Before you heave a sigh of relief, I hasten to disappoint you: Russia still occupies the Crimea and two other provinces of the Ukraine. Russians and Ukrainians are still killing one another, and the Russians are still getting entrenched on their stolen property.
So that conflict is proceeding apace, and there’s no end in sight. But another conflict is raging concurrently, this one involving neither the present nor the future but the past, not geography but history.
The opening salvo was fired by that renowned scholar Vlad Putin, who, on a visit to Paris, reminded the smug French that two of their royal dynasties, the Bourbons and the Valois, were founded by “Russian Anna, Queen of France”.
He was referring to Princess Anna of Kiev, who married Henri I in 1051 and indeed became the ancestor of all subsequent French kings. That much is true, or almost true: Anna wasn’t exactly queen but Henri’s queen consort. And, when Henri died in 1060, she became regent to her son Philip I.
But let’s not quibble about petty details – Vlad was close enough when identifying Anna as a royal personage. It’s when he identified her as Russian that Ukrainians took umbrage.
President Poroshenko accused Vlad of trying to steal Anna from the Ukraine as he had already stolen the Crimea and two other provinces. And the deputy head of Poroshenko’s administration wrote to his “dear French friends” that “Putin tried to mislead you today – Anne de Kiev, reine de France, is from Kiev, not Moscow (Moscow did not even exist by [sic] that time).”
Fair enough, I suppose that’s why she’s called Anna of Kiev, not Anna of Moscow. It’s also true that Moscow didn’t exist at the time. And that’s how, extrapolating from these indisputable facts, I can settle the argument between those two countries.
Chaps, you’re both wrong. Even worse, you’re ignorant. Worse still, you’re driven by ideology and petty jingoism, which are the worst possible accompaniments of ignorance.
For it’s not just Moscow that didn’t exist in the eleventh century. Neither did the Ukraine. Neither, as a matter of fact, did Russia. What did exist was Kievan Rus, a distant progenitor of both countries.
Anna was a princess of the Scandinavian Rurik dynasty that had founded and ruled Kiev since the ninth century. Her father was grand prince Yaroslav the Wise, whose father was Vladimir the Great, who baptised Kiev 1,000 years ago.
Diasporic Ukrainians, playing fast and loose with history, inscribed Vladimir’s statue in London’s Holland Park with the words ‘Ruler of Ukraine’. This, though at Vladimir’s time the Ukraine as a geopolitical entity was still half a millennium removed from being a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Vladimir was the ruler of the Ukraine in the same sense in which Alaric was the Chancellor of Germany.
Now Russia was never identified as such even as late as the sixteenth century. For example, Elizabethan maps refer to what now is Russia as either Muscovy or Tartary. In fact, Russia qua Russia was more or less created by Elizabeth’s contemporary (and hapless suitor) Ivan the Terrible, the last grand prince of the Rurik dynasty and the first Russian tsar.
In a way, one can understand both countries’ desire to claim Anna as their own: she was a remarkable woman. Unlike her husband, she was literate, and in several languages, although her French never did get to be up to snuff.
Henri signed the marriage contract with a cross, while Anna did so in the Latin alphabet. Not only was she uniquely educated for a woman of her time, but Anna also inherited her father’s wisdom (not to mention much of his wealth, which provided a most welcome infusion into France’s depleted treasury).
Henri valued her judgement in matters of state, and many of his decrees bear the inscription “With the consent of my wife Anna”. No other queen consort in French history was honoured with a similar inscription.
Anna was also a sage regent to her son Philip I, although she was driven out of the court after she married a nobleman who had divorced his wife for Anna. She then founded a convent in Senlis, in whose grounds she’s supposed to be buried.
All that apart, the unsightly squabble over Anna between two countries at the outskirts of Europe (the Ukraine actually means ‘outskirts’ in Slavic languages) says little about her but a lot about them.
It’s a squabble not between two lines of historical thought, nor two interpretations of original sources, but between two petty, ignorant chauvinisms, with both parties trying to score political points. History has indeed been described as retrospective politics, or words to that effect.
However, using history that way is tantamount to disfranchising and debauching the past, robbing it of truth, honesty and dignity. All countries are occasionally guilty of that sort of thing to some extent, not least France in whose capital Vlad insulted the Ukrainians so.
According to French historiography, France actually won many battles that traditionally have been scored for England, such as Agincourt and Waterloo. Yes, say the French, in purely technical, soulless, Anglo-Saxon terms, England might have squeaked by in those encounters. But, more important, France won a moral victory, displaying chivalry and valour way in excess of anything shown by les unsporting rosbifs.
Yet there’s something endearing, if ever so slightly risible, about that kind of national pride. The exchange between Russia and the Ukraine isn’t endearing at all. In a way it’s as malignant as the former’s aggression against the latter.