mousestalker wrote...
DariusKalera wrote...
In a fuedal(sic) society a queen could not rule on her own. A regent would be appointed until a few things were done. Either A) The queen remarried someone of royal blood,She was of royal blood herself and there for had to find a king to rule, C) The male child of the king and queen was old enough to assume the throne. Yes, there were a few exceptions to this, but as a general rule, this is how it progressed.
Um, no. Not at all. You may want to Google the Empress Maud (Matilda). I can come up with a laundry list of active reigning female rulers in medieval Europe, competent, incompetent and everywhere in between. The greatest ruler in English history (Elizabeth I) was a woman. Catherine de Medici was a reigning Queen of France (she reminds me a great deal of Anora, btw). There are a host of others.
People tend to think that medieval law was more rigid than it was. Canon law was pretty rigid. Civil law bent according to the ruler's will and what he (or she!) could get away with.
Um, yes. Elizabeth, Catherine, Matilda and others were the exceptions. The list of those queens that were not allowed to rule is far longer than the one where they were.
Elizabeth, well, she was indeed her father's daughter. But she ruled at the end of what could be called the fuedalistic era and during the Reformation. If she had tried to rule even a few decades before she did, she would not have been able to. But there had been enough sweeping cultural changes in England and the rest of Europe that allowed her to assume the throne and rule without having to need a king.
Catherine never actually ruled as a queen. She ruled as a regent for Charles IX until he reached the age at which he could assume the throne. The only reason she was allowed to do that was because her other son Francis II had named her as regent for his little brother when he was on his death bed. If he had not named her as such, she would not have been allowed to become regent. When Charles died, her third son Henry III became king and she died during his reign.
Matilda was never crowned queen in England and her title as Empress was never official since she was never given that title by a pope. She ruled as a regent for her husband, the Holy Roman Emperor, when he was away and when he died, she was quickly remarried. When her first husband died, she was not allowed to rule the Empire and a new Emperor was named. She did become the Duchess of Normandy, but, she was not named so until after her second husband was named the Duke of Normandy.
Out of these three, Elizabeth was the only one that could be said to have ruled totally on her own. The other two, not so much.
Retour en haut
Dammit. Stop giggling. No. Seriously. Look! Look at my angry face!
