Chess apparently originated in Indo-Persia in the seventh century, and was introduced into Europe by the invading Moors about 1000 A.D. The Queen was a relatively late innovation. About 1500 her power in the game was quite suddenly and very sharply increased, with universal acceptance of that spectacular change. This is all the more striking in view of the relative roles of man and woman in the culture, and the fact that in this warlike game she is the only female. It is suggested that man's unconscious need for a powerful and protecting mother figure played a role in this change and that this was enhanced by the coexistence, toward the end of the fifteenth century, of a group of Amazonian women: Lucrezia Borgia, Isabella of Spain, Beatrice d'Este, but most of all a warrior countess, Caterina Sforza, whose husband may well have been the prototype of the weak King in chess. Her exploits, widely celebrated in poems, plays and ballads, may have served as the stimulus to the chess theoreticians and innovators of the period.