Nikephoros Bryennios

Nikephoros Bryennios married the emperor's daughter, failed to become emperor himself because she could not persuade him to try, and wrote a history of how his father-in-law had come to power. He was the grandson or son of the general of the same name who had rebelled against Michael VII in 1077 and been blinded for it by the man who then became Alexios I Komnenos - so the marriage to Anna Komnene around 1097 was a settlement between families. He served Alexios as a soldier and diplomat, negotiated with Bohemond of Taranto during the crusader confrontations, and was given the rank of caesar. When Alexios was dying in 1118 his wife Irene and his daughter Anna worked to have Bryennios take the throne instead of Anna's brother John; Bryennios would not act, John was crowned, and Anna's subsequent plot cost her her property and her freedom. He kept John's confidence and campaigned with him in Syria, which suggests the emperor believed the refusal had been genuine. His Material for History covers the years from 1070 to 1079 and is the main source for the disaster at Manzikert and the civil wars that followed, written from inside two families that had been on opposite sides of them. It breaks off unfinished at his death. Anna Komnene then wrote the Alexiad, which begins roughly where his account stops and which says in its preface that she took up the work her husband had left. The two together are why the eleventh-century crisis of the empire can be described in detail. Anna Komnene wrote that he died of an illness contracted on campaign in the east. Their son was a general under Manuel I. The Bryennios family had been prominent in Adrianople for generations.

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