigns continued to be (or at least to act) more pious than their male contemporaries. Maria Theresa's only critics were either Protestants or Jews settled in Habsburg territories who suffered religious discrimination during her reign. Although Catherine II justified her usurpation of the Russian Empire largely as a defense of the imperiled Orthodox church and required her daughters-in-law to convert to it, she subsequently extended state-supervised toleration not just to schismatic Old Believers but also to vast numbers of her newly acquired Muslim, Jewish, and Catholic subjects. The mental breakdown in 1792 of Europe's last female monarch of the old regime, Maria I of Portugal, was attributed partly to the severity of her confessor.
Male Accessories to Female Rule
Despite widespread ambivalence about having women as divine-right monarchs, European men never developed a coherent theoretical opposition to female rule; John Knox's notorious trumpet blast of 1558 had no imitators. Instead, male critics preferred a more insidious denigration of female sovereignty: the slogan ‘when women rule, men govern’ became almost proverbial before 1800. This adage used conventional beliefs about female frailty to assume that the man with greatest access to a female ruler was necessarily the most prominent person in her state. Such reasoning explains the frequent late medieval coronations of husbands of female sovereigns and the debate in book 3 of Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier about the role of Isabel's husband in her success. It also explains both the frequent rumors of sexual liaisons between women rulers and their favorites and the persistent tradition of historians to see the principal ministers of women rulers as the primary agents shaping state policy, from fourteenth-century Naples to the Austria of Maria Theresa.
There is corroborative evidence to support this approach. Husbands were considered indispensable to every young royal heiress as late as the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria being the most prominent but not the only example. At the same time, some far older women monarchs, as early as Joanna II in early fifteenth-century Naples, clearly governed through male favorites. All-powerful male favorites reappear with Russia's first two eighteenth-century empresses, Prince Alexander Menshikov with Catherine I and Count (later Duke) Ernest Biron with Anna Ivanovna. However, female rulers as early as Queen Anne of England also had politically prominent female favorites. Rule by royal favorites was never peculiar to female monarchs; both before and after Joanna I, many adult male kings did exactly the same thing. Because men comprised 90 percent of all European monarchs it is appropriate that the outstanding collaborative study of rule by royal favorites should include only one female ruler.19
If rule through favorites was endemic and independent of gender, were there any important differences between Europe's female and male kings? Although most of the time men and women governed in identical fashion, two special areas remained segregated by gender. The political peculiarities of female royal rule might be represented by a large central circle overlapped at both ends by smaller circles. The large circle represents ordinary government business (appointments, diplomacy, edicts, and so on) that was exercised in essentially the same way by both men and women. The small circle at one end represents an exclusively male sphere of warfare; throughout the five centuries considered here sovereigns were also military commanders, a role that remained taboo for female rulers. The small circle at the other end is the female zone of queenship centered around legitimate dynastic reproduction, so essential to hereditary monarchies. Male rulers needed female accessories in order to have legitimate heirs; female rulers needed male accessories for the same purpose, but for a long time they also needed them to command their armies. In Sweden a tradition of personal military leadership by the monarch remained sufficiently strong to influence the abdication of its two women sovereigns, both of whom succeeded kings who had been killed in battle.
Nevertheless, Europe's female sovereigns, who often found themselves entangled in wars, compiled a remarkably successful overall military record. Between the capture of the king of Sweden on the battlefield by the army of Margaret of Denmark in 1389 and the defeat of the previously invincible Frederick II of Prussia by the armies of two female monarchs in 1760, one finds the ten-year conquest of Granada, the last Muslim state in Europe, by the armies of Isabel the Catholic; the defeat of Philip II's Invincible Armada by the navy of Elizabeth I; several great Swedish victories in the Thirty Years’ War during Christina's reign; and the humbling of Louis XIV's armies by those of Queen Anne. Such military successes far outweighed their reverses. Meanwhile, eighteenth-century female monarchs found novel ways to cope with the problem of military leadership by such tactics as portraying themselves on horseback carrying a weapon, founding military academies to train their officer corps, and creating honorary orders for outstanding military service; Maria Theresa did all three, even naming the new order for herself. In western Europe royal military leadership ceased being a political concern; after 1745, no male monarch led an army in person. In more recent times, Margaret Thatcher, the first democratically elected female head of a major European state, continued this tradition of military success (see fig. 17).
The most obvious difference between male and female monarchs is that women, in addition to their ordinary governmental tasks, were also expected to undertake the burden of dynastic reproduction. Being kings made it harder for these women to be queens; fulfilling their reproductive responsibilities proved extremely difficult. High child mortality rates compounded the difficulties of locating politically suitable spouses during their childbearing years, so that only about 40 percent of Europe's female monarchs (far below the 70 percent rate for their male counterparts) were succeeded by their direct descendants. All but one of these heirs came from marriages made before the mother began her personal reign.
Royal heiresses inevitably confronted an extremely narrow choice of possible husbands. Their dilemma had three horns. Marrying one of her own subjects almost guaranteed disaster by raising a single clan far above every other noble lineage in her kingdom.20 Marrying any foreigner of nonroyal status reduced her own prestige, but marrying another king or crown prince would automatically merge her kingdom with his and compromise its autonomy. Somehow all these pitfalls had to be avoided in order to preserve their heritage intact.
From a man's perspective, marrying a royal heiress entailed risks as well as advantages. A military leader was assassinated when he tried to marry the last female ruler of Sassanid Persia, and we do not know what happened to the first husband of Queen Tamar of Georgia; he simply disappears from the record. In Latin Europe, although their military potential sometimes played a role in their selection, no royal husband ever died in battle; however, a few of them were murdered, beginning in 1345 with the first husband of the first major European heiress. Among the few from nonprincely backgrounds, one was driven from his wife's kingdom in 1419 and eventually retired to a foreign monastery, while the last husband of Mary Queen of Scots ended in a Danish prison, where he died insane.
Whatever scriptural and customary wisdom said about the subordination of wives, such conventional notions were rarely applied to or internalized by women rulers. Folk wisdom knew that a married woman who was older than her husband had a better chance of exercising authority autonomously, so it is not surprising that some of Europe's greatest heiresses married men younger than themselves. At Naples, Robert the Wise did this with his granddaughter, Europe's first major heiress. In 1469 and 1477 two women whose inheritance rights were sharply contested and who were able to choose their own husbands, Isabel of Castile and Mary of Burgundy, also did this, with highly satisfactory results. In the following century Mary Tudor was better positioned to retain England's autonomy after her marriage by being almost twelve years older than her husband. Even Mary Stuart of Scotland, seldom praised for her political astuteness, chose a man four years younger than herself when she decided to remarry during her personal reign. No subsequent female monarch ever remarried, although a few extremely successful female rulers flaunted affairs with much younger men in their old age. The earl of Essex was thirty-three years younger than Elizabeth I. The interchangeable gigolos of Catherine II's final years averaged thirty years younger than their employer, although her only politically important bedmate, Grigory Potemkin, whom she may have secretly married, as Louis XIV did his last mistress, was just ten years younger.
When they were fortunate enough to have surviving children, reigning mothers were able to avoid the often severe and occasionally murderous antagonism between fathers and crown princes. No mother who was a divine-right monarch ever abdicated in favor of an adult son, although Maria Theresa officially shared power with hers after her husband's death; Catherine II went to the opposite extreme by excluding hers from any political responsibilities. Daughters may have been even more difficult to manage than sons. Old Europe produced only one mother–daughter royal inheritance, and relations between Isabel the Catholic and her second daughter, Juana, turned remarkably bitter after Juana unexpectedly became heiress-apparent in 1502. After Isabel died two years later, the only daughter to acquire a major European kingdom from an extremely politically active mother became the only female sovereign in European history who refused to exercise any political authority whatsoever.
There was no standard formula for how female kings approached the tasks of government. Europe's most successful examples, the women who exhibited the greatest staying power in major states—Isabel the Catholic, Elizabeth I, Maria Theresa, and Catherine II—each developed strategies tailored to maximize the possibilities of her particular situation, and each manipulated very different images of how a woman wielded supreme political power. Isabel maximized the possibilities of a married woman in a dual monarchy in which her kingdom held most of the joint resources, including those acquired during the marriage; yet she always remained part of a partnership called the kings (los Reyes), and her husband held far more authority in her kingdom than she did in his. A half century after Isabel's death, Elizabeth I dodged the burdens of marriage and dynastic reproduction while presenting herself as either (virgin) mother of her subjects or wife of her kingdom, in either role providing safety and prosperity through prudent stewardship. A century and a half later Maria Theresa, flanked by a husband with an imperial title and a large flock of children, maximized the strategy of becoming truly the “mother of her country” (die erste und allgemeine Landesmutter). All three were native princesses, but the foreign-born Catherine II had usurped her throne from an incompetent and overtly foreign husband. She compensated by becoming a patriot in her adopted country and working tirelessly to acquire both glory for herself and improved conditions for her subjects, ultimately becoming the only female ruler generally known as the Great both at home and abroad.
Regardless of their individual styles after achieving power, all of Europe's most successful female rulers from the fourteenth through the eighteenth century shared one vital life experience with their most famous predecessors in such places as Egypt and China. Starting with Joanna I of Naples and Margaret of Denmark, these women had invariably surmounted major political obstacles before attaining sovereign authority in their own name. Isabel had to fight a civil war with her niece; Elizabeth spent much time imprisoned in the Tower of London. Even Maria Theresa, despite all her father's efforts to permit female succession throughout his possessions, had to overcome great difficulties before officially acquiring either of her two royal thrones. Women who managed to survive such testing experiences invariably relished the exercise of supreme power afterward; none of them ever retired gracefully like Japan's female tennos, relinquishing effective control to an adult male relative. Instead, European history offers a counterexample. Sweden's meticulously mentored and highly gifted seventeenth-century crown princess Christina, the woman with the least contested path to the throne and the only one who had been carefully groomed for the tasks of royal government, abandoned her monarchical responsibilities at the age of twenty-eight after only ten years of highly successful personal rule.