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I'll bring the topic up many times: Queen Isabella was strongly influenced by Jeanne la Pucelle.

I suspect ground zero of the first tsunami of feminism(1) was 1429 CE when Jeanne la Pucelle (later Jeanne d'Arc aka Joan of Arc), age 17, and by Jeanne's appointment as Jeanne d'Ay de Domrémy in Charles VII's 1429 letter granting Jeanne a coat of arms.

In the context of the Hundred Years' War, Jeanne began to change the tactics of European warfare. At the siege of Orléans, April 1429, she convincingly encouraged a demoralized French Army to pursue enemies from city to city, rather than just relieve a localized campaign of bullying for extortion.

The modernized version of chess also includes a pawn to queen move which I believe was Queen Isabella's nod to Jeanne la Pucelle.

Additionally, Jeanne and Isabella couldn't be aberrant, not when their exploits and successes occurred within 90 years of each other. I believe the skewed gender ratios tell the backstory: in the Castille region, 60 males for every 100 females is one estimate. In rural areas, an even wider ratio; perhaps 20 males for every 100 females — and certainly can be for my storytelling purposes.

Besom's Heart is my most vulnerable novel so far. Enjoy!

Maurllan.

(1) Prior to the waves of feminism starting in the early 1900s there was, as we shall see, a tsunami.

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"To the best of our knowledge, life expectancies in the good years of the thirteenth century were between 35 and 40 years. The ferocious epidemics of the late fourteenth century cut that figure to below 20; after 1400, as the population achieved a new equilibrium at very low levels, [life expectancy again] extended to about 30 years."

Herlihy, David. The Black Death and the Transformation of the West. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 1997.

"Most women [among nobility] then were valued primarily for their ability to produce offspring, an obligation even more pronounced among royalty. If [Isabel of Portugal] failed to produce a child, she would be viewed as almost worthless…

"There was not even a fireplace in the room; a smoky [unvented] coal brazier supplied the only heat [when her daughter] Isabella…arrived in this world in late April 1451…

"Isabella and her family believed themselves to be descended from Hercules…half-god and half-mortal.

"[On the] series of episodes in 1489, and specifically the siege at Baza and Isabella’s role in its surrender, left a lasting mark, among other things, on the games we play today. Chess — originally invented in India — was enormously popular in Spain at the time, and soon after this battle the Queen became the single most powerful piece on the chessboard, able to move great distances in all directions."

Downey, Kirstin. Isabella: the warrior queen. Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2015.

"In the new game, the Queen combines the moves of Rook and Bishop, to become by far the strongest piece on the board. [And a commoner can become Queen:] Likewise, when it [the female pawn] reaches the row of the opponent’s king, [the female] becomes a queen… [and] can, for the first move [she] makes, take and give check as a queen.

"[In] 1474, Isabel seized the throne [of Castile.]

"The change [in chess] took place quite suddenly in the last quarter of the fifteenth century — between 1475 and 1496 — transforming the way chess had been played for five hundred years."

Weissberger, Barbara F. Isabel Rules : constructing queenship, wielding power. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004.

"Men are looking for women that have ceased to exist and women are looking for men that have yet to exist." -Albert Esteve, Director, Centre D’Estudis Demogràfics, p.206

Lake, Roseann. Leftover in China, The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower. W.W. Norton & Company Ltd, New York & London, 2018.

"The whole of Europe, from the Urals to the Straits of Gibraltar, was the domain of wolves, and bears roamed in all its mountains. The omnipresence of wolves and the attention they aroused make wolf-hunting an index of the health of the countryside, and even of the towns… Francis I created grand masters of the wolf-hunts in about 1520."

Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism 15th — 18th Century, Volume 1, The Structures of Everyday Life : The Limits of the Possible. Translation from the French, Revised by Siân Reynolds. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York. First published in France under the title Les Structures du Quotidien: Le Possible et L’Impossible, 1979. Copyright ©1979 by Librairie Armand Colin, Paris. English copyright ©1981 by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd and Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

"Listen: A lot of writing comes out of you in a burst, out of your heart and your experience. But there’s a good deal of calculation, too. I wanted to make people like Lucas Davenport… When I wrote Rules, it never really occurred to me this one guy, Lucas Davenport, was going to be a second career for me. I thought Rules would be a stand-alone book… Davenport has carried me on through fifteen more novels, and it’s been a hell of a ride. Enjoyed most of it; had a few bummers. Gonna do a few more, I think."

-Introduction by John Sanford

Sanford, John. Rules of Prey, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright ©1989 by John Sanford. Introduction copyright ©2005 by John Sanford.

"Writing a novel may be much like childbirth… the painful and messy details of its origin are a little fuzzy… and its very existence makes it hard for me to remember what life was like before it existed… A book makes intimate friends with people its author will never meet… the novel can, and should, speak for itself, and your relationship with it is as true as anyone else’s, including mine."

-On the Folly of Introductions by Emma Bull

Bull, Emma. War for the Oaks, copyright ©1987, 2001 by Emma Bull. Originally published by Ace Books, Berkley Publishing Group, 1987. An Orb Edition, published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, New York, NY, 2001.

Terms

Convivencia. A practical, if not always harmonious, unity of religious diversity in pre-Spain. Began six hundred years before 1492 and featured an interdependence of jewish, muslim, and christian families and communities.

Repopulación fueros. Fueros provided a unique charter for each town as part of christian repopulation after winning back pre-Spain lands from muslim control. The unique charters formulated legal and social customs to bind together disparate populations at a locale. Due to attrition among males to disease and war, women used fueros along with their gender female longevity and extended local presence to stabilize communities over decades and centuries.

Conversos. Willing jewish converts to christianity. Conversos pushed to expel from the Iberian peninsula jews who refused to convert.

Moriscos. Muslim converts to christianity