Revisiting the Paradox of the Chess Queen
My brother gave my son a civil war chess set this past weekend for his birthday, which sparked a discussion about a post I wrote at Duck of Minerva a year ago on the history of the chess queen. The European Chess Championships having just passed, I thought it appropriate to revisit the issue.
The original post was inspired by my inability to answer one of my son’s random questions: “Why is the queen more powerful than the king?”
In chess, the queen has mobility (the crucial barometer of power in the game) but less value, as the game can continue without her; the hobbled king is relatively powerless, but is the most valuable piece without whom the game ceases. In actual politics, the situation is reversed: women’s relative lack of access to political and military power and even social, economic and physical mobility is sometimes justified and at any rate partly explained through their greater perceived value compared to men for reproductive and symbolic purposes.
As I learned after reading Marilyn Yalom’s The Birth of the Chess Queen turns out it has a lot to do with civilizational identity formation between Europe and empires farther east.
First, the chess board once lacked a queen altogether: in India, Persia and the Arab crescent, early chess included only male figures, the closest thing to the queen being the “vizier.” Yalom argues the appearance of the queen on the board coincided with the Arab invasion of Europe and the Christianization of the game as it took root in lands dominated by the idea of a woman as help-meet to a Christian king.But second, the early queen was far from the icon of power she is today. Indeed, according to tenth century chess rules, the queen is second only to pawns in her abject powerlessness on the board – able to move only one step diagonally in any direction (less power than today’s king). While my son and I have had much fun attempting to play by tenth century rules (which include the knight’s final step moving on the diagonal), the question remains: how did the queen become so powerful? Yalom relates this to the importance of a series of strong European queens during the ensuring centuries.
Commenters at the Duck have proposed other explanations:
why look to geographical cultural movements (Arab v. Europe, etc)… the most obvious explanation that jumps out at me is moving from the military sphere to the civilian sphere. Chess was originally a war game, attempting to model military events. It was taught to military officers, and a facility with chess was valued. I know very little about the military life in 10th century India, Persia, and Arabia — but my imagination suggests an absence of women. So IF I believed this kind of narrative, the one I would propose would be “as chess moved from military culture that didn’t value women to civilian culture that did, the power of the Queen increased.”
Denis De Rougement who wrote, “Love in the Western World.” He suggests that the heightened place given the queen parallels the heightened role given to the Divine Feminine via such Gnostic movements as the Cathar movement and its more subtle variant, the Troubadour movement.
An interesting point with which the authors of this website seem to concur.
None of this, I argued, really answered the question of why the king is so vulnerable – so feminized – relative to the queen in chess.
Perhaps the chess king’s vulnerability reflects the perception of many men surrounded by strong females that women actually hold the power, even if it’s not wielded through the sword. Or maybe chess has simply not caught up (yet) with historical shifts in gender relations in the family and political life.
I concluded the original post by proposing an alternative set of rules in which the king and queen share power and vulnerability:
Imagine a set of chess rules where the king and queen function as partners – equally powerful and equally valued – each dependent on the other for protection. The goal of each army would be to defeat both; either king or queen could fight and be “taken,” but once one partner is lost the other would revert to the vulnerability of the contemporary king, as it is the strength of the union from which their power is derived.
Liam and I have been beta-testing this new set of rules for much of the past year and think it works well. However there has been some push-back at the Duck:
The problem with the “team” concept is that it gives a huge advantage to the player who moves first in a trade, and so dramatically increases white’s currently small advantage. One could sacrifice nearly any combination of pieces to take either the king or the queen, because it would essentially be removing two queens from your opponent by destroying the power of the remaining piece. It would be worth playing to see if I’m right, but I’m guessing that the complexity of the game would decline, as would the interest.
I have spoken with serious chess players from 5 countries and none of them strongly identified the Q as female or K, rooks, knights or bishops as male. They think of the Q as 9, the rook as 5, knights as 3, and want to argue whether the bishop is 3 or 3.25. What gender does your narrative think pawns (soul of chess) possess? (The pronoun for pawns is usually ‘it.’)… There are lots of known chess variants already out there; many are played daily and seriously over interenet chess sites. One I wanted to draw your attention to was a variant (from Fischer?) which introduces 2 new pieces…. at the historical moment where the Queen was “empowered,” it is still interesting WHICH powers it was given: bishop + rook. Examining this historical moment thoughtfully immediately leads to inventing 2 new Queens, that combine (bishop + knight) and (rook + knight). Fun to try a different kind of Queen! or all 3!
Interestingly enough, in Liam’s new chess set there is no queen at all, only two male characters on each side. Go figure.
Alright, I know nothing about the history of chess.
But I have to ask.
What’s the possibility that the queen got the special high power that she did because someone concluded that it made for better gameplay, but didn’t want to disrupt the classical role of the king as the weak character without which the game is lost?
It just seems like a whole possible line of inquiry isn’t being addressed. Chess is a game at the end of it all. Maybe it was done for reasons of gameplay?
I have never been a huge fan of cultural changes as an explanation for the rules changes for the Q. However, the explanation of gameplay is not fully satisfying. The change seems so large, the weakest piece became the strongest (if conventional chess wisdom is right, the queen is now worth just under 2 rooks, previously the strongest piece). Doesn’t a bit more incrementalism see likely?
It would be like in Scrabble, noticing the U was an underused vowel and deciding to change it to worth 16. Or in Monopoly, deciding no one likes Baltic & Med Ave and making them $525.
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I don’t have a good explanation though!
I dunno much too about chess history either, Patrick, but I do think the Queen evolved to be the most powerful piece primarily because of gameplay. Without the versatile power of a Queen, the game can easily bog down into drawish positional stalemates – kinda like trench war.
My 2 cents anyway.
Amusing personal anecdote:
When I was a kid (about age 10), my younger brother and I played chess occasionally. We managed to figure out all of the rules about moving the pieces, etc. However, at first, we both thought that winning required taking both the King and the Queen. We assumed that if you only took the King, the dynasty switched to the Queen. But without any heirs on the board, eliminating both defeated the opposing dynasty. We played this way for weeks (maybe one-two games per week) before we realized that we had it wrong.
As I remember, the resulting games often required almost entirely eliminating the other side, and sometimes we’d stalemate with two queens and no other pieces.
That’s alright. When I learned to play (age 7) with a neighbor kid across the street, I initially got the setup of pieces wrong. I reversed the positions of the Knights and Bishops. Didn’t find out until a month later.
As you can imagine, it somewhat changed opening moves in our games.
As a former competitive chess player and somebody who in the course of that studied the history of chess to some extent, my understanding is that the pieces have changed names a time or two. The movement abilities of the pieces have certainly changed.
The Queen, as originally played in India, where the game first got born, wasn’t always the omnipotent piece it is now. In fact, it couldn’t move any better than the king.
Relative to their current abilities, most of the other pieces couldn’t move to the extent they do as well in modern chess. Pawns couldn’t move two squares forward on their first move (that’s a Renaissance Italy invention), Ditto bishops and their unlimited diagonal moves.
A lot of the movement of chess pieces as we know them now didn’t really happen until the game first spread in the Middle Ages from India to the Arab world, and then from there across the Mediterranean (Turkey, Italy, Spain) and further into Medieval Europe.
Chess is a heavily-stylized version of Dark Ages warfare at its heart. The movement of pieces mirrored that (though much less so today).
It’s also worth noting, from what I’ve read, that the piece in question wasn’t always called the queen (again, that’s a late Middle Ages invention). In Arabic and from Indian, from what I’m led to understand, the piece was more commonly referred to as the equivalent of Chamberlain, or Grand Vizier.
It’s also worth noting (and don’t read too much into what I’m saying here, as I’m speaking about the game, not to be read into any broader sense of the role of women or men in anything), that while the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board, it is the King that is the most important piece on the board.
As somebody who has won a game or two with a Queen sacrifice, one can win without a Queen. Not so, the King.
I never liked playing with the queen. The piece’s unlimited movement made it too valuable to lose. Most of the time, my opponent and I would end up each losing our queens at times very close to one another. You can definitely win without a queen and I usually preferred to.
Not that I won all that often.
This the queen. She smart, she fierce.
No serious chess player thinks of the pieces as masculine or feminine. The Queen in chess is no more a woman than the Bishops are Catholic.
It’s probably true that serious chess players don’t anthropomorphize the pieces.
That said, the throwaway comment at the end of the original post is what intrigues me — in the Civil War Chess Set mentioned, there *are* no “Queens”.
Which is terribly intriguing, in terms of gender politics and historical context, no? Which is what the point of the post was, methinks.
Similarly, the relationship between King and Queen in cards (for example), even granting that the suits and characters were wildly in flux for most of their early history.
For me, the intriguing thing are the collectible character-piece chess sets. For example, take a look at this King Arthur chess set:
http://www.theplatelady.com/chess/king-arthur-2.jpg
Notice that you’ve got Arthur and Gwen on the “good” side, with what looks like two Merlins as Bishops. But then look at the “bad” side, which has Morgan and Mordred. It’s a fantasy chess set, so there’s no need to be slavishly devoted to the gender identities of the pieces — which, as pointed out, are just pieces.
But Mordred is the irreplaceable “king”, and Morgan is the powerful but ultimately sacrifice-able “queen”. Really?
And who’s the pot-bellied fellow that fills the role of bishop on Morgan’s side? I’m thinking you could have a double set of Nimue, as contrast to Merlin, but instead, we have some generic male sorcerer. (Unless I’m forgetting some minor Arthurian character, which kind of goes along with this point anyway).
So I’m thinking that while *serious* chess players don’t anthropomorphize, the pieces really are gendered for people today.
…and when folks can’t think of a female character to insert (maybe women are invisible?), they sub out the queen for another male character (see: Civil War set, or the “Empire” side of the Star Wars set (= Vader), etc).
/rant
“So I’m thinking that while *serious* chess players don’t anthropomorphize, the pieces really are gendered for people today.”
Fair point.
For what it’s worth, in Spanish (where all nouns have gender), knights, bishops and pawns are masculine and rooks are femenine (“la torre”).
Intriguing, but some of the most interesting positions in chess come when the Queen is “truly” sacrificed; i.e., not just given up in a forced mating combination, but traded for a combination of pieces (rook + knight, rook + bishop, maybe an extra pawn or two for one side or another) that roughly balance out. It doesn’t sound like that would ever be feasible under your new rules, which would be a shame.
Nostradamus predicted that one day there would be such a leader as Nancy Pelosi — an upon that prediction the powerful queen was added to the chess board.
1) As far as the historical basis, to what dgree did the Early Modern Queen (or Duchess) maintain and manage the Kingdom while the King was away at war?
2) As an uncompetitive chess player (near expert) I somehow did view the king as a very powerful piece, in that all or many of the other pieces are “commanded” to defend Him. In the case of a fianchettoed structure, it is 6 pieces. There is also castling, which is a critical strategic weapon in many games. In those good games that reach endgame, the king is often the only mobile attacking piece.
All the other pieces can be sacrificed to get to a promotable pawn assisted by the King opposed by a lone King. Draws come to he who get rid of that pawn. Wins (or losses) by other means (material advantage or mate) are simply not ideal games. Somebody blundered.
Since I am always working backwards from K-P-K, the King is the most powerful piece on the board, and the rest of the game is to unleash that power.
You use the phrase “ideal game” but I am not crazy about this concept. Just curious, who wins the ideal game? White? Is there more than one ideal game? Could I get a quick list of the ideal openings?
Your narrative has no room for brilliancies. Many chess games contain blunders, true, but many others are merely the result of an unexpected and creative approach. Heck, many games are decided by the gradual accumulation of small advantages.
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Pedantic correction: there are stalemate positions in KKP endgames, so getting rid of the pawn is not required to draw as you suggest. Preventing it from advancing is enough.
One of my favorite games had Suba sacrificing his queen for the three pawns (and maybe a minor) in front of his opponent’s king. Opposite-side castling, Suba then started the pawn storm. A game that teaches piece values and imbalances.
Always worth another look is Byrne v. Fischer 1956 (move 17).
I’m just making this up, but is the powerlessness of the king a reflection of the military reality that a king is only powerful because his officers serve him? I can see that as the world view of military officers in general. This changes when you have kings who actually go to war, but I thought that was more the exception than the rule.
In those good games that reach endgame, the king is often the only mobile attacking piece.
Yes. The King must always be protected but it isn’t weak and it’s far from powerless.
I don’t know much about chess, but if the intent was to mimic antique war tactics, then the status of the King in chess is pretty much right.
A King wasn’t exceptionally powerful in an actual battle (just a guy on a horse and some guards), but had some mobility and was extremely important; often the capture, death or even escape of the King would effectively end the battle, due to the demoralization of the army.
In the Russian language, the word for the queen in chess is ferz’, which is a masculine noun.
Pawns are the soul of chess.
Pawns have many tiny powers Queens do not possess.
1. The power to promote to a Queen.
2. The power to underpromote to a knight for some specific kinds of mates, or with a check to keep an attack going.* The power to underpromote to a rook when a Queen would cause a stalemate but a rook will be sufficient to win.**
3. The power to threaten credibly a protected minor piece with capture. (The power to fork 2 protected pieces.)
4. The power to offer small gambits. And break up enemy defenses.
5. The power to close lines. And hold territory. And hold back the advance of other pawns. And drive off protected knights. And profitably interpose to answer a check from a bishop.
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Fun thought experiment on pawns vs Queens to illustrate how low value units can control space: please imagine a chess game where you get 4 Queens and one King (location your choice) and my side of the board is 31 pawns and one King. Heck, you can throw in a free minor piece or two. The massed pawns would have less value according to the conventional chess wisdom, but would easily win by supporting each other to slowly but safely take over territory while all attack lines for the Queens remain blocked. And then some promotions happen.
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The Queen moves/captures further, and in more directions. These are tactical powers and very important. Playing the pawns properly is more decisive. Pawns have strategic powers, and that’s what separates the GMs from the experts.
* Has happened in my own personal games a couple of times, comes up every 5 years or so. When I notice. :)
** Have only seen this idea in a composed study.
Brilliant. Thank you.
This is the power behind the throne..