Women who Ruled the World: 5,000 years of Female Monarchy

Most British people are aware of the women who have been crowned as monarchs in Great Britain, from the first, Mary, Queen of Scots, in the sixteenth century, to the late Queen Elizabeth II, whose seventy year reign encompassed enormous social and political change and whose coronation guest, the Queen of Tonga, drew all eyes. Aficionados of twentieth century politics will probably know of the queens of Denmark and the Netherlands who embodied their nations’ resistance to Nazi aggression. Some keen students of European history may even be aware of the regnant queens of the Iberian peninsula and Navarre, but, with the exception of the famous Cleopatra VII, last pharaoh of Egypt, how many of us have the least knowledge of the many other women who ruled as monarchs across all continents and ages?

In most historiography, regnant queenship is seen as an aberration, something which most nations avoided at all cost, and indeed, this in-depth study of female monarchy shows that myths of queens of unknown lands, such as the fabled ‘Calafia’ who apparently ruled what is now modern California, or the Amazon women feared by the Ancient Greeks, were held up as object lessons of what could go wrong when women usurped masculine power. But that does not mean that ruling queens did not exist, nor that their power, energy, and wiliness couldn’t be just as effective as their fathers’ and brothers’.

Dr Elizabeth Norton’s work takes us on an immaculately-researched journey of discovery. We learn about the many queens of African nations other than Egypt, from the earliest times to the nineteenth century and about the Egyptian women who ruled from Merneith to Cleopatra VII – often airbrushed out of history by their male relatives. There were reigning empresses in China and Japan, as well as in the Byzantine and Russian empires. There were queens in Mexica (part of modern day Mexico) and in the Asian lands of Georgia and Palymyra. Indeed, Tamar of Georgia (r. 1184–1213) is one of the most interesting women in the whole panoply of queens, remembered by her nation today with much the same posthumous reverence as Elizabeth I of England commands.

But this is not just a list of women who wielded sovereign power, it is a carefully constructed exploration of how they obtained that power, how they used it, and, sometimes, how they lost it. Arranged thematically, Norton’s work draws insightful parallels between such apparently diverse individuals as Teri’imaevarua II of Bora Bora (r. 1860–1873) and Isabella II of Jerusalem, (r. 1212-1228), or a Kandake of Kush who reigned in the first century BCE with Isabel I of Castile, from the fifteenth century. Some of these women, such as Isabel I or the Japanese empress, Suiko, who ruled in the sixth century CE, were immensely powerful, while others were subject to the machinations of their male relatives, eager to snatch power from the women’s hands. While Ferdinand of Aragon and Philip of Burgundy’s treatment of Juana, Queen of Castile (daughter of the former and wife of the latter) was particularly egregious, that of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg towards his adoring wife, Queen Victoria, was not a great deal better. However, unlike Juana, Victoria flourished in widowhood, as did Empress Wu Zetian, whose challengers or rivals were surprisingly short-lived!

Recommended.

Tudor Times received a review copy of this book.