Kyiv’s Khanundrum—the wounds that time won’t heal

Happy Sunday Reader!
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Now in the fourth year of conflict, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine continue to resist the Putin hordes against all odds.

But the Ukranian’s steadfast resistance shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The city of Kyiv has faced at least 15 major sieges, battles or sustained military attacks in its 1,500-year history. This makes it one of the hottest contested cities in Europe.

In Tim Marshall’s book, ‘The Power of Geography’, he argues that—regardless of the ambition of any individual Russian dictator to reclaim the former states of the USSR—Ukraine will always be at the mercy of its own geography.

How so?

Firstly, it is sandwiched between the largest country in the world, Russia, and the rest of Europe to the west.

The Northern European Plain runs from the northern regions of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and across much of Poland.

At this point, it gives way to the Eastern European Plain, which covers Ukraine, the Baltic states and Belarus. It then sweeps across Moscow, ending abruptly at the Ural Mountains, which—broadly speaking—mark a dividing line between Europe and Asia.

In other words, it’s low-lying land all the way.

With no continuous mountain ranges and limited natural defences, geographically speaking, Ukraine serves as a buffer zone between Russia and the West.

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In addition, Russia has limited warm-water ports, vital for unrestricted sea trade. Sevastopol, on the southwest tip of the Crimean Peninsula and currently under occupation, is a military port and home to Putin’s Black Sea Fleet. By contrast, the Black Sea port of Odesa, hotly sought by Russia, has traditionally handled 65% of Ukraine’s sea-borne imports and exports.

Finally, Marshall highlights that Ukraine’s grain exports account for 10-15% of global corn supplies and 8-10% of global wheat supplies, not to mention its abundance of precious metals.

According to Marshall, Ukraine is a ‘prisoner of geography’.

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Perhaps the most significant of the 15 or more attacks on Kyiv was carried out by Batu Khan, grandson of the great Genghis Khan, founder of the mighty Mongol Empire in 1206.

By the time Batu had reached his twenties, the Mongol Empire had conquered most of Central Asia and Northern China. Genghis Khan’s real genius wasn’t just conquest, it was convincing Mongolia’s fractious nomadic tribes to act as one terrifying force.

The Mongol Empire also excelled at ‘practical imperialism’—allowing communities to follow their own traditions while subjugated to the Empire. It was a sort of Mongol co-operative.

Genghis Khan’s death in 1227 led to the division of the empire among his heirs. Batu’s share was substantial. He wanted more.

In 1236, Batu launched a western campaign that would reshape European history. His target was everything west of the Ural Mountains—a rather ambitious shopping list that encompassed modern-day Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Hungary.

By late 1240, his army had swept through Russia and now stood before Kyiv, still the principal city of Kyivan Rus, though its reputation as a major European commercial and cultural centre had started to fade.

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Out of Curiosity

Kyivan Rus emerged in the late 9th century when Vikings traditionally associated with prince Rurik shifted from raiding Eastern Europe to settling among—and ruling over— the incumbent Slavic tribes.

Kyiv became the capital city and the Kyivan Rus held onto power for the next four centuries.

Then Batu Khan arrived.

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Seven hundred and eighty-five years ago this Friday, 28 November 1240, Batu’s forces surrounded Kyiv and the assault began.

For eight days, Kyiv repelled wave after wave of Mongol attacks. Trebuchets and catapults hurled boulders at the city ramparts. The offensive was relentless, day and night.

On the eighth day, the city walls were breached and the Mongol hordes poured through. The carnage that followed was brutal even by medieval standards. The death toll proved catastrophic, with some estimates suggesting that 96% of the 50,000 inhabitants were slaughtered.

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By the time Batu Khan had demolished Kyiv, he had redrawn the political map of Europe. The city would slide from major commercial and cultural centre to provincial backwater.

By contrast, Moscow—formerly a provincial backwater—would rise to become the epicentre of a new Russian state that would stretch from Poland to the edge of the Pacific.

Slavic power was shifting from Kyivan Rus to Moscow.

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Eight centuries later, both Russia and Ukraine (and Belarus for that matter) are engaged in what analysts sometimes refer to as a ‘battle of memory’. Each claim Kyivan Rus heritage as theirs—the founding myth that legitimises their modern identities.

From a Russian perspective, this ideological war determines who speaks for Eastern Slavic civilisation and, therefore, who has the right to rule Ukraine.

It’s quite the legacy for a 13th-century warlord. Some historical wounds, it turns out, never quite stop bleeding.

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Dates with History

Tuesday…

In 1100, England was still recovering from the upheaval of the Norman Conquest thirty-four years earlier.

Henry I had seized the English throne that year after his elder brother, William Rufus, died in a convenient hunting accident in the New Forest. By the time brother Robert returned to claim his birthright, Henry had already secured the crown.

The new king spent the next twenty years consolidating Norman power through administrative reform and the occasional massacre. Best of all, his wife, Matilda of Scotland, gave him an heir. William Adelin was born in 1103.

The succession was secure. Or was it?

William was groomed to be a king. By 1120, Henry’s Norman barons had sworn their allegiance to William as heir.

Furthermore, later that year, Henry and William completed a successful diplomatic trip to France to confirm William’s rights to the Duchy of Normandy with King Louis VI.

On the way back to England, Henry chose not to return on the White Ship—the finest vessel in the Norman fleet—having made alternative arrangements. William and the younger nobles took their opportunity and boarded the White Ship for their return home.

The entourage left Barfleur 905 years ago this Tuesday, 25 November 1120. Spirits were high and wine flowed freely, crew included.

With poor visibility and a sozzled crew, nobody spotted the rock.

The ship struck a rock with devastating force, tearing open the hull. The White Ship began sinking immediately.

William managed to board a small boat to escape the chaos. But as they rowed to safety, he heard his half-sister, Matilda FitzRoy, calling for help. Without hesitation, William turned the boat around.

Within moments, desperate passengers tried to climb aboard. The swamped boat gave itself up to the sea. Only one of the 300 people who set out from Barfleur survived. William and Matilda’s bodies were never recovered.

Henry I’s succession had vanished in a single drunken night.

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Out of Curiosity

Eight hundred and ninety years ago next Sunday, 1 December 1135, King Henry I tucked into a 'surfeit of lampreys' at his hunting lodge in Normandy. The Sea Lamprey is a rather grotesque-looking eel-like fish which grows up to four feet in length.

Against doctor’s orders, Henry gorged on the lampreys and within a few days he was dead.

Since the loss of his only legitimate son William, Henry had worked to secure the succession of his daughter, Empress Matilda*, extracting oaths of loyalty from his barons.

It was not enough. Henry died leaving a vacuum. Nineteen years of civil war—The Anarchy—followed before Henry II and the Plantagenets restored order.

*There are three Matilda’s in this story: Matilda of Scotland, Henry’s wife; Matilda FitzRoy, Henry’s illegitimate daughter, and Empress Matilda, Henry’s legitimate daughter who fought The Anarchy against King Stephen.

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Thursday…

Jannetje Johanna Schaft was born in September 1920 in Haarlem, a prosperous Dutch city just west of Amsterdam.

The bright, ambitious Hannie was studying Law at the University of Amsterdam when Germany invaded the Netherlands. It was 10 May 1940. Within days, Rotterdam lay in ruins and the Dutch government had capitulated.

For the next two years, Hannie’s Jewish friends were either persecuted or expelled to who-knows-where. This was now personal.

In 1943 the 23-year-old joined the Dutch resistance. Rather than sitting in a safe house forging documents, she chose to be on the streets liquidating unsuspecting German officers and Dutch collaborators.

Hannie’s cover was perfect. A young girl, innocently cycling through Haarlem and Amsterdam, approaches her target with a happy-go-lucky smile. When she is close enough, she pulls out her pistol from her handlebar basket, fires the weapon at point-blank range and pedals away as fast as possible. Clinical and effective.

Hannie became known by the Nazis as ‘the girl with the red hair’.

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Just three weeks before Dutch liberation, Hannie was caught at a checkpoint carrying a pistol. The dyed black hair hadn’t fooled the guards. She was arrested, interrogated, and executed. Her body was dumped in a shallow grave in sand dunes near Bloemendaal, where it lay for seven months.

After the war, Dutch investigators uncovered the mass graves in the dunes and identified Hannie’s body among them. She was reburied with full military honours at the Bloemendaal Honorary Cemetery 80 years ago this Thursday, 27 November 1945.

Hannie Schaft’s funeral was attended by members of the Dutch government and Queen Wilhelmina, recognising her as a ‘symbol of the Resistance’, while thousands lined the procession route.

Hannie’s tombstone bears the simple inscription:

"She served".

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75,000 Days Ago

When you walk across her, you’re standing on a piece of engineering history that’s been quietly fulfilling her role for over two centuries. No fanfare. No fuss. Just 449 feet of wrought iron stretching across the River Tweed between England and Scotland.

The Union Chain Bridge, opened 75,000 days ago this coming Saturday, 26 July 1820, was the world’s first vehicular suspension bridge and is the oldest suspension bridge still carrying road traffic today.

The bridge predates other famous suspension bridges by decades. Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, opened in 1864, a full 44 years later, while New York’s Brooklyn Bridge wouldn’t appear until 1883.

At the time, suspension bridges were the stuff of novelty and experimentation—a bit like flying cars in the 1950s. Everyone talked about them, but nobody would trust them with their lives.

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The border between England and Scotland had long been a complicated affair. For centuries, the two nations had enjoyed what historians diplomatically call a ‘turbulent relationship’. That is, the English and Scots were either at war, or planning the next one.

The River Tweed marked the shifting boundary, which meant that anyone wanting to cross needed either a boat, a ford at low tide or a very long detour to the nearest bridge.

Captain Samuel Brown had other ideas.

Brown had spent much of his naval career perfecting anchor chains, a vital tool for all seafaring ships. In 1817, he patented a design for wrought iron chains and soon wondered: could such strength be stretched across a river to carry travellers, not anchors?

Brown’s pre-Victorian design was elegantly simple. Two stone towers on either bank, each 60 feet high, would anchor massive wrought iron chains. From these chains, vertical suspension rods would support a wooden deck, yours for £7,700. (USD 1.175m in today’s money—pocket change.)

When the bridge opened in 1820, locals approached with understandable caution. The deck swayed gently in the breeze. A crossing felt "less like walking and more like a gentle maritime experience".

Samuel Brown died in March 1852, aged 75.

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Question of the Week

She was a Jamaican-born ‘doctress’, learning her medical skills from her mother before becoming one of the Crimean War’s (1853-1856) most celebrated healers.

Her application to become a battlefield nurse in Crimea was rejected by the British War Office.

She paid her own way to Crimea and set up the 'British Hotel'—though it wasn’t actually a hotel and served far stronger medicine than gin.

She was voted the Greatest Black Briton in 2003, despite being largely forgotten for over a century after her death in 1881.

Who was she?

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And Finally…

The year 1720 was a bad year for the pirates of the Caribbean. The Royal Navy had finally yielded to pressure from London’s merchants whose export profits were dwindling. They called in the pirate hunters.

High on the wanted list was an unlikely culprit: Anne Bonny.

Anne was born around 1697 in County Cork, Ireland, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy lawyer and the housemaid. She grew up in relative comfort until scandal struck—she had married a small-time privateer, James Bonny.

The marriage lasted just long enough for Anne to be disinherited by her father. In 1719, she abandoned her good-for-nothing husband for ’Calico Jack’ Rackham.

Rackham was a budding pirate who earned his colourful nickname from his fondness for calico cotton clothing, rather than any daring deeds on the high seas.

Together they pilfered the sloop 'William', assembled a ragtag crew and set sail from Nassau Harbour on a brief but notorious spree—raiding fishing craft and coastal traders from the Bahamas to Jamaica.

Anne had befriended another woman from the crew, Mary Read, who had been disguising herself as a man. They became fierce friends and even fiercer pirates.

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When they raided other boats, the woman wielded their cutlasses and pistols while Calico Jack and many of the male crew were pickling in rum below deck.

One night in October 1720, the party ended. Pirate hunter Captain Jonathan Barnet cornered Calico Jack’s sloop off the coast of Jamaica. With only Anne, Mary and a few conscientious men to put up any meaningful resistance, the sloop was soon overwhelmed.

Three hundred and five years ago this Friday, 28 November 1720, Anne Bonny and Mary Read stood trial in Spanish Town, Jamaica, charged with piracy on the high seas. The evidence was damming. The verdict was swift. Guilty.

Then came the twist.

Anne and Mary 'pleaded the belly’. By declaring themselves pregnant, the women would be reprieved from the gallows if an inspection by a 'jury of matrons' agreed that they were, indeed, pregnant.

In this pre-pregnancy test era, this inspection involved nothing more than prodding and poking the abdomen to detect foetal movement. Not surprisingly, the less-than-scientific testing received the derision it probably deserved.

One physician, who had presumably had his nose put out of joint, bemoaned that women weren’t very effective at detecting their own pregnancies, let alone anyone else’s. In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders published just two years later, the eponymous heroine admits she’s "no more with child than the judge that tried me".

The only recorded evidence for both ladies being 'quick with child' was the cutting-edge observation that their breasts seemed rather large. Which raises the obvious question: compared to what, exactly?

Fortunately for Anne and Mary, that line of enquiry seems to have been overlooked and they were reprieved from the gallows, temporarily at least.

We will never know if either woman would have received the ultimate penalty. Mary died from fever in prison a year later, while Anne Bonny simply disappeared from the records.

Bonny’s farewell to her lover, Calico Jack, the night before his execution, did warrant recording for posterity; On her final visit to the beleaguered sot, Bonny scowled….

Who said romance is dead.

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Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.

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Question of the week… answer

The Jamaican-born 'doctress’ who became renowned for her bravery in the Crimean War was Mary Seacole, born 220 years ago today, 23 November 1805.

The pioneering nurse wrote in her autobiography that she felt her skin colour counted against her in her application to the British War Office.

Having paid for her own fare to Crimea, Seacole set up the British Hotel, part convalescent home, part restaurant, part medical facility.

Whereas her compatriot, Florence Nightingale, was based comfortably back from the front lines in Scutari, Turkey, Seacole positioned her British Hotel near Balaklava, close to the battle zone.

Mary Seacole’s bravery and contribution went largely unnoticed throughout the remainder of her life and into the 21st century, overshadowed by Florence Nightingale’s legacy. In fact, when the BBC launched their 100 Greatest Britons series in 2002, the list featured no black Britons.

In response, the Every Generation website produced their own list, '100 Greatest Black Britons', with Mary Seacole voted the Greatest Black Briton.

Mary Seacole died in London in May 1881.

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