The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  These were indeed difficult times for royal heiresses. If they died young and childless after their husbands had received joint power, they risked being virtually erased from their kingdom's history—except, perhaps, for numismatists.26 Two were deposed in the same year (1385) in widely separated kingdoms, Hungary and Portugal; one later recovered her throne. The papacy's Great Schism, which had undermined Joanna I's rule at Naples, further complicated their situation. One heiress, whose small kingdom backed the Roman pope, was held hostage for fourteen years by a larger kingdom, whose rulers backed his Avignon rival. On the other hand, the one heiress who lined up early and consistently behind the Roman pope achieved a unique distinction among Europe's female monarchs: six centuries after her death, Jadwiga of Poland has finally become a saint.

  In 1377 Maria of Sicily inherited a monarchy which recognized papal suzerainty and maintained a fragile autonomy between two larger kingdoms, Naples to the north and Aragon to the west; her father gave Malta to his illegitimate son and made him heir to Sicily if his unmarried daughter died childless. Her uncle, the Aragonese king, vainly protested to the pope that women should not inherit; then he kidnapped Maria. After fourteen years of closely supervised captivity outside Sicily, the next Aragonese king used a dispensation from the antipope at Avignon to marry her to his nephew, who was barely half her age. When Maria returned for a joint coronation with her husband, she was “exhibited as a powerful fetish, an object or symbol of sovereignty, lost some time ago and recently recovered.” Only four surviving documents bear her signature.27

  Like her Sicilian counterpart, Beatriz of Portugal was an unfortunate political pawn. Her father, after losing several wars against Castile, was compelled on his deathbed to betroth her to the son of his hated enemy. However, the Castilian king suddenly became a widower and decided to marry Portugal's underage heiress himself. The decision soon proved to be a serious political mistake. He lost control of his child-wife's kingdom when rebels supported an illegitimate prince who won a dramatic victory in 1385. Because the victor founded a new dynasty, Portugal's unlucky heiress has been expunged from its official record, which still describes the two years separating her father's death from her bastard uncle's coronation as an interregnum.28

  Europe's next heiress, Maria, was the older daughter of Louis the Great, king of Hungary and Poland. Her luck was little better: she became the second female monarch to be deposed by the same Angevin prince who had removed Joanna I of Naples in 1381. Within a week of Louis's death in 1382, his ambitious widow staged a solemn coronation making the twelve-year-old Maria king (rex) of Hungary. This act not only overturned her husband's intentions (Maria supposedly inherited Poland), but it also bypassed a German fiancé whom her mother disliked. For a few years the dowager governed Hungary; but disaster struck when her autonomous Croatian cousin invited Joanna I's assassin to add the Angevin heritage in central Europe to his Mediterranean possessions.

  Advancing rapidly, the invader met little resistance. In late 1385 he was crowned as Hungary's new king, while its young heiress made a humiliating renunciation and her mother stood by helplessly. But within two months the dowager had organized a conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of the usurper. Maria and her mother then moved south to Croatia, where both were soon imprisoned. In early 1387 her captors murdered the dowager regent. Maria's original fiancé finally reached Hungary and became the third person crowned as its king within five years. A few months later she was finally liberated with help from Venice. Their subsequent marriage and joint reign until her death in 1395 seem anticlimactic.

  The destiny of her younger sister Hedwig (Jadwiga in Polish), separated from her mother and pushed into her father's other kingdom, took a totally unpredictable turn. One must penetrate very thick clouds of incense concealing a thin layer of surviving documents in order to grasp events in Poland before and after Jadwiga's coronation as its king in October 1384. She was obviously manipulated by Polish magnates, who prevented her from marrying the Habsburg prince with whom she had been raised. Instead, they promised her to their powerful non-Christian neighbor, the grand duke of Lithuania. In exchange for accepting Catholic baptism and marrying Poland's official monarch, he would be crowned king of Poland. And so it happened. The thirty-six-year-old Jagiello was already unanimously accepted as king and lord of Poland even before being baptized at Cracow, the kingdom's capital, taking a new Christian name, and marrying Poland's other “king” three days later, on her twelfth birthday. His coronation, which required additional negotiations, followed five weeks later.

  Understandably, objections were raised: the Habsburgs opposed the wedding, and the Teutonic Knights opposed the conversion. In 1386 and 1388 two papal legates investigated, but both found the marriage to be canonically legitimate and the conversion authentic. In order to reduce their dependency on Poland's magnates, this oddly assorted royal couple, though unable to speak a common language, quickly established a working political relationship. With Jadwiga's mother and sister imprisoned in Croatia, Poland's new king sent his young wife off to claim a disputed province from Hungary; she accomplished this successfully while he began implementing the conversion of Lithuania. A few months later she reminded Polish officials that Jagiello was the kingdom's “natural lord.” Poland's queen remained active in Hungarian affairs; after the death of her sister Maria, Jadwiga added “heiress of Hungary” to her official titles.29

  Jadwiga took great interest in promoting Latin Catholicism in her husband's territories, which were populated mainly by Orthodox Christians. In 1398 she endowed a college for Lithuanian theology students at the University of Prague. When she died a year later (between 1126 and 1853 she was Europe's only female monarch to die from complications following childbirth), her jewelry was sold to help reestablish a university in Cracow that still bears her husband's name. Twenty years later, churchmen who owed their careers to her began campaigning for her beatification.30 Her sainthood is unquestionable; but the extent of her political agency in Poland seems much less than that of her paternal grandmother, who governed this kingdom for many years with minimal intervention from her son. From a political perspective, St. Jadwiga was simply the least ineffective of these late fourteenth-century Navarrese-style heiresses.

  Navarre Unravels

  Although the Navarrese solution to female inheritance generally worked well in the small kingdom that had originally developed it, one of Europe's most energetic and capable fifteenth-century heiresses, Blanca of Navarre, became involuntarily responsible for undermining its long-term autonomy. Her first husband, Martin the Younger of Aragon (who had acquired the kingdom of Sicily by outliving his first wife), died childless in 1409 and bequeathed Sicily to his father, who then appointed his son's widow to govern this nominally autonomous kingdom. Despite having no hereditary ties, Blanca did so successfully for five years before her Aragonese in-laws repatriated her. (Aragon's fifteenth-century kings were unusually comfortable with female surrogates; as Theresa Earenfight has recently demonstrated, a Castilian wife administered Aragon for her husband for twenty-one consecutive years after he had inherited the kingdom of Naples from Joanna II.) Blanca unexpectedly became the heiress to Navarre in 1420 and, now a thirty-four-year-old childless widow, married the twenty-two-year-old Aragonese prince who had followed her as Sicily's viceroy. Their marriage produced a son and two daughters before Blanca's father died five years later. Navarre's heiress and her husband (not a crown prince) later held an elaborate joint coronation at Pamplona in 1429.31

  Blanca had previously governed Sicily, and her young husband was preoccupied with the far larger kingdom of Castile, so she ordinarily managed most governmental business in Navarre. Until Blanca became chronically ill after 1437, almost three-fourths of Navarre's state documents were issued in her name and usually bore her signature. Afterward, her son, Carlos (born in 1421), became increasingly involved in governing Navarre (see table 3.1).

  Table 3.1. Government under Blanca of Navarre, 1426–
40

  * * *

  Year Joint names Queen only King only Crown Prince

  * * *

  1426 29 177 7

  1427 48 134 0

  1428 17 131 1

  1429 37 235 19

  1430 42 355 29

  1431 33 274 0

  1432 123 121 4

  1433 60 211 11

  1434 21 177 7

  1435 6 227 9

  1436 27 177 5 1

  1437 13 128 16 3

  1438 12 57 73 22*

  1439 18 19 35 78

  1440 15 44 7 168

  * * *

  * also 5 signed jointly by king and crown prince Source: Florencio Idoate, ed., Archivo General de Navarra: Catálogo de Comptos

  During Blanca's lifetime all three of her children had been sworn as potential heirs by Navarre's representative assembly with their order of succession confirmed, and all three had been married off, the crown prince to a German bride. Despite such precautions, one unforeseeable circumstance caused the Navarrese solution to unravel after Blanca's death. All three of her children would eventually claim her throne, but none ever enjoyed official recognition because of their father's exceptionally long survival. Juan I of Navarre lived until the age of eighty-two; after making a second marriage that produced his famous son Fernando the Catholic, he later inherited his father's kingdom, becoming Juan II of Aragon. Every key document in the gradual erosion of Navarrese autonomy, from the prenuptial agreement of 1420 to the testaments of all three children, is still extant. They outline what could and did go wrong when a formally crowned “dowager king” outlived a royal heiress by thirty-eight years but refused to let any of their adult children rule her kingdom. In this political tragedy, the most important document was Blanca's testament, long and “barely legible in places,” as its leading expert acknowledges.32 It confronted an unprecedented situation: she was Europe's only royal heiress who was survived both by a crowned husband and an adult son already accustomed to exercising authority, and she bequeathed her jeweled crown to a son who never wore it. The political abilities of all parties involved make Blanca's testament and its subsequent manipulations exceptionally important in the history of late medieval joint monarchy.

  After King Juan remarried the daughter of a Castilian grandee in 1443, relations between father and son deteriorated rapidly. Within a decade, a very small kingdom had two parallel administrations. The father imprisoned his son for two years; the prince then fought an unsuccessful civil war, infuriating his father by minting his own coins as they traded mutual accusations of falsifying Blanca's testament. Juan summoned Navarre's Estates and formally disinherited both his son and his older daughter “as if dead of natural causes,” considering them “erased [suprimidos] from the royal House of Navarre.” The prince fled abroad, spent much time imprisoned, and died in exile. His older sister died shortly afterward while imprisoned by her younger sister and her husband, whom king Juan named as governors of Navarre. The younger daughter, now widowed, outlasted her octogenarian father by only a few weeks in 1479. This fifty-two-year-old heiress, the oldest in European history, lived just long enough to make a will bequeathing Navarre, still split between two warring clans, to her grandson, advising him to avoid Aragon and rely on French support to maintain its independence.33

  Four years later, what remained of a very small kingdom acquired a very young heiress, Catherine of Foix. Alvaro Adot has demonstrated how Navarre—now joined to the independent principality of Béarn across the Pyrenees, which she also inherited from her father—experienced a brief renaissance as a viable trans-Pyrenean state under Catherine and her French husband, Jean II d'Albret. Their marriage proved both biologically and politically fruitful. To an even greater degree than their better-known Castilian contemporaries Ferdinand and Isabel, theirs was truly a joint government: almost 80 percent of the 434 documents issued for Navarre between their joint coronation in 1494 and their expulsion in 1512 bore both their names. Catherine's official testament, drawn up at Pamplona in 1506, resembles that of her fourteenth-century predecessor Jeanne II in its generous provisions for her “husband and good companion.” Its primary clauses awarded him fifty thousand gold florins “for good marital love” plus one-fourth of Navarre's revenues even after their heirs occupied the throne—unless he remarried, in which case his paternal rights and revenues would “cease immediately.”34

  Catherine's and Jean's downfall came suddenly and unexpectedly. In 1512 their overmighty neighbor Fernando the Catholic, son of Juan II of Aragon (Juan I of Navarre) by his second wife, invaded their kingdom, conquered it, and annexed it to Castile. Navarre's ruling dynasty lamented his “completely unreasonable” actions (gran sinrazón cometida por el rey Fernando) and retreated north of the Pyrenees. Their defeat was not quite total or permanent. Within twenty years their son had reclaimed the northernmost bit of their Navarrese kingdom from Spain and governed it from Béarn.35 Within eighty years, their great-grandson unexpectedly inherited France and thereby reunited two crowns which had been separated by the Salic law in 1328.

  Cyprus: The Last Crusader Monarchs

  The kingdom of Cyprus, Europe's last surviving state founded by crusaders, lost its independence through the misfortunes of its two fifteenth-century female rulers. Their fates were truly extraordinary: the first was overthrown by Muslim intervention, and the second was deposed by a republic which had legally adopted her. In the first case an Egyptian sultan (who ignored the sacramental status of Christian monogamy and the associated notion of legitimate birth) sent a jihad to replace a young woman ruler with her bastard half brother; the second woman ruled as a puppet of Venice, which ultimately forced her abdication when she threatened its interests.36

  When John II, the last legitimate male king of Cyprus, died in 1458, his island had become a protectorate of Egypt's Mameluke sultans, to whom it paid an annual tribute. By his second wife, a Byzantine princess, John II left a daughter, Charlotte; by another Greek noblewoman he also had an illegitimate son, whom he intended to make the island's Latin archbishop. Since a legitimate female, although younger, outranked an illegitimate male, the Cypriot barons duly arranged Charlotte's coronation in October 1458, absent the archbishop-elect of Nicosia. The major political issue was to arrange her marriage to a younger son of the duke of Savoy, which duly took place a year later.

  Meanwhile, her half brother escaped from virtual house arrest and fled the island. The political fate of this crusader kingdom would now be determined by its Egyptian suzerain, and the extraordinary tale is best recounted primarily through Egyptian chroniclers, who provide its basic narrative: “On Sunday 28 Ramadan 863 [May 29, 1459] Jakum the Frank, son of Jawan, ruler of the island of Cyprus, arrived in the Egyptian realm with a request of the sultan that he be granted possession of Cyprus in his father's place. The people of Cyprus had installed his sister, supplanting him, since he was the product of adultery, or some such condition that did not legitimate his succession in their community.” Help was soon promised. Three months later “the sultan convened a ceremony in the royal courtyard of the Citadel of the Mountain. He presented Jakum ibn Jawan and draped him with a Kamiliyya robe of honor, enrobing two other Franks who were presented with him. The sultan gave him a horse with a golden saddle and mantle with gold and silver brocade, which he rode for the duration of his stay in Egypt. The sultan designated him governor of Cyprus and pledged to establish him there, delivering Cyprus to him.” A few weeks later, “the sultan commenced construction of the vessels designated for the jihad, with Jakum accompanying them to Cyprus.” Four days later, he sent an emissary to Cyprus “to inform its populace that the sultan desired the sovereignty of this Jakum over Cyprus in place of his father, and the deposition of his sister, censuring them for the lack of sovereignty of this Jakum and the preferment of his sister in his place.”

  Greater honors followed: “On Sunday 25 Rabi [864/January 19, 1460], the sultan celebrated the Prophet's birthday in the royal courtyard as per tradition every year. T
he sultan presented Jakum al-Firanji, son of the ruler of Cyprus, and seated him among the notable officials of state.” As the chronicler observed, “This distressed the populace grievously. So I have said: Possibly the sultan did not present him at this court session, except to see him glorify Islam and diminish unbelief.” Jakum al-Firanji was surely the only Latin archbishop-elect who ever attended such a ceremony, and rumors about it “distressed the populace grievously” on the Christian side as well: his enemies insisted he had renounced his faith, and no pope ever trusted him again.

  On Cyprus, many Frankish barons protested the sultan's repudiation of their queen. When his emissary returned to Cairo on March 24, 1460, he was accompanied by “a large group of Frankish princes and people from Cyprus in two factions: one unit requesting that the designated queen be confirmed; the other demanding her deposition and installation of her brother.” When the sultan finally decided the matter a few months later, events took two unexpected twists. On May 27, 1460, reports the Cairene chronicler, “a heinous event occurred in the realm: the sultan convened the notable Cypriot Franks, filling the royal courtyard. He intended to confirm the queen as ruler of Cyprus as she was established.” The sultan had changed his mind because the queen's emissaries had offered to raise the island's tribute and brought the money with them: “He enrobed her emissaries, the notable Franks,” and “appointed [his falconer] as her escort, bearing her diploma and her robe of honor.” Meanwhile, “her brother was in attendance, seated below the commanders of 1000. The designation of his sister … pained him. He rose to his feet and called for support. He spoke words to the effect that he had come to Egypt, taken refuge with the sultan, sought his protection, and submitted to him this lengthy period. [He asserted] that he had more right to the kingship than his sister. The sultan did not heed him, being resolved upon confirmation of his sister, and ordered him to depart to his residence. Thus, Jakum had no recourse but to depart from the middle door of the royal courtyard. His adversaries, his sister's entourage, followed after him.”