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Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom
Silver Queen - The Glamour and Shadow of Success by Maria Ivanka


Birth of the Chess Queen
by Marilyn Yalom
Harper Collins
2003, 304 pages
$24.95

Review by Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times
Liesl Schillinger is an arts editor at The New Yorker. May 23, 2004

Buy this book at Amazon.com

 

On the Costa del Sol, near the narrow Strait of Gibraltar that separates Spain from Morocco, the crowned figureheads of the present age play, royal and nonroyal millionaires of all nations and faiths (not to mention legions of red-faced package tourists). If they choose, they can spend their leisure hours sunbathing, shopping at Hermes, dancing at discotheques or speeding to the Malaga airport in their Porsches and Rollses along highways posted with signs in Spanish and Arabic.

It was by these Andalusian beaches that the Moors landed in the early eighth century, bent on conquest. Once things simmered down, the region's new Islamic leaders needed a sociable pastime to engage in with the movers and shakers who visited their courts. Designer boutiques had yet to be invented, but, luckily, someone had thought to pack chess in his war duffel before heading north. The game caught on and spread to Italy, France, England, Germany, Scandinavia and Russia, becoming a must-have accessory for the leisure classes. As early as the 10th century, when Muslim, Christian and Jewish glitterati male and female gathered in the sumptuous, tolerant court of the caliph Abd al-Rahman III at Cordoba, a hundred miles north of Marbella, chess was an established part of the luxury landscape. But the game they played was not the game we know today.

In ''Birth of the Chess Queen,'' a wide-ranging exploration of the origins of chess and of its most powerful piece -- the queen -- the Stanford gender scholar Marilyn Yalom, author of ''A History of the Wife,'' ''A History of the Breast'' and other record-correctors, has rattled the vaults of Europe to shake out the missing-link chess pieces that show the game's evolution on the Continent. Her fossil record is chessmen made of marble, crystal, bone and jewel-encrusted gold, and in these relics' changing contours she traces the rise and spread of female power and prestige across Europe in the Middle Ages.

Yalom definitely has a point: the game that washed up on the beaches of the Costa del Sol had no chessmen, it had chess lumps, because the Koran forbade the depiction of living creatures like men, women and horses; also, it had no queen. The king's sidekick was a man -- the vizier -- and was the weakest piece on the board, permitted to move only one measly square per turn, on the diagonal. (Indeed, games that feature the vizier and abstract pieces live on, mostly in the Middle East and India.) The game we know today in the West had begun to take shape by the end of the 10th century, when the chess queen surfaced in manuscripts in a Swiss monastery; in the 11th century, ivory chess queens turned up in Italy; and in Spain, a queen with a face finally appeared in the 12th century. Dwarfed by her ivory throne, she looks, Yalom writes, as if she were ''sitting in a bumper car.'' The queen needed those bumpers over the next 300 years, as she transformed herself into the crowned powerhouse that we and Garry Kasparov recognize today, who swoops across the board, forward and backward, diagonally and sideways, knocking down any knight, pawn, bishop or rival queen in her path. However did she do it?

Yalom's entertaining (and credible) contention is that the booting of the vizier and the coronation of the queen are linked to the rising status of women in medieval Europe: ''The miraculous Virgin, the chess queen and the beloved lady grew up together and reinforced one another,'' she explains, referring to the cult of the Virgin Mary and the tradition of courtly love. Also crucial, Yalom believes, was the example of medieval warrior queens, who made a chessboard without a queen seem as incomplete as a Ferrari without an engine.

In Spain there was Toda of Navarre, in the 10th century, who went to battle to install her grandson on the throne of Leon; and Urraca of Galicia, who divorced her husband, King Alfonso I of Aragon and Navarre, waged war on him (she won), retook Portugal and then a lover; and (skipping a few generations of Amazons) Queen Isabella of Castile, who united the country, financed Christopher Columbus's foreign travel, exiled Spain's Jews, expelled the Moors and in her spare time ran the Spanish Inquisition. Elsewhere in Europe, there was Adelaide of Burgundy (later a Holy Roman empress), Matilda of Tuscany (she led her troops into battle on horseback) and Catherine the Great. Roping in two others, Eleanor of Aquitaine in France, whose court was a beacon to courtly love, and the pious Marianist, Blanche of Castile, Yalom declares, ''Their illustrious reigns coincided with the spread of chess in France and England, and enhanced the prestige of the queen on the board.''

But the queen's apotheosis nixed the game's popularity among female players. The vizier's feeble powers of movement had made the game slow and not too complex, so much so that at early medieval baby showers noble ladies received postpartum chess sets. The fiction of the era is rife with stories of Muslim princes and Christian princesses (and vice versa), who fall in love while playing and convert to the victor's faith. By the late Middle Ages, the game of chess was so widely understood as a metaphor for seduction that there was a ''Book of Erotic Chess,'' strip-chess scenes were carved on ivory caskets, and a checkerboard illustration on a book of romantic poetry would set pulses racing.

By the eve of the Renaissance, a game that had grown popular as a harmless diversion for grown-ups, only a bit more challenging than Hi Ho! Cherry-O, had turned into a showcase for fast-paced intellectual combat. ''New chess was no longer suited to leisurely encounters between ladies and gentlemen that could last a day or more, with interruptions for eating, drinking, dancing and singing, or, in more plebeian settings, for stirring the pot and nursing the baby,'' Yalom writes. The antipathy has persisted: in the year 2000, women were estimated to constitute only 5 percent of players worldwide.

The game that we play, or rather, that men (overwhelmingly) play today is known as ''Queen's chess.'' Back in the day, its detractors called it ''Mad queen's chess,'' -- scacchi alla rabiosa to the Italians, esches de la dame enragee to the French -- Yalom notes, evoking ''a wild, furious, maddened person driven to violent action, as well as the fear one felt in the presence of such a rabid creature.'' One wonders what they would have made of Bobby Fischer. Some critics, Yalom adds, ''became openly hostile to the chess queen and would have removed her from the board, had that been possible.''

Fortunately for Yalom and her diverting book, it was not possible. And yet, it may not be a bad thing that the jet-setters who bump moisturized elbows these days mostly avoid chess as they unwind in the game's historic terroir. If they play on the board at all, it's more likely to be backgammon. Another centuries-old game with Persian roots and a European makeover, backgammon has no known relevance to feminist history, and its pieces are so abstract in shape that they are known as blots. It's got nothing like a dame, which makes backgammon a little less complicated than chess to play over a glass of cava on the beach. Not to mention shorter.
Marilyn Yalom is a senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender at Stanford University. She is the author of A History of the Wife; A History of the Breast; Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women's Memory; and Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband, psychiatrist and writer Irvin Yalom.