The Queen of France Who Signed in Cyrillic: Anna, Princess of Kyiv

In the mid-11th century, Anna (Анна Ярославна, Anna Yaroslavna), daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kyiv, became the wife of King Henry I of France. In France she was known as Anne, and after her husband’s death she is said to have ruled the kingdom together with her young son, Philip I. A document from the French royal house preserves her signature, written in Cyrillic.

The often-told story that French kings placed their hand on a Gospel Anna brought with her and swore their coronation oath on it, however, is treated by the same encyclopedia as a legend. What follows is based on the entries “Anna Yaroslavna,” “Henry I,” and “Reims Gospel” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU), published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta, as of September 2026.

As a Daughter of Yaroslav the Wise

According to the IEU, Anna was born in Kyiv in either 1024/25 or 1032; her exact birth year is not certain. Her father was Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kyiv, and her mother was Ingegerd, daughter of King Olof Skötkonung of Sweden. Her sisters married King Andrew I of Hungary and King Harald III of Norway. The marriages of Yaroslav the Wise’s daughters are also touched on in our article on Kyivan Rus’ through the 16th century.

The IEU writes that a medieval fresco depicting Anna, her mother, and her two sisters survives in St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. The debate over the year the cathedral was built is covered in our article on whether it was 1011 or 1037.

Married at Reims in 1051

Henry I (c. 1008–1060) had been king of France since 1031. According to the IEU, Henry, who had been widowed twice and had no son, had three reasons for pursuing marriage to Anna: to gain Yaroslav’s support against the Holy Roman Empire, to obtain a male heir, and to observe the Church’s rule against marriage between close relatives.

The wedding took place at Reims Cathedral on May 19, 1051 (IEU). Their first son, the future Philip I, was born in 1052, and the couple had three sons in all. The IEU cites scholarship suggesting that the name “Philip” was extremely rare in France up to that point, and was most likely chosen after Saint Philip, who preached in Scythia, a land medieval writers equated with Kyivan Rus’.

After Her Husband’s Death: Undocumented Final Years

Henry I died on August 4, 1060, at Vitry-aux-Loges, near Orléans. According to the IEU, Anna governed France as co-regent while Philip was still a child.

The following year, 1061, Anna married Raoul III, Count of Valois. Because Raoul already had a wife, the two were excommunicated by Pope Alexander II. When Raoul died in 1074, Anna returned to the court of her son Philip. The record then breaks off, and neither the place nor the date of her death is known.

The IEU writes that in Senlis, north of Paris, the church of the Abbey of Saint-Vincent, which Anna founded, holds two full-length statues of her, both made in the 20th century.

The Signature in Cyrillic

According to the IEU, a document (charter) of the French king from the 1060s preserves a signature Anna wrote in Cyrillic. The IEU makes three points about this signature.

• It is the only surviving signature of a Capetian queen written on parchment.
• It is the only known signature of a member of the Rurik dynasty from before the 13th century.
• It is the oldest surviving example of handwritten Old Ukrainian.

The third assessment is the IEU’s own. The IEU’s entry does not state which document the signature appears on, where on it, or the document’s exact date and current location.

The “Coronation Oath Gospel” Is a Legend

In Reims, France, there is a manuscript known as the Reims Gospel (Ukrainian: Реймське євангеліє, Reimske yevanheliie). It is widely said that this book came from Kyiv with Anna and that French kings used it for their coronation oaths. According to the IEU’s entry “Reims Gospel” (from the encyclopedia’s 1993 volume), the manuscript came together as follows.

• The first part (16 folios) is a portion of a Gospel written in Cyrillic. Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV acquired it somewhere in Hungary and donated it to the Emmaus Monastery in Prague.
• The second part (31 folios) contains Gospel and Epistle readings in Glagolitic script, copied in 1395 by a Czech monk at the Emmaus Monastery from a Croatian original.
• After the Emmaus Monastery burned in 1421, the manuscript made its way to Istanbul. Cardinal Charles of Lorraine bought it and donated it to Reims Cathedral, where it was kept from 1574. It was later transferred to the Reims Municipal Library.

The same entry describes the story that French monarchs used this book for their coronation oaths as a “legend.” It likewise presents the claim that the book belonged to Yaroslav the Wise’s library and was brought to France by his daughter Anna only as something “according to one legend.” As for when and where the Cyrillic portion was written, the entry notes that views have differed between those who see it as a 14th-century copy and those who see it as an 11th–12th-century East Slavic work.

In other words, by the IEU’s account, this manuscript did not arrive in Reims until the 16th century. The IEU does not state as fact either that Anna brought the book with her or that kings swore oaths on it.

The Wedding and the Gospel: Two Different Stories, Centuries Apart

The fact that Anna was married at Reims Cathedral, and that the Gospel later came to be kept at the same cathedral, may be why the two are easily told as a single story: they both take place in the same town, in the same building. But setting the IEU’s two entries side by side shows a gap of more than 500 years between them.