The first literary reference to the game of chess appears in an ancient Persian romance, Karnamak, written around 600 (Yalom, 4). Although it wasn't until almost four hundred years later (just before the end of the 10th century) that the chess queen made her way onto the board. In 990 a ninety-eight line Latin poem, now called the Einsiedeln Poem, appeared, containing the first indication the queen had made her way on the board.
Yalom suggests that the chess queen likely made her way onto the board in the last decades of the ninth century and was modeled after Empress Adelaide (wife of Otto I) or Empress Theophano (wife of Otto II) two empresses of the Holy Roman Empire circa 962-990. Though Yalom argues that a “circumstantial case can be made for both” (Yalom, 24) the impact on chess was that at the start of the 11th century their was in fact a queen on the chess board.
In this era in European history was “marked by the rising power of kingship, queenship, and the church” (Yalom, 26). The king and queen chess pieces marked this rise reflecting the status of royalty having the king stand as the tallest figure on the board followed by the queen. Chess pieces represented a class system in which everyone knew their respective place in the social order. However, at this point in history, despite her high status in the actual kingdom, on the chess board the queen could only move diagonally one space at a time making her the weakest piece on the board.
In Italy in the late thirteenth century the book Good Companion described the state of chess. Here we see that the power of the chess queen has grown. Now the queen had the ability to move two spaces and jump over any pieces blocking her way. Here we see the game still starkly reflects the hierarchy of social classes, but since the queen has grown stronger, she represented the rise in female power in society, which was difficult for most men to accept.
The chess queen did not reach her full potential until the late 15th century during the reign of Isabella of Castile, most well known for her funding of Columbus' inadvertent trip to America. The power of the new queen was documented in a poem “Love Chess” written at some point in the 1470s. The poem told of a game played by current rules, with the exception that a pawn could not be “queened” while the original queen was yet to be captured. This was most likely directly related to the fact that Isabella of Castile was at that time in civil war with Queen Juana of Portugal.
It took nearly one thousand years from the first documentation of the game of chess until it formed into the game we knew today and there were many significant women throughout the history of the game that attributed to the rise of the chess queen. The queen's rise directly relates with the rise of female power throughout the centuries and the cultures that changed and formed the game. Although, unfortunately, even today there are those who have not accepted equality of all humans regardless of race, gender, or religion. I wonder how years from now game fanatics will view the games of our generations.
Works Cited
Yalom, Marilyn. The Birth of the Chess Queen. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005
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