Introduction
Early History
The Varenhoff Dynasty Begins
Modern History

INTRODUCTION

With the restoration of the Varenhoff dynasty to the throne of Rovenia, interest in the history of the small, mountainous nation has increased. Many people are surprised that they have heard so little about Rovenia in the past. But to Rovenians, it is no surprise.

Politically insignificant, geographically isolated and self-sufficient, the Rovenian people themselves preferred to live in obscurity for many centuries, occasionally to their detriment. When the Soviet Union gobbled up Rovenia in 1945, the rest of the world barely noticed. And again, when we were spit out with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it caused hardly a ripple. Even the bloody revolution fought to overthrow the Communist government that seized power after the Soviet breakup failed to attract attention or garner much worldwide support.

It was not until the third democratic parliament voted to restore the monarchy that the world finally turned their eyes on our small country. And now the world wants to know more. Given the cause for the attention, it may be romantically pleasing to note that the history of Rovenia is closely tied to the history of the Varenhoff family. Few other royal families have held a throne in such a long and unbroken line as the Varenhoffs, from their ascension in 1475. But Rovenia--and indeed the Varenhoffs' roots go back much further. Top

EARLY HISTORY

The early inhabitants of the region today known as Rovenia were a loosely knit band of mountain tribes known as the Vareni. Protected by the Arel Mountains to the east and the Doldav mountains to the south and southwest, the Vareni--primarily sheep and goat farmers--ably defended their small realm against a variety of would-be invaders until finally succumbing to invasion by Slavs from the Kievan Rus (modern-day Ukraine, Belarus and northwest Russia) early in the eighth century CE.

Rovenia became a principality governed by a series of Kievan princelings. The native Vareni adopted a form of the Slavic language and many of the customs of the Slavs, while the Slavs who settled and intermarried in the region took on many of the local customs and upheld local legends and oral traditions. In 1025 CE, Rovenia became a Christian state under the Orthodox church when Prince Vlachko converted.

With the decline of the Kievan State, the Rovenians seized the opportunity and drove out the Kievan princes in 1202. Village chieftains organized themselves into a governing class and elected Veded Mabinov prince of Rovenia in 1211. In spite of success in keeping out the Mongol hordes, the Mabinov dynasty was marred by mismanagement and fighting among the local chieftains, now styled as counts and barons, the early nobility of Rovenia. Arded, the last Mabinov prince, was forced to give up his crown in 1385. For the next century, Rovenia struggled to remain independent as the nobility jostled for power and the threat of invasion by the Ottoman Turks loomed. Top

THE VARENHOFF DYNASTY BEGINS

Then in 1471, when his warnings of the advancing Ottomans went unheard by the Council of Nobles, Baron Gorba Varenhoff of Gris--who claimed a pure line of descent from the earliest of the Vareni overlords--organized an army to defend the southeastern border of Rovenia against a second and final Ottoman onslaught. Gorba's successful campaign led the people of Rovenia to call for his election as king and Gorba and his army rode on the ancient capital of Brabinsk. But several of the northern members of the Council--notably Baron Rudnanye and Count Radovan deBatz--had no intention of letting a southern baron reign.

The battle for the throne lasted nearly three years. But Gorba had the support and loyalty of the people, and discontent and infighting weakened the cause of the northern nobles. They were routed at the Battle of Svetvya in 1474, but Gorba was mortally wounded and died three weeks later. His son, Arkady, was acclaimed the first true king of Rovenia and crowned in the Cathedral of St. Florian in Brabinsk early in 1475.

Arkady reduced the power of the Council of Nobles and established kingship by right of primogeniture rather than election. In 1490, he passed laws handing much of the power of local governance to town and city councils, rather than individual nobles. The nobles--led by Orczy Rudnanye--attempted to overthrow Arkady in 1492 but were defeated. Arkady's fair treatment of the nobles further insured his popularity, along with the singular treaty he engineered with the Ottoman Empire. He died in 1520 and was succeeded by his surviving son, Aleksandr I.

The Ottoman Turks tested the treaty and the new king, but Aleksandr was able to drive them back. In 1530, he arranged a marriage between his son, Ivor and Swanna, niece of the Polish king, ensuring Rovenia's continued independence as Poland expanded its borders in the sixteenth century.

Aleksandr I died in 1546 and was succeeded by his son, Ivor I. With increasing pressure from Poland, Ivor and his Polish wife were not well-liked by the people. In 1550, Endrey Varenhoff--the grandson of Arkady's brother Vedni and a cousin of King Ivor--eloped with Jarmilla, Ivor's beautiful and popular sister, in what was clearly an attempt to build support for a bid on the throne. Ivor banished his sister and her husband, but in 1553, they organized a small band of supporters and launched an assault on the Castle Varenhoff in the capital.

Acting on Jarmilla's information, Endrey and two accomplices gained entrance to the castle through a secret passageway leading from the catacombs. Endrey murdered Ivor in his chambers and imprisoned the twenty-one-year-old Crown Prince Ikar. Angered by the treatment of the prince, the Royal Guard and armed citizens of Brabinsk took the castle from Endrey and Jarmilla and liberated Ikar. Ikar was crowned king in June of 1553 and Jarmilla and her husband were executed the following week. In a gesture of peace to unite the two sides of the family, Ikar adopted Jarmilla and Endrey's infant son Voiteh as his legal heir.

In contrast to the blood-soaked beginning of his reign, Ikar I was a gentle, thoughtfully intelligent man who disliked war and preferred the study of astronomy, introduced printed books to Rovenia and endowed the University of Brabinsk. But it was also Ikar who skillfully withdrew from the treaty with Poland when Polish power in the region waned and established the Rovenian Orthodox Church in the face of sweeping reformation. He never married and died in 1620 at the age of eighty-eight, succeeded by Voiteh's son, Ikar II.

Ikar II inherited a country with a failing economy at the start of the Thirty Years War, leaving Rovenia more vulnerable to invasion than in the previous half-a-century and forcing Ikar II to make unpopular bargains with Russia and Austria. Rovenia barely managed to maintain autonomy by the end of the war and Ikar was left a broken man. He died in 1664 and was succeeded by his eldest son Alexander II.

Alexander had resisted his father's attempts to make a dynastic marriage with any of a number of European princesses and married instead Terza Sussak, the fiery and independent-minded daughter of a Brabinsk silk dealer. Alexander died suddenly and mysteriously in 1675 at age 35 and his younger brother, Tedor, seized control of the throne from the council and Alexander's three-year-old heir Nikolas. Terza and her young son fled the capital for northern Rovenia, where she gathered the support of the growing merchant class and launched a campaign for the throne in her son's name. "Terza's War" raged for three years, ending in the death of Tedor at the Battle of Voder in 1678.

Six-year-old Nikolas was proclaimed king and Terza appointed regent until 1690, when the eighteen-year-old king--as independent-minded as his mother--took full control of the throne. His reign was long and uneventful and he survived both of his children, Tibor and Terza. (Ironically, this Terza's grandson would launch his own unfounded bid for the throne.)

Nikolas died in 1754 and was succeeded by his grandson, Ivor II. Ivor II's reign was primarily involved in putting down a succession of peasant revolts that followed on a reemergence of the plague in Rovenia and a two-year drought that further weakened the frail economy. But his introduction of reforms in taxation and property laws and greater trade flexibility restored peace. Ivor II died in 1796 and was succeeded by his son Nikolas II.

After a series of public outbursts and private chaos, it quickly became clear that Nikolas II was unfit to rule. In 1799, badly disfigured in a fire he set at Castle Varenhoff to "cleanse it of demons," he abdicated and the crown passed to his brother, Tibor I.

In 1803, a challenger to the throne arrived on the scene in the person of Estep Duvalis, a great-grandson of Nikolas I, who styled himself as simply "Varenhoff." Duvalis claimed that both the insane Nikolas II and his brother Tibor I were illegitimate, products of an adulterous affair carried on by their mother, Beatrice of Saxe-Gotha. Backed by members of the northern nobility--friends of his powerful grandfather, Baron Bialas Rudnanye, whose family had a long-standing antipathy towards the Varenhoffs--he was able to rally enough of a fighting force to draw Tibor into two years of intermittent battle and disrupt Tibor's plans to build on his grandfather's reforms.

But Tibor's eldest son Beda--a brilliant and fearless soldier--organized the final rout of Duvalis's supporters from the northern mountains. Duvalis was captured and executed in February of 1806.

The Duvalis affair left Tibor with little time and fewer resources to prepare for Napoleon's march on Eastern Europe. Rovenia was forced to turn to an ancient enemy for support and allied itself with the Ottoman Empire. The fight against Napoleon brought the bitterest blow to the aging monarch when his heir, Beda, was killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Becoming more and more of a religious recluse, Tibor left the administration of Rovenia to his second son, Idylr, who became King Idylr I on Tibor's death in 1824.

Struggling with both the industrial revolution (which did not have the same impact on Rovenia that it had in England, Western Europe and America) and burgeoning liberalism, Idylr made several bad decisions. Turning against the Turkish allies, he placed Rovenia in a position to be absorbed by Russia and only barely escaped armed conflict by unpopular concessions to the Austrian Empire involving handing over a nearly 50% interest in Rovenia's coal mines.

Enraged, the council and Parliament--now with a majority of non-noble members--forced the king to sign the Agreement of Jurisdiction, reducing what until then had been the almost absolute power of the monarch. Idylr died in 1863 and was succeeded by his son, Ivor III.

Ivor's reign was marked by continually changing alliances with political upheaval in the Austrian Empire as well as the newly independent Balkan nations. Rovenia joined in the Pan-Slav fervor fostered by Russia and identified itself more and more with the East.

Ivor III died in 1881 and in spite of his wishes, the crown passed to his eldest son, Tibor II, who had defied his father by making a morganatic marriage with an older, widowed woman of Russian descent named Galia Dashkova. Tibor died of pneumonia in 1889, leaving no heirs, and was succeeded by his brother, Alexander III. Top

MODERN HISTORY

Alexander had drawn considerable notice by marrying a distant cousin of Queen Victoria of England. But this alliance proved valuable to Rovenia as World War I loomed on the horizon. Rovenia benefited from increased trade and shipping affiliations with the British, significantly rebuilding the economy to a point that barely carried Rovenia through the war.

Alexander died in 1913, leaving the throne and the threat of war to his very popular son, Tibor III. Caught between the Austrian Empire to the west and Russia to the east, Rovenia could not remain neutral and allied itself with Russia but evoked Russian ire by keeping the bulk of the Rovenian army in Rovenia to defend the border with Hungary. Aided by the topography, the Rovenian army was able to deflect the German army as they drove into Russia, resisting invasion and occupation even after the Russian defeat. Forty-five-year-old Tibor camped out with his troops and rode review every morning on his gray stallion.

But as Germany withdrew and the war drew to a close, a nationalist fervor began to sweep monarchs from thrones in the region. Though this feeling never took hold in Rovenia, where the people had always been secure in their national identity and saw the Varenhoff kings as idealized symbols of that identity, it did give rise to small pockets of anarchist and Communist sentiment.

In December of 1918, while on a Christmas pilgrimage to Gris, Tibor III's train was stopped by a manmade avalanche and a bomb was tossed into the monarch's car, killing Tibor and his chief advisors. But the general uprising the anarchists had hoped to incite never happened. The country deeply mourned Tibor and welcomed his son, Idylr II to the throne.

Twenty-three-year-old Idylr inherited a government divided along party lines, a decimated army and an economy reeling from the war. When his policies failed to rapidly improve conditions in Rovenia, the Parliament of 1922 forced the young king to sign over nearly all of his remaining constitutional power. But when massive depression swept Europe in the early thirties and the corrupt Prime Minister Ossip Podmayersky further crippled the economy, Idylr won back partial control of the government.

Recovery was slow and at the outbreak of World War II, Idylr knew Rovenia was not in a position to defend herself. For the first time in nearly eight hundred years, Rovenia was occupied by a foreign power when the German army overtook Brabinsk.

Idylr became a symbol of resistance to his people, refusing to ally Rovenia to Germany, accepting occupation but refusing to let his government pass Nazi-mandated legislation, hand over Rovenians to the German courts or fill orders for supplies. Until the Nazis established marshal law in Rovenia.

The growing Communist party urged Idylr to accept Russian aid. Many felt that paved the way for the Soviet takeover. At the end of the war, the Soviets made up an historical claim to Rovenia, the Communists backed them and Idylr, his wife and son were forced to flee. Idylr's younger brother, Ikar, acted as decoy for the king and his family and was arrested and held by the Soviets until his death in 1962.

The exiled royal family was offered sanctuary in England, where they settled in 1947 and Idylr set up a court-in-exile dedicated to restoring the Varenhoffs to the throne of Rovenia.

But Rovenia had virtually ceased to exist. Now officially part of the USSR, all record and remnant of the Varenhoff dynasty that had not been spirited away or hidden was removed or destroyed. The Rovenian people were not allowed to mention the name of Varenhoff or refer to themselves as Rovenians. They could only find work, receive government support if they learned to read and speak Russian. Rovenian holidays, festivals, dress, songs, books were all prohibited. The Communist deliverance they had hoped for brought the loss of the national identity they so prized.

But the Rovenian people continued to follow the fortunes of the royal family in secret, confounding the Soviets and later the Communist governments with seemingly meaningless displays. When Prince Nikolas married Mirena Kostolany (the daughter of Idylr's chief advisor, who had escaped Rovenia with the Varenhoffs), Rovenian women wore their skirts turned inside out. In 1962, when Ivor was born, royalists filled the empty fountain in Arkady Square with milk. And when Idylr and then Nikolas died, villagers painted their front doors blue.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, royalist hopes for a restoration of the monarchy were dashed by the swift takeover of the government by the Communist Party, headed by President Bazyli Szanetrik, whose anti-monarchist, anti-Rovenian policies were even stricter than the Soviet's. In England, the Varenhoffs themselves had given up on any hope of regaining their throne. With Nikolas's death in 1998, Ivor retired the Rovenian flag that had flown over the family's residence since 1947 and allowed his son, Alexei, to grow up with no expectation of a royal future.

But conditions in Rovenia had grown steadily worse. The Communists were unable to repair the damage the Soviets had done to the infrastructure of Rovenia. Szanetrik's handling of uprisings in the south made him increasingly unpopular and when he and his council refused to allow a general election in 1998, the people of Brabinsk stormed the Winter Palace. The presidential council brutally put down the brief Brabinsk uprising and took command of the Rovenian army, shutting down Parliament and taking complete control of the government.

But the Rovenian Nationalist Movement had been on the rise since the murder of Ardulf Vrenitzi, the last Varenhoff heir living in Rovenia, in 1994. Stirred now to open rebellion, the secretly assembled Rovenian National Army declared war on the Communist government. The revolution lasted four years, with casualties on both sides in excess of 50,000, leaving Rovenia in even worse economic shape than ever.

In February of 2002, the Rovenian National Army officially seized control of Brabinsk, capturing Szanetrik and his council on information provided by Count Stefan deBatz, who had infiltrated the Communist army. A democratic government was hastily installed and the first general election in nearly twelve years held, sweeping conservative Prime Minister Rodion Mayernik into office.

But continuing economic difficulties and division within the two-party system threatened the new government. In search of a unifying symbol and a way to draw international attention to Rovenia, the government asked the Rovenian people to vote on the restoration of the Varenhoff dynasty as a constitutional monarchy. The referendum passed four-to-one and in February 2004, Ivor Varenhoff formally accepted the offer of the crown of Rovenia. He was crowned Ivor IV in the Cathedral of St. Florian in Brabinsk in June of 2004.

Copyright 2003 Melissa Wyatt

(pictures of Gorba, Arkady and Ikar come from E. S. Ovchinnikova, Portret v russkom iskusstve XVII veka [Moscow, 1955]; all other pictures from prints and photos in my personal collection.)