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This chapter examines the broader context in which Tausret's life and reign must be understood by examining the positions and roles of royal women in Egypt—focusing on the known queens who ruled in their own names—from earliest times till Cleopatra VII. Beyond its biographical analysis, the chapter examines areas of connection between ancient Egypt's female pharaohs by considering underlying questions such as What were the factors that affected female rule and how did these factors affect the kind of situation in which Tausret became pharaoh?

This chapterk presents preliminary historical geographic evidence from three sites discovered in and near the ancient city-state of Kano, in northern Nigeria, that shows that as early as the 1500s, royal concubines in the Kano palace held exclusive rights over the production of indigo-dyed cloth; and that they did so because of indigo blue's association with human and earthly fertility over which royalty was understood to have control. The data suggest that over subsequent centuries, royal women and non-royal women across Hausaland (a linguistic region straddling Nigeria and Niger of which Kano was a leading economic and cultural part) began producing indigo-dyed cloth for domestic and commercial purposes. It was only after a reformist jihad in the 1800s that men effectively wrested industry control away from royal and non-royal women alike. The findings indicate that while the gendered makeup of Kano's nineteenth-century indigo dyeing industry was indeed anomalous in West Africa, it was so for only a relatively brief period of time.

This chapter investigates the harem and the political roles played by royal wives at the Benin royal court in Nigeria. Benin resembles many early accounts of palace women in the Middle East, China, India, and elsewhere up to the twentieth century. On rare occasion, such as the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu from Turkey (1763), Western women have written personal accounts of their glimpses of harems. This chapter also looks at sources of power and influence available to royal women, and assesses what impact, if any, royal women had on the lives of ordinary women and men beyond the walls of the harem. Politics in this African harem is broadly defined to mean observable decision making and makers acting in public arenas to direct the control and distribution of resources perceived as scarce. This chapter also examines the reign of the Obas, the Oba's palace, seclusion of the Oba's wives, the role of eunuchs in the royal harem, and the queen mother.

For roughly 100 years, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, women of the Ottoman royal family exercised so much influence on the political life of the empire that this period is often referred to, in both scholarly and popular writing, as “the sultanate of women.” This period is notable for the important role acquired by dynastic women, the queen mother in particular, in the symbolics of sovereignty: the ceremonial demonstrations of imperial legitimacy and the patronage of artistic production. The standard historical treatment of this salience of the imperial harem in Ottoman politics views it, in the framework of the Islamic polity and Islamic society, as an illegitimate exercise of power. This chapter corrects certain misconceptions regarding harems in the Ottoman Empire and explores the networks through which royal women in this gender-segregated society exercised power in the world beyond the walls of the harem.

The turbulent private life of Ivan IV (1530–1584) in the later part of his reign as Tsar of Russia and the effects it had on his eldest son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, decisively shaped the role of Russian royal wives (tsaritsy) during this period. According to Antonio Possevino, a papal legate who visited Russia in 1581–1582, Ivan Ivanovich had complained to his father about his use of forced tonsure to eliminate unwanted royal wives before receiving a mortal blow from Ivan IV's hands. When Russian royal women were forced to take the veil, they continued to enjoy the title tsaritsa and the respect that went with it. This chapter argues that the role of the Muscovite ruler's wife was not affected by outward changes in her socioreligious status brought about by such phenomena as divorce and tonsure. Social isolation, whether associated with the dissolution of the marital bond or with the otherworldliness of monastic life, did not eliminate the responsibilities and privileges inherent in a tsaritsa's royal rank.

This chapter argues that while the religious leaders of Timbuktu and Jenne enjoyed unrivaled prestige, there were other actors who, though receiving scant attention in the secondary materials, were nonetheless significant figures. Specifically, holy men associated with the Mori Koyra community played influential roles, as did royal women, including, and especially, the royal concubines. Indeed, women were a critical component of the askia's strategy in realizing an ethnic pluralism that would transform relations between the clan and the state, such that loyalties to the former could be accommodated within the latter. Buoyed by a resurgent economy, stellar scholarship, and the reconfiguration of political fealty, Songhay experienced a new age of cosmopolitanism. With so many accomplishments, it is little wonder Askia Muḥammad is revered as one of the most important leaders in West African history, his policies a template for Muslim reformers for centuries to come.

In Chapter 4, the central place of the royal family within the dynastic household is examined. It is argued inter alia that although there was no official crown prince in the Hellenistic kingdoms, Hellenistic kings did dispose of a variety of means to hierarchize their wives and set up a successor in advance. Special attention is given to the place and function of royal women: court women acted as intermediaries at court, as representatives of other dynasties, or were given tremendous power as ‘favourites’. The centrality of royal women in dynastic households was for a large part determined by the Macedonian dynasties’ inheritance customs, in which women played a pivotal role.

This chapter focuses on the women involved in the medieval restoration of Hokkeji, many of which served as ladies-in-waiting under powerful royal women. As former ladies-in-waiting, they were well educated, well connected, and proud of the social status they possessed. The ties they had formed with each other as a community of cultural producers and patrons—ties supported by a shared sense of history that allowed them to feel connected both to each other and to ladies-in-waiting of times past—positioned them to formulate and support the restoration of Hokkeji both ideologically and economically. The chapter then examines how members of court society viewed nuns as well as the relationship between women and Buddhism.

This chapter examines Songhay's twenty-year nadir, which was first and foremost a time of myopia relative to the expansive, internationalist age of Askia Muḥammad that preceded it, its parochialism a function of an unprecedented rivalrous spirit invested in sanguinary practice distinctive in both elevation and scope, reaching the most privileged while encompassing a broad expanse of social formations. A collective royal neurosis of the most toxic variety enveloped Songhay's elite, as a result of which many sons, and even daughters, of amīr al-mu'minīn were cut down by blood relatives, and precisely for that reason. Because intimacies necessarily attended these intrafamilial conflicts, the level of intrigue must have been extraordinary, aided by privileged slaves who stepped into breaches left by the serial elimination of their masters, advantaged by administrative experience combined with their nonthreatening, liminal status. In Songhay, the process was led by eunuchs, who leveraged their skills in both their own interests as well as those of their patrons, becoming indispensable. As a result, royal slaves and the royal women they served became a powerful component of the “people of Songhay.” The growth of the servile estate, in turn, was enabled by an apparent surge in slaving, swelling not only the ranks of the dispossessed but constituting the principal “commodity” for which mounts could be imported into the empire, stimulating further slaving.

This chapter analyzes a new appropriation and translation of the Carro de las donas (Chariot of Ladies)—one that combined the Llibre de les dones with new material developed by a new translator, taken in part from Joan Lluís Vives's De institutione feminae christianae (On the Education of a Christian Woman) and other sources—so as to serve both a queen of Portugal, Catalina of Habsburg, and her daughter, Maria Manuela of Portugal, as well as other Habsburg women, and the broader female audience in the mid-sixteenth century. Analyzing these additions in the light of the advantages and difficulties that royal women faced in this new era can help us appreciate the changes in gender discourse that took place in the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period.

This chapter looks at the Infantazgo during the reign of Alfonso VIII. Beginning as early as the tenth century, the royal women of León-Castile laid claim to a little-understood share of the crown's patrimony, known as the Infantazgo. These Infantazgo properties were usually a significant source of power and income; their possession appears to be a major factor in the unusual prominence of certain women in the Leonese-Castilian monarchy. Contrary to previous assumptions, the Infantazgo did not disappear in the mid-twelfth century. It was altered, certainly, by the upheavals that attended the partition of León and Castile in 1157. But it endured, to last through the reign of Alfonso VIII and well into the reign of his grandson, Ferdinand III. Eventually, of course, the Infantazgo's significance did fade, due to the changes of the mid-thirteenth century. Ferdinand III's unification of León and Castile radically altered the kingdom's axes of power. The old domains of the Infantazgo, especially those on the Leonese-Castilian border, lost some of their strategic and economic value as a result.

This chapter elaborates the broad conclusions found in the study of ritual and dynasty in Russian royal weddings. It argues that wedding rituals were about dynasties and succession, and only incidentally about foreign policy or diplomacy. The chapter also unveils that wedding rites revealed both the misogyny of the court and the agency of royal women in a political system that rested so vitally on marriage and kinship. Also, royal weddings very directly revealed the interplay between Christian and non-Christian culture. The chapter then describes Peter I's reforms as part of a much longer and larger process of adaptation, borrowing, and improvisation. Ultimately, the chapter asserts royal weddings as an essential ritual that must be studied alongside other court spectacles like coronations, birthdays, name days, funerals, processions, and diplomatic audiences. It addresses weddings through the lens of dynasty and succession, which has necessarily led us to many other vital questions along the way and produced a number of venturesome reconsiderations of matters long thought settled in the historiography.

After finishing their course at the Bedford Japanese School in 1942, some people were sent out to the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi, which was the equivalent to Bletchley Park in India and which also absorbed cryptographers from the Far East Combined Bureau after the fall of Singapore. The Wireless Experimental Centre was primarily concerned with monitoring communications connected with the Burma Campaign and the Japanese attempted invasion of India. Meanwhile, the members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service who had been working at the Far East Combined Bureau in Singapore, and who had been the first British servicewomen to be posted overseas, were transferred to Kilindini Naval Base near Mombasa, where the British Eastern Fleet was based after having been forced to leave its base on Ceylon (Sri Lanka). In 1944, as the tide of the war was turning, the Eastern Fleet returned to Ceylon: one of the troopships, SS Khedive Ismail, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and this led to the largest single loss of Allied servicewomen and of African troops in the war, including some of the Wrens.

The chapter examines how the Muscovite state through the seventeenth century broadcast an ideology defining political legitimacy. That ideology was grounded in Orthodoxy, portraying the state as a godly community, with the ruler representing God’s appointee on earth. The legitimate ruler was expected to provide a moral example of righteousness, to give justice, and to defend the faith and the realm. In doing so he was expected to take advice from his people. The ideology was expressed inclusively and was not so closely linked to the institutional Church as to exclude non-Orthodox subjects. The chapter explores how ideology was disseminated by rituals, icons, cults of saints, chronicles, and the built environment, particularly in the Kremlin ensemble and in church architecture modeled on it and then built in towns across the realm. It briefly summarizes political succession in the Daniilovich and Romanov dynasties and addresses the problem of “despotism.”