Anna Komnene

Anna Komnene was a Byzantine princess and the author of the Alexiad, the single most important narrative source for Byzantine history in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. She was the eldest child of the emperor Alexios I Komnenos and Irene Doukaina, born in the purple chamber of the imperial palace in 1083. She was betrothed as an infant to Constantine Doukas and raised partly in his mother's household. Her education was exceptional for anyone of her century and remarkable for a woman: Greek literature and history, philosophy, theology, mathematics and medicine. For a time she and Constantine stood next in line to the throne. That ended with the birth of her brother John in 1087, and Constantine's death soon after. She married Nikephoros Bryennios, a soldier and historian himself. When Alexios died in 1118 she is said to have joined her mother in a plot to set aside John and put her husband on the throne. The attempt failed. Bryennios would not act, John became emperor, and Anna spent the rest of her life in a monastery her mother had founded. She used the seclusion to write. The Alexiad covers her father's reign in fifteen books, and its account of the First Crusade is the fullest surviving view of that event from the Byzantine side. She describes the crusader leaders with a mixture of curiosity and disdain, and her portrait of Bohemond of Taranto is the most vivid we have. She is frank about her own bitterness at losing the throne. She also ran a hospital and orphanage in Constantinople and presided over a circle of Aristotelian scholarship.

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