How Did Royal Women Wield Their Power?

Eleanor of Aquitaine is a woman of many titles — wife, mother, counselor of kings, crusader, and patron of the arts. She is often portrayed as one of the most powerful queens. In fact, in the eyes of her husband, her power is so great that it needs to be contained. And so, her husband, Henry II of England, locked her up.

Eleanor is only one of the great women of history. And these great women had the same power as her, and they used it quite like Eleanor did as well.

...In a recently published paper, the political anthropologist Paula Sabloff of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico attempts to do just that, by comparing the roles and political clout of royal women in eight premodern societies spanning five continents and more than 4,000 years.

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With the help of a small army of students and citizen scientists, over a period of five years, Sabloff built a series of databases on 14 premodern states. Of those, eight had enough information on royal women to support comparison. The oldest was Old Kingdom Egypt (2686-2181 BCE), the youngest protohistoric Hawai’i – a society that lasted from the 16th century CE until the first Europeans arrived in 1778. In between fall Aztec, Inka, Maya, Zapotec, Late Shang China and the Mari Kingdom of Old Babylonia. They range from city-states with populations in the tens of thousands, to empires comprising tens of millions. Some practised primogeniture, others did not. They varied with respect to their rules on succession, women rulers, marriage between kin and gender separation – meaning that each gender had its matched ruler. In short, they were worlds apart.

And yet, says Sabloff: ‘This same structure pops out.’ In all eight societies, royal women exerted power in at least four ways: they influenced policy; they influenced the behaviour of those both above and below them in rank; they acted as go-betweens; and they patronised clients. In addition, they were often involved in determining succession, governing, building alliances, and expanding or defending territory. The most powerful of all were the queen rulers. They were rare – the only society in Sabloff’s sample that tolerated them was the Maya – but they packed almost as much political punch as their male counterparts. In the 7th century CE, Lady K’awiil Ajaw of Cobá in the Yucatan peninsula presided over a formidable group of warriors and statesmen, and when she died she left behind one of the most successful kingdoms in Mayan history.