The eldest child of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Kom-nenos and Irene Doukaina, Anna Komnene wrote the Alex-iad, an epic history in Greek of her father’s life and times, probably after the year 1138.
The Alexiad, an important source for the First Crusade (1096-1099), was composed with a large degree of hindsight; Anna was concerned to preserve her father’s reputation by praising his cautious treatment of the Franks at a time when her nephew, Emperor Manuel Komnenos, was following a much more pro-Western policy. Anna’s work contains vivid pen-portraits of crusading leaders, particularly Bohemund I of Antioch, but she reveals little information about the preaching of the crusade, even though Alex-ios’s appeals to the West for military help against the Turks were known in her day. She concluded that the crusaders’ real aim was not to liberate the Holy Sepulchre, but to conquer Byzantium.
Anna played an important part in the “family politics” of the Komnenian era. As a baby, she had been betrothed to a maternal relative, Constantine Doukas, but after his premature death, she was married around 1097 to Nikephoros Bryennios (d. 1136/1137), a military man who also wrote history. After her father’s death and with her mother’s support, Anna attempted to gain the throne for her husband, but she was thwarted by her brother John and subsequently forced to live in seclusion in the convent of the Theotokos Kecharitomene in Constantinople (mod. Istanbul, Turkey). She was extremely well-read and was the patroness of a circle of scholars that particularly concerned itself with the works of Aristotle.
-Rosemary Morris
Bibliography
Anne Comnene, Alexiade, trans. Bernard Leib, 3 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1937-1976).
Anna Komnene and Her Times, ed. Thalia Gouma-Peterson (New York: Garland, 2000).
Buckler, Georgina, Anna Comnena: A Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929).
Chrysostomides, Julian, “A Byzantine Historian: Anna Comnena,” in Medieval Historical Writing in the Christian and Islamic Worlds, ed. David O. Morgan (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1982), pp. 30-46.
France, John, “Anna Comnena, the Alexiad and the First Crusade,” Reading Medieval Studies 10 (1984), 20-38.
Howard-Johnston, James, “Anna Komnene and the Alexiad,” in Alexios I Komnenos, ed. Margaret Muhett and Dion Smythe (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1996), pp. 260-302.
Lilie, Ralph-Johannes, “Der erste Kreuzzug in der Darstellung Anna Komnenes,” in Varia II: Beitrdge von A. Berger et al., Poikila Byzantina, 6 (Bonn: Habelt, 1987), pp. 49-148.
Loud, Graham A., “Anna Komnena and Her Sources for the Normans of Southern Italy,” in Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to John Taylor, ed. Ian Wood and Graham A. Loud (London: Hambledon, 1991), pp. 41-57.
Shlosser, Franziska E., “Byzantine Studies and the History of the Crusade: The Alexiad of Anna Comnena as Source for the Crusades,” Byzantinische Forschungen 15 (1990), 397-406.
Thomas, R. D., “Anna Comnena’s Account of the First Crusade: History and Politics in the Reigns of the Emperors Alexius I and Manuel I Comnenus,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 15 (1991), 269-312.
World History
