Queen (chess) - History

History

The queen was originally the fers (counsellor or prime minister) and had a quite different movement. In Persia it was called the farzin and later the firz. Initially it could move only one square diagonally. About 1300 its move was enhanced to allow it to jump two squares diagonally, which was the same move as the bishop at the time. For a while it was also allowed to jump like a knight once in the game, somewhat analogous to castling for the king. This rule was used in Turkey and Russia until the 18th Century.

The feminization of the fers into the queen arose over time. Some surviving early medieval pieces depict the piece as a queen, and the word fers became grammatically feminized in several languages, for example alferza in Spanish and fierce or fierge in French, prior to its replacement with names such as reine or dame (lady). The Carmina Burana also refer to the queen as femina (woman) and coniunx (spouse), and the name Amazon has sometimes been seen. (The amazon is sometimes used as a fairy chess piece that can move as a queen or a knight.)

In Russian it keeps its Persian name of ferz to this day; koroleva or queen is colloquial and is never used by professional chess players. However the names koroleva, tsaritsa (empress), and baba (old woman) are attested as early as 1694. In Arabic countries the queen remains termed, and in some cases depicted as, a vizier.

Historian Marilyn Yalom proposes that the prominence of medieval queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Blanche of Castile, the cult of the Virgin Mary, and the power ascribed to women in the troubadour tradition of courtly love, might have been partly responsible for influencing the piece towards its identity as a queen and its extraordinary power on the board, as might the medieval popularity of chess as a game particularly suitable for women to play on equal terms with men. She points to a surviving chess queen representing the Virgin, as well as medieval poetry depicting the Virgin as the chess-queen of God or Fierce Dieu,. Significantly, the earliest surviving treatise to describe the modern movement of the queen (as well as the bishop and pawn), Repetición de amores e arte de axedres con CL iuegos de partido (Discourses on Love and the Art of Chess with 150 Problems) by Luis Ramírez de Lucena, was published during the reign of Isabella I of Castile. Well before the queen's powers expanded, it was already being romantically described as essential to the king's survival, so that when the queen was lost, there was nothing more of value on the board.

During the 16th century the queen's move took its modern form as a combination of the move of the rook and the current move of the bishop. Starting from Spain, this new version - called "queen's chess" (scacchi de la donna), or pejoratively "madwoman's chess" (schacchi alla rabiosa) - spread throughout Europe rapidly, partly due to the advent of the printing press and the popularity of new books on chess. The new rules faced a misogynistic backlash in some quarters, ranging from anxiety over a powerful female warrior figure to frank abuse against women in general.

At various times, the ability of pawns to be queened was restricted while the original queen was still on the board, so as not to cause scandal by providing the king with more than one queen. An early twelfth-century Latin poem refers to a queened pawn as a ferzia, as opposed to the original queen or regina, to account for this.