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 Ruknudd
in 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
The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 Page 3