The piece we know today as the chess queen underwent a gender transformation sometime around the 10th Century, after journeying from its origin point in India, via the Muslim world, into Europe. As seen in Marilyn Yalom’s Birth of the Chess Queen: A History, it began its career as a male advisor to the king, known to Islamic players as the vizier. (For its part, the bishop earned a species upgrade, starting out as an war elephant.) Yalom’s book follows the diffusion of the chess queen throughout Europe during a period when women monarchs occasionally wielded significant power. Her book reads as if she began her process hoping to weave her narrative around a big theory, but found the facts too elusive to support a particular thesis. What remains is a series of vivid anecdotes about chess, medieval queens, and the intersection thereof. To my mind, that’s a better result, anyhow.

When it came to chess, medieval women of high status were as avid as male players. Both in the Islamic world and in Christian Europe, skill at chess was a basic component of the feminine activity roster. As a social equalizer allowing prolonged interaction between courtly men and women, it took on sexy overtones and was subsumed into the traditions of chivalrous romance. Occasional efforts by church authorities to suppress it proved fruitless.

The chess queen of this period was not the powerhouse she later became. She could move only a space at a time, and only diagonally. Nor could the bishop sweep across the board to capture the enemy. The slow pace of the original game allowed for leisurely play. To ramp up the speed and excitement, less fastidious players added dice to the proceedings. Random rolls determined which piece the player got to move. Dice chess attracted wagerers, or vice versa, partly explaining ecclesiastical objections to the game.

In 15th century Spain, during the reign of Isabella, the queen morphed into the chessboard’s primary bad-ass. Edition wars followed; so-called mad queen’s chess met prolonged resistance in its march across the continent. Many of the objections raised to this faster, more challenging games cited what we would think of as flavor or suspension of disbelief issues. Writers complained that it was unrealistic for a female piece to exert such a devastating effect on play.

Ironically, the addition of a powerful woman to the game was followed by a steep loss of female players. Renaissance mores restricted the range of acceptable behaviors for educated women. Warlike confrontations with men, even simulated and abstracted ones, dropped from the menu. The shift from a casual to a strategic game may have contributed to the decline, which we still see today. The new chess rewarded obsessive devotion, which a smaller coterie of players, almost invariably male, were willing to muster.

Yalom’s perspective on these rules changes is from a primarily cultural point of view, and is only peripherally concerned with game play itself. If you’re looking for an exploration of how players chose to alter the game and why, this isn’t it. As a game designer, I’m inclined to think that the change arose when some clever tinkerer decided to see what would happen if you turned a couple of the loser pieces up to eleven, a development that happened to dovetail with Isabella’s growing political power only by serendipity. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Tags: culture, gaming hut, history

(Leave a comment)