Yas Queen: Standards for Powerful Queens in Medieval Literature

 

By: Christine Corcoran

Queens with legitimate political power in the medieval world are hard to come by. A culture may only have one or two queens who are remembered as relevant political and cultural figures – like Queen Tamara in Georgia or Empress Zoe in Byzantium. 

However, many more queens are present in Medieval literature, often serving as the ideal both for queenship and femininity in a given culture. Many of these ideals are remarkably consistent across the Medieval Latin and Islamic worlds, in cases where both cultures have stories with similar narrative structures and characters, we can handily determine the cultural criteria for women-led leadership and expose the gendered expectations prevalent across both the Islamic and the Christian worlds.

Consider Alexander the Great, a Macedonian king who conquered the Persian empire and ruled everything from Greece to Egypt to western India in the 300s BCE. Since Alexander ruled over such a large swath of territory, many disparate cultures developed stories about the king that became loosely connected in a network of stories called “The Alexander Matter,” almost like a Medieval Marvel Cinematic Universe. Because Alexander was such a popular figure across cultures, many of his stories were circulated on a large scale, causing different cultures to codify very similar stories, with unique details to better suit their culture. 

We can see this phenomenon in the Persian epic The Shahnameh, composed in the Turkish court in modern-day Iraq around 1000 CE, and The Alexander Romance, a (presumably) Egyptian narrative that was translated into Latin at about the same time. Both texts contain a short story about a queen – whose name is Quaydafeh in The Shahnameh and Candacis in The Alexander Romance – whom Alexander is unable to conquer. In comparing these stories, we can see what traits were necessary to make these queens good – and therefore unconquerable – rulers. 

Though Alexander is known both in the stories and in history as a military leader, these queens never legitimately consider doing war with him. Instead, they use other traits more suitable to queenship to best Alexander off the battlefield.

The first trait both these queens share is their unimaginable wealth. In both stories, Alexander is amazed by not only the impressive wealth that the queens display in their palaces, but also by the natural abundance of their lands. At this time, a ruler’s wealth mostly came from inheritance and taxation of peasants who relied on farming for sustenance. These streams of income aren’t directly tied to the choices or quality of the ruler, with the only exception presumably being the tax rates. Even these, though, were often actually controlled by a royal advisor or vizier. Though both of these queens are wealthier than Alexander, since their lands are naturally fertile, this trait of their leadership cannot be chalked up to a good tax policy. So even though it seems like being financially savvy is a necessity for good queenship, it’s instead mostly reliant on whether the harvest is good. Basically, you’re expected to be wealthy, but that’s not a quality that’s completely in your control. 

The second trait a successful queen should have is cunning. Both queens outsmart Alexander by figuring out his secret identity after he sneaks into their courts in disguise. Each queen does this in a roundabout way, having commissioned a remarkably accurate portrait of the Macedonian king before the main events of the story which she uses to determine his true identity. Since queens are not expected to be proficient on the battlefield, their intelligence isn’t as derived from thinking quickly as their male counterparts. Instead, queens are expected to develop complicated long-term plans that will bring them success. This method of delicately resolving issues through not direct confrontation, but patience and emotional intelligence, is characteristic of how women largely operated in historical courtly politics. Gendered expectations at the time demonized women for causing fights, as they were expected to emulate women from the Bible – especially the Virgin Mary, who was portrayed as demure and subservient. This created a culture where women in turn had to develop more subtle methods of conflict resolution, which reinforced the gendered expectation. 

That being said, like being wealthy, being smart isn’t tied to gender. There are plenty of men in both stories that are both wealthy and wise. Alexander himself is a great example. Tutored by Aristotle, he is lauded as not only a conqueror, but a wise ruler. In fact, his success is so directly tied to his intelligence that in the 900s, a book called Secretum Secretorum on the morals and governance of kings was anonymously published under Aristotle's name addressed to Alexander. Alexander’s intelligence and Aristotle’s reputation were both so revered in both the Islamic and Christian worlds that for centuries the text was assumed to be Aristotle's writings. However, it was ultimately determined to be Medieval in origin, and is now attributed to pseudo-Aristotle. That said, though in this narrative with the queen, Alexander is outfoxed, he is generally considered to be a wise ruler worthy of emulation. 

So if both wealth and intelligence were also lauded in kings, couldn’t Medieval literature just be holding their queens to the same standard as their kings?

The difference is that a queen must have these characteristics to a greater extent than her male counterparts. Quadafeh and Candacis don’t need to just be wealthy and be smart, they need to be wealthier and smarter than anyone Alexander has encountered before. In short, to legitimately compete with their male counterparts, these queens have to outperform them.