Piececlopedia: Queen

Historical notes

In earlier forms of Chess, such as Chaturanga and Shatranj, the King shared the center of the board with the Ferz, also known as a Vizir, a General or a Councelor, and this piece moved only one space diagonally. At some point in time, this piece transformed into the modern Queen, capable of moving any number of spaces in any direction. But when and how did this change happen? And did it happen all at once or in stages? The evidence indicates that it changed its name before it changed its powers of movement. In Birth of the Chess Queen: A History, Marilyn Yalom tells us the earliest evidence of this change in name is a Latin poem from the late 990s called Versus de scachis or in English, Verses on Chess (Page 33). In this poem, the rules remain the same as in Shatranj, but the pieces have Latin names, and the piece that began beside the King and could move one space diagonally was now called a regina, the Latin word for queen.

She identifies the two pieces displayed at the top as the earliest queens with faces that have been preserved (Page 47). Although the ebook does not have any pictures, she describes the pieces and mentions where to find them. They are part of a set originally known as the Charlemagne chessmen, because they were once thought to have belonged to Charlemagne (742-814). However, they were eventually dated to the late 11th century, because the Pawn looked like a Norman foot soldier of that time. This set includes a figurine representative of every Shatranj piece, including a Vizir, which is another name for the Ferz. All of them can be found together by searching for echecs at the website for the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Given that this set included both these Queens and a Vizir, it indicates that this was a time of transition when both names were in use.

In a 12th century work called Be Shahiludio: Poema tempore Saxonum exaratum, the piece is called a regina again, though when the Pawn promotes, it is called a ferzia (Murray, Page 499). In the early 13th century, the De Naturis Rerum refers to it as a regina (Murray, Page 500-501). In the Carmina Burana, whose poems date between the 11th and 13th centuries, the Queen is called a femina, and the Pawn promotes to a regina (Yalom, Page 83). In the Deventer Poem, which is probably from the 13th century, the Queen is called a regina, and the promoted Pawn is called a fercia (Murray, Page 505). In Incipit modus et scientia ludi scaccorum, the Queen is called a regina, a femina, and a regalis femina, and the promoted Pawn is called a domina (Pages 506-507). In the Vetula, which was translated into French in the 14th century, the Queen is called a Maid or virgo, a choice which may be due to the author's opinion that the pieces are based on the planets, identifying "the royal Maid (regia virgo)" with the planet Venus, and the promoted Pawn is called fierge (Murray, Page 507-508).

This next image is of a piece Marilyn Yalom describes seeing in person in Berlin. Based on her description and the mention of Berlin, I tracked it down to the Bode Museum, though I could not find an image on their website and had to resort to a Wikimedia image instead. She says it was carved in Italy during the early twelfth century (Page 50). She notes that this piece has the same hand gestures as the Vizir from the Charlemagne set, and these hand gestures can also be seen on the ivory plaque commemorating the joint rule of Otto and Theophano (Page 51). The plague she speaks of can be seen on this page about St. Theophana, and it also shows a statue of her with the same hand gestures. Theophano was the wife of Otto II of the Holy Roman Empire, and Yalom had already suggested the she or her mother-in-law Adelaide, who had both died the same decade as Versus de scachis was written, could have inspired through their leadership the idea of making the King's companion piece in Chess the Queen. The similar hand gestures to images of Theophano do suggest that the creator of this piece had her in mind and was using these hand gestures to suggest the piece's regal authority. While she mentions the hand gestures in the context of this piece, I will point out that the earlier piece displayed in the top left also has the same hand gestures.

Yalom tells us that the earliest evidence of the Queen having its present-day move is in a Spanish Hebrew text attributed to Bonsenior ibn Yehia, possibly from the 12th century, though possibly later. This text refers to the piece by the Hebrew name of shegal, which means queen. She provides the relevant text in English as this:

She sits at the top of the high places above the city. She is restless and determined. She girds her loins with strength. Her feet stay not in her house. She moves in every direction and into every corner. Her evolutions are wonderful, her spirits untiring. How comely are her footsteps as she moves diagonally, one step after another, from square to square. (Page 67)

While she is ready to conclude that this describes the modern Queen, I will point out that it doesn't explcitly say the Queen can move any number of spaces on a single turn. In fact, in the next paragraph that she quotes, there is an indication that the Queen moves exactly the same as the King. In reference to the King and Queen, this text reads:

There is no difference between them as they come towards you. They set out towards you along the same path, at the same pace and by the same route. When the one dies, so does the other. (Page 67)

The key phrase is at the same pace. In modern Chess, the King and Queen do not move at the same pace. The King moves only one space at a time, but the Queen can move any number of spaces. So it seems more likely that this text reflects a stage in the development of the Queen where it began to move exactly like the King. The last sentence suggests that the two pieces were co-royal, and you could win by capturing or mating either one of them. But even if that is correct, this did not carry over into modern Chess, where only the King counts as royal.

Queen or Lady?

While its name means Queen in various languages besides English, there are various other languages in which it means Lady. To get a better handle on why this is happening, I shall group languages according to what its word for this piece means, using data from Template:Chess names on Wikipedia:

The first thing we may notice is that Ferz is popular mainly in non-European or eastern European areas. This suggests that a name meaning Queen spread from western Europe.

Second, Queen is more popular than Lady. Aside from the 15 languages with a word meaning each, 26 (4+22) languages use a word meaning Queen, and only 9 use a word meaning Lady, and two of these, Esperanto and Ido, are invented languages. Besides there being more languages with a meaning of Queen, the two most popular languages in the world, Chinese and English, are in the Queen group, and Hindi and Spanish, which are third and fourth, each have a word for it meaning Queen. So, in terms of speakers, more people call it by a name meaning Queen. The languages representing places where Chess was first known in Europe, such as Spanish, Italian, and German, have words meaning both, though Latin, which is a dead language, just uses a word meaning Queen. The meaning of Queen is favored throughout the British Iles, and it is present or favored in Northern Europe.

It's also worth noting that the languages with words meaning Lady use virtually the same word with only variations in spelling. The most common names are dame and dama. In contrast, the languages with a word meaning Queen use a variety of different words, such as reina (Catalan), koningin (Dutch), queen (English), sarauniya (Hausa), regina (Italian, Latin, Romanian), valdovė (Lithuanian), and dronning (Norwegian). This suggests that the cause of it being called a Lady happened later, and the influence came from a single language.

My best guess is that this language was French. Among languages that just use a word for Lady, French is the most popular, it is the language we literally refer to when we speak of a lingua franca, and France is the home of FIDE, which stands for Fédération Internationale des Échecs, an organization codifying the rules of Chess for international tournament play. But why would French in particular change the name of this piece? My first thought was that the French Revolution might have something to do with it. However, Yalom says,

During the fourteenth century, reine (spelled roine or royne at that time) gradually replaced fers, fierce, and fierge in French usage, and during the fifteenth century, the word dame also began to take over (Page 100).

Since this was a few centuries before the French Revolution, I thought it might instead be from the influence of Joan of Arc (1412-1431). In fact, in my own game Holywar, I had named a different piece Lady in memory of her. Given that Joan of Arc lived during the early 15th century, her actions could have inspired the change in the piece name. In what was then recent French history, she was the woman whose actions were most like those of a Chess Queen. She fought for the coronation of Charles VII of France, and she continued to fight for him after his coronation. But since she was never a queen herself, a name like dame would have fit her memory better.

Nevertheless, another possibility is that the change in name was inspired by the Virgin Mary. Veneration of the Virgin Mary was a big thing in Catholic Europe, and Yalom says Mariolotry waxed steadily from the early eleventh century till its high point in the fifteenth century (Page 121). So the name of dame grew popular during the same century that veneration of Mary was at its height. Notably, the same word that the French used for the Chess piece is also in the name of the Notre Dame Cathedral, whose name means "our lady" and refers to the Virgin Mary. Yalom herself seems to favor this explanation. She says,

When the great chess reform took place at the end of the fifteenth century, Catholic countries continued to use the vulgar equivalents of domina—dama in Spain, donna in Italy, and dame in France—that evoked “Our Lady.” But Germany and England, transformed by the Protestant Reformation, refused derivatives of domina that might suggest any link with the suspect cult of the Virgin. Instead, they used the secular terms Königin and “queen” (Page 122).

How Did the Piece Become Female?

As mentioned above, the name of reine had replaced some feminine versions of ferz in France. This might suggest a theory put forth by Henry Davidson in A Short History of Chess:

The ferz became feminine as a result of the transition from the word ferz to fercia to fierge and then, by similarity of sound, to verge, the French for virgin. ... The queen is peculiar to European forms of the game, and she owes her title to accident of sound, not to undue gallantry in Europeans. It is the homophony of fierge and vierge that accounts for the feminization of the counsellor in European chess. (Page 30).

In the previously mentioned examples of early literature on Chess, these more feminized forms of ferz do not show up on their own. In the Versus de scachis, which is the earliest description with a name change, the name that shows up on its own is regina, which already means Queen. Additionally, this description adds the rule that a Pawn may promote to a Queen only if there isn't another on the board. This rule did not exist when the piece was concieved as the king's councellor, but it helped preserve the idea of monogamy when the piece was conceived as the King's wife. Instead of being predecessors of the name regina, some of these feminized forms show up as alternate names for the promoted Pawn, which allows a Pawn to promote without making the King a bigamist. They probably became feminized, because casting the original Ferz as a Queen led people to think of the piece as female. It's also very unlikely that the piece came to be recognized as female through the influence of the French. While Murray wrote before Davidson, he expresses his disagreement with the same idea in a footnote, which reads:

Freret (Origine du jeu des échecs, read to the French Academy, 24 July, 1719, printed in Hist, de l’Académie, V, Paris, 1729, 250–9) tried to explain the change of name by supposing that French players confused the words fierge (fers) and vierge (L. virgo), and that the latter—possibly by way of ‘the Virgin’, the Queen of Heaven’, ‘the Queen’—suggested the terrestrial Queen. The historical evidence is strongly opposed to this pretty guess, though the similarity of sound between fierge and vierge naturally led to comparisons in poems, e.g. in the Fr. translation of the Vetula, in Gautier de Coincy, &c. (Page 423)

Instead of coming about through a series of linguistic alterations, the name of regina probably came from the idea that the piece accompanying the King should be the King's wife. Due to practicing polygamy, Muslims were unlikely to come up with this idea. But when Chess made its way to Europe, where monogamy was the usual practice, Chess found itself in a climate in which a King's wife would sometimes share his political power, or sometimes even reign as a regent or a monarch. This difference between European and Muslim society made the idea that the King's companion would be his wife a more natural one. It may have also helped that Chess was popular among European royalty. Queens themselves played Chess, and maybe one, feeling left out, came up with the idea to change the piece name. But it could have also been a King, a courtier, or the general public who first thought the piece should be a Queen. It was then thanks to the continued presence of Queens in Europe that the name made sense to people and grew popular.

While this theory seems fairly plausible, another possibility is that veneration of the Virgin Mary played a role. While Muslims followed a strict monotheism, Catholics also revered saints, and Mary, whom they regarded as the mother of God, was the chief among them. This did play a role in elevating the status of queens in Europe, Yalom noting that female sovereigns sometimes used an analogy with Mary to shore up their authority (Page 120). In elevating the status of queens, veneration of Mary would have made it more likely for Catholics in Europe to imagine that the piece accompanying the King should be a Queen. But whether veneration of Mary played any direct role in leading the piece to be called a regina is harder to say. Personally, I lean toward the idea that the wives of kings were the main inspiration behind the change in name. While the name regina could refer to Mary when understood as Queen of Heaven, it stood apart from domina or vierge as a term that could refer to the King's wife.

Movement

The Queen is a compound piece that can move as a Rook or a Bishop. It moves an arbitrary number of spaces in any orthogonal or diagonal direction. It may not pass over occupied spaces, and it ends its move by occupying an empty space or by capturing an enemy piece. Orthogonal movement passes through rows of spaces that are connected to their neighbors in the row by shared sides. Diagonal movement passes through the corners of spaces, connecting spaces of the same color on a suitably checkered board.

Movement Diagrams

Notes

For more information on the orthodox chess queen, see our Illustrated rules of chess or the FIDE laws of chess.

In notation and ASCII diagrams, the Queen is represented by the letter Q.

Vocabulary: Compound

The Queen is a compound piece. This means that it combines the powers of two other pieces, being able to move as one or the other--though not as both at the same time. In the Queen's case, it combines the powers of the Rook and the Bishop. Each time the Queen moves, it moves either as a Rook or as a Bishop. The Queen is the only piece in regular Chess that is a compound of other pieces in the game. The King can be thought of as a compound of the Ferz and the Wazir, two pieces that are not found in standard Chess--though the King is no mere compound piece. Other commonly used compound pieces include the compound of Bishop & Knight and the compound of Rook & Knight.

Alternate Images

Click on an image to view the full piece set it belongs to.

References

Davidson, Henry A. A Short History of Chess, 1949.