Anna Komnene: princess, historian, and conspirator?
Leonora Neville
Anna Komnene was a Byzantine princess and author of a history of the reign of her father Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118). The International Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages summarized her life story as follows:
Anna Komnene (born Constantinople 2 Dec. 1083, died c.1153/4) was a Byzantine princess and historian, and the author of the laudatory historical biography Alexiad modeled on Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad. Eldest daughter of Alexios I Komnenos and Irene Doukaina, she received an excellent education from a young age (literature, historiography, philology, poetry) and could easily be considered as one of the most educated women of the Middle Ages. While still an infant, Alexios I had betrothed her to Constantine Doukas, co-emperor and son of Michael VII Doukas (who had been overthrown by Nikephoros III Botaneiates in 1078). As a result, Anna always nurtured the hope that as the future wife of Constantine Doukas, she would succeed to the throne. However, the birth of her brother John (II) Komnenos in 1087 shattered her plans and she remained hostile to her brother throughout her entire life. After the premature death of her fiancé in 1095, Anna (now at the age of fourteen) married the young nobleman Nikephoros Bryennios (1097) who would subsequently become caesar and historian of the Komnenos family. When her father died in Aug. 1118 she and her mother plotted against her brother with the aim of securing the throne for her husband. The latter refused any involvement and retained loyalty to the family. When the conspiracy was brought to light, she was forced, following the death of her husband (1138), to retire to the monastery of Kecharitomene that had been founded by her mother. There she lived the remainder of her days and composed her historical work (which she completed around 1148). She was tonsured a nun shortly before her death.
In many modern histories Anna is characterized as ambitious and arrogant. The work of the great Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy reflects common perceptions of her character:
In the prologue to her Alexiad
Anna Komnina laments her widowhood.
Her soul is all vertigo.
“And I bathe my eyes,” she tells us,
“in rivers of tears.... Alas for the waves” of her life,
“alas for the revolutions.” Sorrow burns her
“to the bones and the marrow and the splitting” of her soul.
But the truth seems to be this power-hungry woman
knew only one sorrow that really mattered;
even if she doesn’t admit it, this arrogant Greek woman
had only one consuming pain:
that with all her dexterity,
she never managed to gain the throne,
virtually snatched out of her hands by the impudent John.
I believe that the perception of Anna as arrogant, embittered, and ambitious stems from a misreading of the rhetorical strategies she used in the Alexiad in order to be perceived as humble and modest. Misunderstandings on the part of modern historians of how Anna’s self-presentation interacted with twelfth-century conceptions of appropriate gender led them to see Anna as mannish, ambitious, and unnaturally interested in political power. Given this perception, their interpretations of the evidence for the events surrounding Alexios’s death elevated Anna into the role of mastermind of an attempted coup. While we cannot know exactly what happened on the night Alexios died, when all of the available evidence is examined in light of current research on Anna’s culture, there is little reason to think that Anna opposed her brother’s accession. It certainly seems mistaken to see Anna’s life as dominated by an attempt on imperial power. When we understand better what Anna was trying to accomplish through her self-presentation in the Alexiad, the reasons for thinking of her as a person who would want desperately to be empress fade away.
A standard part of secondary education in Anna’s culture was practicing making speeches impersonating what a famous character from literature or history would have said at a particular moment such as, “what Achilles would have said upon seeing Patroclus body,” or, “what Niobe would have said upon seeing her dead children.” This rhetorical exercise, called ethopoiia, taught students to imagine a situation from the perspective of another and to express that viewpoint convincingly. This chapter is an ethopoiia on what words Anna Komnene would say upon reading about herself in modern texts such as the International Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages and Cavafy’s poem.
Notes
- Alexios Savvides, “Anna Komnene, Historian, 1083–1153/4,” International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages-Online. A Supplement to LexMA-Online (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2011), www.brepolis.net.
- Constantine Cavafy, Collected Poems, ed. Geōrgios P. Savvidēs, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Rev. ed., Princeton Modern Greek Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
- Leonora Neville, Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Further Reading
Buckley, Penelope. The Alexiad of Anna Komnene: Artistic Strategy in the Making of a Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Kaldellis, Anthony. “The Corpus of Byzantine Historiography: An Interpretive Essay.” In The Byzantine World, edited by Paul Stephenson, 211–222. London: Routledge, 2010.
Macrides, Ruth, ed. History as Literature in Byzantium. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Magdalino, Paul. “Byzantine Historical Writing, 900–1400.” In The Oxford History of Historical Writing, edited by Sarah Foot, Chase F. Robinson, and Daniel R. Woolf, 2: 218–237. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Neville, Leonora. Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Neville, Leonora. Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The “Material for History” of Nikephoros Bryennios. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Sewter, E. R. A., and Peter Frankopan, trans. The Alexiad. Revised. London: Penguin Classics, 2004.