Title:
Her High Excellency Veronika Sofiaskaya of Moscow and Rome
Veronika Sofianstaya Rurik-Palaiologos
Age:
28 years of age
Bio/Personality:
As time turns in the west, so does it in the East and in the frozen plains of Russia, the new Grand Prince of Moscow, free from the Golden Horde mongols at last and that declared, after the downfall of Constantinople and his marriage with one of the last remaining heir of the dead Emperor, that his princedom was the third empire of Rome, looks west, past Poland and Germany. The Muscovite'Rus principality is in need of more legitimacy and of allies, even if only for the prestige it would give for a dynasty that desperately needs it so. In his typical fashion, the newly self made Grand Prince Vassili III sent his eldest, a daughter, to marry the king of England.
Veronika had, for most of her life, been an afterthought in the eyes of her father, desperate to have a male son, but she means the most for her mother, Sofia, born in Greece in what used to be the most powerful force in the known world, the Byzantine Empire and as her father hardly cared, Veronika was raised in a mostly greek fashion. Knowing Russian, Latin and Greek, she would eventually learn French and of course, English.
She learned that last one after she came to England, the decision of her father had literally came out of nowhere one day and the next week she was sailing for England. When she first arrived she had to rely on clergymen to translate her from Greek and Latin to be understood. Needless to say, it didn't make the strongest of impression, neither did the foreign warriors speaking uncivilized languages that came from a place most people didn't even know existed. Although she didn't say it plain as day when she spoke it in Latin, her traducer exposed the reason of her coming as simplistically as possible: To marry the King. People got a good laugh of her this day but because it was so exotic, strange or because she was a legitimate Byzantine tied royalty that happened to look good, she was allowed to stay.
It had been a few short months ago and as she learned english, still with heavy foreign accents, she began to implant herself at the court within the more... liberal elements in it. It was something that came from her mother who had been herself a young girl in the court of the most decadent Byzantine despots and self naming emperors as everything was crumbling around her, gambling, cheating, incest, orgies, it was an environment where anyone did what it wanted and the priests could go see elsewhere if the nobility cared, she never even raised an eyebrow about anything she heard about the king's sexual appetites and if anything, she found him pretty tame in comparison to all the tales of sodomy, men loving men and so forth she heard were common place in ancient greek and roman cultures.
