By Blood or by Marriage: Dependence in Medieval Queenship

It seems to be a package deal, kings and queens. Texts about medieval royalty often feature this sequence: a young man, preparing to take the throne, advised from all sides that he must now find himself a wife — a queen. 

These details advance an image of kingship and queenship as interdependent. The roles work in tandem with each other. Kings fulfill a certain duty, and thus gain legitimacy, from having a queen by their side, while the queens themselves gain the power, and title, from being associated with the king. 

But this interdependence of kings and queens does not only function laterally, it works across generations, too. It is not only in king and queen pairs related by marriage, as husband and wife, that we see this dependence play out, but also in pairs related by blood, as parent and child, too. 

Of course, dependence on family is obvious in the norms of royal succession — but in many cases it is not simply proximity to royal power, but a direct blood relationship to that power that most legitimizes a king or queen’s rule. Several representations of these intergenerational relationships between a king and queen specifically — both in art and literature — support this understanding of dependence. 

There are a couple of medieval queens who were their father’s successor — Zoë, who was a Byzantine empress, and Tamar, a Georgian queen (or debatably, a female king). Textual and artistic renderings of these women reflect that their power was not necessarily legitimized by the husbands they take, but rather by the positions of their fathers. Since female successors were not frequent in the Middle Ages, their claims to the throne emphasize the importance of not simply lineage, but their direct relationship to the king that preceded them. 

In a historical account of Zoë and Theodora’s rise to power, one scene features a mob of Byzantine subjects who “were ready lay down their lives for Zoe…the rightful heir to the empire, whose father was emperor, whose grandfather was monarch before him” (Psellus 138-139). It is Zoë’s relationship to her father and grandfather, more than any man she might marry, which grants her legitimacy in the eyes of the public. She did not simply come from a noble family — or generally “good” lineage — she has a direct relationship to the monarch himself. Importantly, the legitimacy that comes from her lineage superseded the unprecedented nature of a woman succeeding her father, and taking power.  

We see this similarly reflected in depictions of Queen Tamar’s rise to power. One famous fresco depicts Tamar standing alongside her father, with the two dressed in almost identical garb. The choice to depict Tamar with her father, and not a contemporary king or partner by marriage, could reflect a tendency or perception within the public to view because her father as the legitimizing force of her rule. 

Queen T’amar with her father King Giorgi III, fresco, 1180s, main church of Vardzia monastery (Photograph: Neli Chakvetadze).

While the legitimizing force that king father’s play in the lives of their queen daughters reflects a dependence of kings and queens across generations, this relationship also works in the other direction: queen mothers and their king sons. 

It is an age-old narrative that widowed queens with young sons who succeeded the throne play an important role in the kingdom’s leadership. Oftentimes, the widowed queen helped rule the kingdom and educate her son as he came of age. 

One example of this idea is reflected in the life of Queen Brunhild, an Austrian queen who continues to play a persistently dominant role in the kingdom even after she is widowed. 

Brunhild served as regent alongside not only her husband and son, but several generations of successors. These rulers do not only have queenly wives, but also a queenly maternal ancestor in the person of Brunhild, who works with them to shape the leadership of the kingdom. Brunhild is best described as an instigator, convincing the current king to employ forces (Dossier 14), kill various patricians (Dossier 13, 14), and appoint local leaders (Dossier 13). In this way, Brunhild controls who succeeds to the throne and the actions they take while upon it, using political savvy to run the kingdom behind the scenes. 

Textual evidence even reflects that the king’s relationship with Brunhild could be more important than the one with his wife: “It was his grandmother Brunhild’s doing once again that he did not have intercourse with his bride” (Dossier 14). Theuderic yields to the opinions of Brunhild — and that can only be because even as king, he is dependent on her favor. 

The figures of Brunhild, Zoë, and Tamar reflect different ways in which queens and kings were highly dependent on each other – not just as family — but as legitimizing forces essential to their rule. For Zoe and Tamar, their legitimacy as queens was, in the eyes of the people, dependent on their relationship to their father. For a series of kings in the Merovingian dynasty, it was essential to be closely associated with Queen Brunhild, who constantly used her ever-present and politically savvy nature to actively shape the kingdom she once ruled alongside her husband. 

While the packaged nature of kings with queens is often reflected in the marriage, historical evidence emphasizes that cross-generational pairings too — mothers and sons, fathers and daughters — often played just as significant a role in royal rulership. 

For Further Reading

Queen Brunhild: A Dossier of Contemporary Sources

Psellus, Chronographia, “Book Five.”