Keywords

Introduction

Anna Komnene was a Byzantine writer, historian, and scholar. In the epic narrative she composed, the Alexiad, a Byzantine emperor and empress are viewed by their imperial daughter from the threshold of twelfth-century Constantinople. Anna Komnene’s Alexiad is available in the original Greek in several Medieval codices, including Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1438; it is a significant historical document and the principle source for our knowledge of the important period which saw the restoration of Byzantine power and the encounter of Byzantium with the West in the First Crusade (Ostrogorsky 1969: 351). The eldest daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1057–1118, ruled 1081–1118) and Irene Doukaina (1066 to ca.1023/1033), Anna Komnene is representative of a period in Byzantine history when the power of great aristocratic families became amplified and interconnected by strategic marriage alliances. Alexios was the first of the Komnenian Byzantine emperors, and Irene’s family was known to trace its lineage back to Constantine the Great; there was a tradition that he had appointed their forbear the Duke of Constantinople, hence the family name Dukas.

Anna Komnene narrates in rich detail the panoramic life of her father in her opus magnus which Dölger has called a “work of filial piety…set out to extol the virtues of her father whom she adored and admired above all others.” (Dölger 1966–1967: 231) The Alexiad is the only text written by a woman in the whole of the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (Hill 1999: 34). Deemed a scholarly work without parallel in the canon of women’s writing in Attic history, (Quandahl and Jarrett 2008: 303) Anna Komnene has made a singular contribution to Byzantine history by writing the Alexiad. Note that quoted references to the Alexiad are given here in the 1969 E.R.A. Sewter English translation, which features somewhat modern language; see also the Elizabeth A. Dawes 1928 translation, which tends to follow the Greek more literally.

A Porphyrogenita Princess

From the opening of the text, Anna Komnene stresses her royal birth, introducing herself with the defining fact of having emerged from the cradle as a true imperial child “born in the purple,” (Comnena 1969: Prologue:17; hereafter given with book.chapter: page) 2 years after he ascended the Byzantine throne, and therefore she was delivered in the royal birthing room in the palace, a chamber lined with semiprecious purple porphyry stone designating those born there as porphyrogenita. When still quite young, Anna was betrothed to Constantine, the son of Emperor Michael VII Doukas (c.1050–1078, ruled 1071–1078), in a bid by Alexios I to secure an heir for the Byzantine throne. Following the Byzantine tradition, she was sent off for several years to be brought up within the household of Maria of Alania (ca.1050 to ca.1103). Anna describes this as a happy period of her life, looking up at an impressionable age to the celebrated beauty of her intended mother-in-law and rhapsodizing about her fiancé.

Later, when a son, John (1087–1143, ruled 1118–1143), was born to Alexios and Irene, the betrothal arrangement proved unnecessary and Anna’s bright future, at least as an empress, was eclipsed by her infant brother. Expectations of imperial power, however, were indelibly imprinted on her point of view for the rest of her life. After the untimely death of her young fiancé, Anna was, while still a teenager, then married off to Nikephoros Bryennios (1062 to ca. 1136/1137), a military comrade of her father.

Considering the fierce dynastic strategizing of her adoptive mother, Maria of Alania, and the imperial chrysobull of Emperor Alexios empowering her grandmother, Anna Dalassene (1025–1102), to control Byzantine administration in her son’s absence, which she quoted in the Alexiad, Anna Komnene witnessed a generation of imperial Byzantine history when women’s powerful roles at court had been amply evident. However, she has also been implicated by many as conspiring with her mother in a bid for the throne after her father died, which involved a plot to murder her brother. While her silence about the accomplishments of Emperor John II Komnenos may indicate she battled resentment for her brother and his reign, Anna remains adamant in her devotion to her father, faithful to him throughout his lifetime, and present with him in his last hours. After the death of her mother in 1123 and her husband in 1137, Anna Komnene withdrew from public life, “in order to devote myself to my books and the worship of God,” (XIV.vii: 460) and she focused on crafting a major epic honoring her father’s memory.

Development of a Byzantine Historian

One of the ways that Anna Komnene authenticates herself as a historian is by demonstrating her qualifications as an intellectual figure on a par with any man (Hatlie 2003: 51). She makes good use of the matchless education of a porphyrogenita princess, speaking with undaunted pride about her imperial upbringing. Classical education was often described as achievement in a quartet of subject categories favored at the time – geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music – which were referred to as the Quadrivium of sciences. Anna Komnene crafted the Alexiad to complete a project inaugurated by her mother; Irene Doukaina had commissioned Anna’s husband to write an historical account of the deeds of Alexios after his death. What survives of this effort is the essay “Materials for a History.” (Bryennios 1953: 469–530; 1955–1957: 881–925).

Anna Komnene composed her own fifteen-volume work during the reign of Manual I, the next emperor after John. Although she offered a version of history which passed over her brother’s reign in critical silence, John II Komnenos has in fact been regarded by some as the greatest of the Komnenian emperors (Birkenmeier 2002: 85). Written in retrospect, the Alexiad looks back on memories of her father’s life culled from war stories of the emperor’s retired comrades-in-arms (XIV.vii: 460), Anna’s own eyewitness memories, and conversations between the emperor and his military commander, George Palaiologos, while his niece was present at court. Additionally, the Alexiad provides the only known complete Byzantine historical account of the First Crusade. When compared with the terminology and language of the histories of Michael Psellos or Niketas Choniates, Anna speaks “not as a woman in an écriture feminine, but in the same full-blown atticising form of Greek favoured by the dominant élite of eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium.” (Smythe 2006: 156) It provides a unique window into the imperial epicenter of Komnenian Byzantium. Alexios I and his family are all viewed at work and at prayer, receiving friend and foe at court, and strategizing Byzantine survival in precarious times.

Emperor Alexios inherited an empire in financial shambles and a disintegrating imperial frontier with daunting foes pressing in on all sides. Fortunately, in his rise toward the Byzantine throne, he came to rely on the powerful women surrounding him: first, his mother, Anna Dalassene, then his adoptive mother, Maria of Alania, and his wife, Irene Doukaina. Alexios and his family did much to promote a newly energized wave of monastic piety, as founders and refounders of monasteries and convents. Empress Irene was known for patronizing monks and holy men; Alexios, however, was often on such bad terms with the Church that he was condemned by Patriarch Cosmas as deserving of public penitential rebuke (Angold 1995: 69).

Examining the Alexiad

Anne Komnene crafted the Alexiad for an audience assumed to possess a educated knowledge of Homeric influences and citations; in Anna’s eyes, her father was: “a modern and most noble Hercules,” (I.x: 52) Alexios and even his enemies are depicted as sharing in heroic struggles in the style of Greeks versus Trojans (Connor 2004: 247). She fills the page with jeweled scenes of the imperial court and graphic images of the mechanics of warfare, (XIII.iii: 402) but also with endearing true-to-life details and startling episodes she knew firsthand from the remarkable characters in her family. Anna Dalassene, for example, is described demanding sanctuary in Hagia Sophia during her son’s coup d’état by clasping the entrance doors and crying out, “Unless my hands are cut off, I will not leave this holy place, except on one condition: that I receive the Emperor’s cross as guarantee of safety.” (II.v: 85) In another remarkable image, she depicts the warrior-prowess of her father, who suddenly struck at the enemy, “his hand, together with the sword in it, was at once hurled to the ground” (I.viii: 50). In her highly visual literary style, Anna Komnene depicts her father in the midst of it all as the operational centerpiece: analyzing maneuvers, issuing orders, and campaigning to retrieve the four corners of the empire. At once both congenial father figure and warrior-emperor, she describes him as respected by subjects and foes alike, driving the reins of the empire (Connor 2004: 248).

Anna Komnene also looked up to the strong women in her family and she describes the reins of the empire being driven by one of them as well. Anna Dalassene is one of three impressive maternal figures at play in the makeup of Anna Komnene’s family life: “He yielded her precedence in everything, relinquishing the reins of government, as it were, and running alongside as she drove the imperial chariot…She governed with him, sometimes even grasping the reins and alone driving the chariot of power—without accident or error” (III.vi: 116).

Like many young girls, Anna adored her grandmother and characterized her as the courageous “mother of the Komneni,” (II.iv: 85) a phrase which Anna Dalassene herself adopted as a semiofficial title during her years in power; a seal survives inscribed with the phrase (Hill 1999: 117). Anna also provides appreciative descriptions of her mother, Irene Doukaina, and highlights their relationship with a miraculous occurrence in connection with her birth: Since her father was away on campaign, Empress Irene is said to have made the sign of the cross upon her belly, charging her unborn child to stay the onset of labor until his return (VI.viii: 196). In this, Anna was compliant. She paints a picture of the rounds of her pious imperial family life, with scheduled times for Scripture to be read and Psalms to be offered. Later, after her childbearing years, Empress Irene accompanied her husband on campaign, and was known for her generosity and good counsel to the poor (XII.iii: 377–378). Maria of Alania as well comes in for admiration and praise in Anna Komnene’s description.

Maternal Influences

Anna Dalassene, Irene Doukaina, and Maria of Alania each figure significantly in Anna’s family life and that of her father, Alexios I. All three women navigate the specific crises they face with courage and vision. Both Anna Komnene’s mother and her grandmother retired to the convents they founded, Irene Doukaina to the Kecharitomene, and Anna Dalassene to the Pantepoptes. Anna followed in turn, also retiring to the Kecharitomene convent. Of course, only when her mother’s efforts to put Nikephoros Bryennios on the throne failed did Anna Komnene turn to scholarly writing; (Ostrogorsky 1969: 377) and so it was in her forced convent retirement that she wrote the Alexiad. In the portraits of her grandmother and her mother, maternal imagery is mobilized to argue for a noblewoman’s right of access to both a full philosophical life and real political power (Hatlie 2003: 51).

Although in his history of the middle centuries of the Byzantine state (Choniates 1984) written in the next generation after Anna Komnene, Niketas Choniates blames Empress Irene for inciting Anna’s husband to seize the throne and names Anna as an instigator of the plot; more recently, commentators including Browning and Hill have been more cautionary in their estimation of Anna’s responsibility in plans to overthrow the throne (Browning 1990: 34; Hill 1999: 34). While frustration over unfulfilled imperial ambition may likely have spearheaded Anna Komnene’s efforts to favor her father over her brother in describing her family circumstances, the Alexiad was nevertheless an unprecedented achievement. Treadgold hails it as “the finest work of historical art since Procopius’ Wars. Anna set a high standard for the Byzantine historians to come” (Treadgold 1997: 693).

Summary

Although the text was never explicitly intended as such, the Alexiad remains the most significant existing source for the First Crusade from the Byzantine perspective (Comnene 1928: vii). Indeed, in recent scholarship, Anna Komnene’s historical work in the Alexiad has often been accepted as the official authorial voice (Gouma-Petersen 2000: 110). On balance, Anna Komnene was able to advance the memory and renown of her beloved father by the crafting of an epic narrative describing his achievements. Thus, as the scholarly daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, she has left an enduring legacy in Byzantine history.

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