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Anna Yaroslava, daughter of Yaroslav the Wise and granddaughter of Volodymyr the Great, passed her youth among the golden-domed cathedrals and gold-tipped terem-style towers of medieval Kyiv, but in 1050 she found herself betrothed to Henri I, the widowed king of distant France, who was twenty years her senior. Leaving her eastern homeland, she made her way from Kyiv to the cathedral city of Reims, from the glittering, mosaic-encrusted Byzantine Commonwealth to the still-barbarous West, in the company of two French bishops, a train of attendants, and chests brimming with her sumptuous dowry.
The wedding of Henri I and Anna of Kyiv took place in Reims on May 19, 1051. Les Grandes chroniques de France, a 14th-century illuminated manuscript now in the possession of the British Library, depicts the occasion. Anna, with her doe-eyes and contrapposto pose, and her crown perched uneasily atop a mass of curly blonde locks, looks somewhat nonplussed by it all, and numerous myths would grow up around her experience of culture shock. It was said that she was unimpressed with the paltry three courses served at her wedding feast and that she found Parisians to be “unwashed,” their houses “gloomy,” their churches “ugly,” and their customs “revolting.” Most of these juicy quotations seem to have been hallucinated by later historians like Maurice Druon, but it is true that Anna’s royal husband was basically illiterate, and his capital confined at that time to a small island surrounded by fetid swamps, while the Slavic princess, hailing from a cosmopolitan metropolis at the crossroads of East and West, had been classically educated in the Byzantine fashion, and was conversant in Greek, Latin, Old East Slavic, Old Church Slavonic, and French. It would be understandable if she felt at sea in her new home.
Still, the marriage proved to be a good match. Anna Kyivska provided France with gold, gemstones, and, in the words of the medievalist Jean Dunbabin, “a much-needed touch of the ex...