Birth of the Chess Queen

Marilyn Yalom

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061913426
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia francese

"Marilyn Yalom has written the rare book that illuminates something that always has been dimly perceived but never articulated, in this case that that the power of the chess queen reflects the evolution of female power in the western world." —Cleveland Plain Dealer

Everyone knows that the queen is the most dominant piece in chess, but few people know that the game existed for five hundred years without her. It wasn't until chess became a popular pastime for European royals during the Middle Ages that the queen was born and was gradually empowered to become the king's fierce warrior and protector.

Birth of the Chess Queen examines the five centuries between the chess queen's timid emergence in the early days of the Holy Roman Empire to her elevation during the reign of Isabel of Castile. Marilyn Yalom, inspired by a handful of surviving medieval chess queens, traces their origin and spread from Spain, Italy, and Germany to France, England, Scandinavia, and Russia. In a lively and engaging historical investigation, Yalom draws parallels between the rise of the chess queen and the ascent of female sovereigns in Europe, presenting a layered, fascinating history of medieval courts and internal struggles for power.

PART I

The Mystery of the Chess Queen’s Birth

ONE

Chess Before the Chess Queen

Though historians still debate the exact origins of chess, most agree that it emerged in India no later than the sixth century. In Sanskrit, the game was called chaturanga, meaning “four members,” which referred to the four parts of the Indian army: chariots, elephants, cavalry, and infantry. This fourfold division, plus the king and his general, provided the basic pieces of the game, first in India and then throughout the world.

Chess in Persian Literature

The first definite literary reference to chess comes not from India but from Persia. In an ancient romance called K

rnam

k, written around 600 in Pahlavi (the writing system of Persia before the advent of Islam), chess already commanded the great esteem it would hold for centuries to come.¹ The Persians took from the Indians the essentials of the game—the six different figures, the board with sixty-four squares—and rebaptized the pieces with Persian names. This new nomenclature was to have enduring significance far beyond the East, for shah, the Persian word for “king,” ultimately served as the name of the game in several European languages by way of the Latin scacchus: scacchi in Italian, Schach in German, échecs in French, and chess in English, among others.

The Persian epic Book of Kings (Sh

h-n

meh), written by the great poet Firdausi (c. 935–1020), gives an amusing account of how chess made its way from India to Persia. As the story goes, in the sixth century the raja of India sent the shah a chess set made of ivory and teak, telling him only that the game was “an emblem of the art of war,” and challenging the shah’s wise men to figure out the moves of the individual pieces. Of course, to the credit of the Persians (this being a Persian story), one of them was able to complete this seemingly impossible assignment. The shah then bettered the raja by rapidly inventing the game of “nard” (a predecessor of backgammon), which he sent back to India with the same challenge. Despite its simplicity relative to chess, the intricacies of nard stumped the raja’s men. This intellectual gambling proved to be extremely costly for the raja, who was obliged to pay a heavy toll: two thousand camels carrying “Gold, camphor, ambergris, and aloe-wood,/As well as raiment, silver, pearls, and gems,/With one year’s tribute, and dispatched it all/From his court to the portal of the Shah.”²

Another story in the Sh

h-n

meh tells how chess was originally invented. In this tale, an Indian queen was distraught over the enmity between her two sons, Talhand and Gav, half brothers with respective claims to the throne. When she heard that Talhand had died in warfare, she had every reason to think Gav had killed him. The sages of the kingdom, the tale has it, developed the chessboard to recreate the battle, and show the queen clearly that Talhand had died of battle fatigue, rather than at his brother’s hands. The Persian term sh

h m

t, used in this episode, eventually came down to us as “check mate,” which literally means “the king was dumbfounded” or “exhausted,” though it is often translated as “the king died.”

The Sh

h-n

meh version of the birth of chess vied with another popular legend in which a man named Sissa ibn Dahir invented the game for an Indian king, who admired it so much that he had chessboards placed in all the Hindu temples. Wishing to reward Sissa, the king told him to ask for anything he desired. Sissa replied, “Then I wish that one grain of wheat shall be put on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, and that the number of grains shall be doubled until the last square is reached: whatever the quantity this might be, I desire to receive it.” When the king realized that all the wheat in the world would not suffice he commended Sissa for formulating such a wish and pronounced it even more clever than his invention of chess.³

While no Indian or Persian chess pieces have survived from this early period, later pictures of Indian and Persian men playing chess give us an idea of what a match must have looked like. Usually, the chessboard is a white cloth divided by vertical and horizontal lines. The illustration included here, found in a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Sh

h-n

meh, depicts a Persian noble playing with an envoy of the Indian raja.

Chess in Muslim Theology

In 638, six years after the death of the prophet Muhammad, Arab conquerors under the leadership of Caliph Omari overran Persia to spread the gospel of Islam. (A caliph is the supreme ruler of the Muslim community in both religious and secular matters.) As they moved on, they brought chess with them, spreading the game to such far-flung destinations as Spain (conquered in 711) and Northern India (1026). Arabic became the dominant language in many of these conquered lands, and some of the chess pieces took on Arabic names (al-fil for elephant, baidak for pawn, and firzan, firz, or ferz for the general or vizier), while others retained their Persian labels (shah for king, rukh for rook, asp for horse).

While the Muslims were clearly enthralled with the game, chess sets with pieces resembling humans and animals appeared suspect to them, probably because of a passage in the Koran that reads: “Believers, wine and games of chance, idols and divining arrows, are abominations devised by Satan. Avoid them, so that you may prosper.”⁴ Sunni Muslim theologians took this ban on “idols” to include all representations of humans and animals, in forms as diverse as painting, sculpture, and chess pieces. In contrast, Shi’ite Muslims gave this a narrower interpretation, limiting the meaning to religious idols.

On the whole, the Sunni interpretation prevailed, and realistic-looking Indian and Persian chessmen were transformed into abstract pieces. Curiously, the prohibition against realistic representation has never been applied universally. Court culture often ignored it, as in numerous Persian works of art, even though symbolic figures became the norm on the chessboard.

In general, Muslims held that chess was permissible as long as it was played with nonrealistic pieces, did not interfere with the performance of religious duties, was not played for money, and did not lead to disputes or foul language. M

lik, an influential eighth-century jurist and head of a Muslim theological school, took a harsher view: he is reported to have said that “there was nothing good about chess” and pronounced it haram, an expression classifying it as forbidden and deserving punishment.⁵ From time to time during the following centuries, a strict caliph would issue a blanket prohibition of the game and order the destruction of all sets.⁶

This extreme position was found in the last decades of the twentieth century under the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, where chess was banned from 1979 to 1988, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, who lumped chess together with movies, television, alcohol, nail polish, kites, billiards, firecrackers, and secular music. Afghanis found enjoying these “unclean things” were subject to whipping and imprisonment. Not surprisingly, when Afghanistan was liberated from the Taliban, the first objects to be taken out of hiding were radios, musical instruments, and chess sets.

Chess Under the Caliphs

Despite such ultra-orthodox prohibitions of the game throughout its embattled history, chess has survived and prospered in Muslim circles. No less a figure than the famous Caliph Harûn al-Rashîd, who reigned in Baghdad from 786 to 809, is credited with popularizing the game. Along with backgammon, polo, archery, and racket games, chess became an exemplary court activity. If you wanted to shine in Harûn’s presence, skill in chess was a sure way to catch the light. Unusual prowess, like being able to play blindfolded, could bring admittance to high society as well as great riches, even for those of humble origins. An analogy with the pawn promoted to the rank of vizier once it had crossed the board (“queened” in today’s language) was appropriated for someone who rose from lowly beginnings to achieve worldly success.

Harûn’s lavish gifts to those who won his favor have become legendary. Hundreds of gold pieces, prized slave girls, silk robes, and even thoroughbred horses were offered by Harûn or his beloved wife, Zubaidah, to lucky members of their entourage. A poet producing verses that touched Harûn’s heart or a chess player unfolding a remarkable combination might become the recipient of a fabulous reward. One of the stories in The Arabian Nights tells how Harûn paid ten thousand dinars for a slave girl known to be a fine chess player. After he had lost to her three times in succession, he rewarded her by commuting the sentence of a certain Ahmad b. al-Amin, presumably her lover.⁷

Whether this story had any factual basis whatsoever, Harûn’s interest in chess is a matter of historical record. In 802, when Emperor Nicephorus succeeded Empress Irene to the Byzantine throne, his greetings to Harûn used a chess metaphor to describe his discontent at their current relations: “…the Empress to whom I have succeeded estimated you as of the rank of the Rook, and estimated herself as of the rank of the Pawn, and paid a tribute to you, which you rightly should have paid to her. But this was because of a woman’s weakness and folly.”⁸ The new emperor felt that the former empress had underestimated herself vis-à-vis the caliph, and demanded that Harûn return the tribute. The matter was ultimately settled in battle, and Nicephorus, whose forces were soundly beaten, was compelled to continue the tribute that Irene had paid without bloodshed. Perhaps she was not a victim of weakness and folly, but a practitioner of sober Realpolitik.

Arabic Women Players

That Empress Irene spoke the language of chess was not unusual, as high-status Byzantine women and Muslim women from various social levels have played chess ever since the game was introduced into their homelands. For example, Ali ibn Husayn, a great-grandson of the prophet Muhammad, is reputed to have played with his wife. Caliph Ma’mûn, the brother of Caliph Amin of Baghdad (reigned 809–813), is reported to have bought a female slave for the lofty price of two thousand dinars, in no small part because of her great skill as a chess player. Stories of clever women had wide currency in the Arab world, especially those about well-educated slaves taught to recite poetry, play the lute, and excel at chess. Sometimes they even offered assistance to a prestigious male so he could beat his opponent, as in the competition between two famous scholars, Sûlî and Mâwardî, during the first decade of the tenth century.⁹

In addition to these semihistorical accounts, a wealth of chess stories featuring women formed part of medieval Islamic fiction. These stories often took the form of a contest between the sexes, with the possibility that the winner might be a woman intensifying the excitement. In one such tale, the beautiful maiden Zayn al-Maswâsif invites Masûr, a love-struck suitor, to play chess using a set made of ebony and ivory, and encrusted with pearls and rubies. They begin to play, but Masûr becomes so obsessed with her fingertips that he is unable to concentrate on the game, and is quickly defeated.

A similar story from The Arabian Nights pits the Muslim prince Sharkân against the Christian princess Abrîza. The princess is the leader of a group of beautiful young girls, who enjoy such unfeminine activities as wrestling. After the prince has secretly watched the princess defeat a series of female opponents, he makes himself known and challenges her to unarmed combat. Although he is her physical equal, he becomes so dazed by the touch of her body that he, too, loses—no fewer than three times! The princess then offers him hospitality, and, on one of the following nights, challenges him to a chess match. Again the prince is distracted, this time by looking at her beautiful face during the game. He is once again undone, and once again defeated. Predictably, the two fall in love, Abrîza is converted to Islam, and they depart for the court of the prince’s father.¹⁰

We shall see in later chapters how the theme of chess matches between the sexes is taken over, but treated differently, by European authors. In those equally biased tales, it is usually the exotic Arab princess who becomes distracted by the beauty of the European male, and, if a conversion is made, it is invariably from Islam to Christianity.

Fictional tales like these, as well as the game itself, arrived in Spain with the Arab conquerors. Chess was introduced at the court of Córdoba, the seat of Spanish Islam, in 822 by an influential musician from Baghdad named Ziriab.¹¹ He also brought the new modes of Arabic poetry and song practiced in Baghdad, all of which quickly took root in this new land. By the tenth century, Córdoba had become the acknowledged equal of Baghdad in wealth, splendor, and cultural achievements. The mighty caliph of Córdoba, Abd al-Rahman III (reigned 913–61), established a luxurious and sophisticated court that was admired by ambassadors from both East and West. Chess figured prominently in this cosmopolitan setting where Muslims, Christians, and Jews played the game together, the women as well as the men. Christians and Jews, it should be noted, were legally protected from persecution in Islamic Spain as long as they did not proselytize or make a public show of their faith. The period of rule by the Omayyid caliphs (756–1013) became known as a “golden age” for Muslims and Jews.

Queen Toda of Navarre

Caliph Abd al-Rahman III was the nephew of the legendary Christian queen Toda of Navarre. Like other visitors to his court, she would have encountered chess there, and then returned to her own kingdom familiar with the game. Queen Toda’s story reveals so much about the interchange between Islamic and Christian Spain, as well as the status of queenship in this era, that I shall recount it at some length. Queen Toda Asnárez of Navarre was the major political figure of tenth-century Spain, overshadowing all the other Christian sovereigns, male or female. Those sovereigns ruled over small principalities in the North—Galicia, Asturias, León, Castile, Navarre, Aragón, Catalonia—each jockeying for power, and all mindful of the greater Muslim power that occupied the rest of the Iberian peninsula.

The success or failure of the Christian kingdoms was largely determined by the character of their rulers. A successful king had to be a fierce warrior, and a queen, too, could not shrink from the sight of blood. She was often expected to accompany her husband at the head of an army or, if need be, lead troops into battle on her own. Both kin...