Anna Komnene and the Alexiad: A Byzantine Princess Historian

Anna Komnene (1083–c. 1153) was a Byzantine princess, scholar and historian, the eldest daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. In the 1140s, living in retirement in Constantinople, she wrote the Alexiad, a history of her father’s reign completed around 1148. It is the main source for the Byzantine recovery after 1081 and offers a rare Byzantine view of the First Crusade, and Anna is often called one of the first women historians.

Early life

Anna was born on 1 December 1083 in the Porphyra, the purple chamber of the imperial palace reserved for imperial births, which made her a porphyrogenita (“born in the purple”). As a child she was betrothed to Constantine Doukas, son of the former emperor Michael VII, and grew up expecting to become empress.

The birth of her brother John in 1087 and the early death of Constantine ended these hopes. Around 1097 she married Nikephoros Bryennios the Younger, a general and scholar from an aristocratic family. They had several children.

Anna received an unusually thorough education. She studied grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics and medicine, and she read classical Greek authors such as Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle. Her husband and she were later at the centre of a circle of scholars who wrote commentaries on Aristotle.

The succession crisis

When Alexios I lay dying in August 1118, Anna’s mother, Irene Doukaina, wanted Bryennios to succeed rather than John. Alexios instead supported his son, and John II became emperor.

According to the later historian Niketas Choniates, Anna then took part in a plot against John, which failed partly because Bryennios would not support it. Anna’s property was confiscated but later returned. Anna herself never mentions a plot, and modern historians are divided over how much of the story is true. In the following years she lived in or near the Kecharitomene convent founded by her mother.

Writing the Alexiad

Bryennios had begun a history of Alexios’s rise, but he died around 1137 having covered only the years before 1081. Anna took up the task. She wrote in a learned, classicising Greek modelled on ancient historians, and named her work the Alexiad, echoing Homer’s Iliad.

The work has 15 books and covers about 1069 to 1118. Anna says she used her own memories, her father’s and uncles’ accounts, official documents and the stories of old soldiers who had become monks. References in the text suggest she was writing in the 1140s and finished around 1148, some thirty years after her father’s death.

What the Alexiad tells us

The Alexiad describes Alexios’s seizure of power, the Norman invasion and the Battle of Dyrrhachium, the wars against the Pechenegs and Turks, and religious controversies such as the trial of the Bogomil leader Basil. Its account of the First Crusade shows how the Byzantine court viewed the arrival of huge Western armies, which Anna described with a mixture of awe and alarm.

Anna’s portraits of individuals are vivid. Her description of Bohemond of Taranto, her father’s great enemy, is among the most famous passages: she admires his size and appearance while warning of his cunning. She also gives one of the clearest Byzantine descriptions of Greek fire and of the crossbow, which she calls a barbarian weapon unknown to the Greeks.

Strengths and limits

The Alexiad is openly a work of praise. Anna presents her father as wise, patient and almost always right, and she is hostile to the Latins, the Turks and Alexios’s rivals. Her chronology is sometimes confused, especially for the crusade, and she was writing decades after many events.

Modern scholars nonetheless value the work highly. It is the only full narrative of the reign written from inside the court, and it preserves information found nowhere else. The historian James Howard-Johnston has argued that much of the military narrative came from notes left by her husband, but most scholars accept Anna as the author and shaper of the work. Edward Gibbon mocked her vanity, while recent scholarship has stressed how carefully she used the conventions of her time.

Death

Anna died around 1153, although the exact year is uncertain. A funeral oration for her by the scholar Georgios Tornikes survives and praises her learning.

Timeline

• 1083, 1 December: Anna is born in the Porphyra of the imperial palace.
• 1087: Her brother John is born.
• c. 1097: She marries Nikephoros Bryennios the Younger.
• 1118, 15 August: Alexios I dies; John II becomes emperor.
• c. 1118–1119: Alleged plot against John II.
• c. 1137: Bryennios dies, leaving his history unfinished.
• c. 1148: Anna completes the Alexiad.
• c. 1153: Anna dies.

Why it matters

Without the Alexiad, the reign of Alexios I Komnenos and the Byzantine side of the First Crusade would be far less known. Anna’s work is also a rare voice of a learned medieval woman, writing history on a grand scale in a tradition dominated by men.