DURING THE EARLY modern period an exceptional number of women came to high positions of authority throughout the world, which eventually sparked a widespread ideological posture against female rule in many realms. The “Monstrous Regiment of Women,” proclaimed by John Knox in 1588 in Europe during a period when Scotland, England, and France all witnessed leadership by female monarchs, corresponds to what some historians still label as the “Sultanate of Women,” a 150-year period from approximately 1534 to 1683 when harem women were able to assume great authority in the Ottoman Empire. Although female rulers in Europe and the Near East had a long history before the “so-called” abnormality of female rule was questioned in the sixteenth century, both these appellations express the phenomenon of women rising to power that was especially pronounced in these two seemingly unrelated contexts in Europe: France and the Ottoman Empire.

The French queen regent and the Ottoman validé sultan both assumed roles as the queen mother of their respective empires and became the highest-ranking personages in the social order of the land with the sole exception of their sons, who were either the reigning king or sultan.1These case studies are in contrast to places such as England and Sweden, where regnant queens came to the throne in the early modern period, in that women's formal power in an official context was limited in the French and Ottoman realms, because women were strictly prohibited from ruling in their own right. Nevertheless, we shall see that this limitation on official rule did not prevent the queen regent and validé sultan from exercising significant influence in both the court culture and wider societies of which they were a part. Both the French and the Ottoman queen mothers had to fight to claim the power that was their sons’ potential inheritance (and thus their own) by navigating court and harem politics, which thus raises the intriguing possibility of comparing the two case studies. Therefore, by examining the trajectories of the queens regent of France and the validé sultans of the Ottoman Empire, we can expand upon our knowledge of the nature of women's political activities, which in turn gives us space to shape an emerging definition of female sovereignty.