7. Renaud de Châtillon, prince d’Antioche. Par G. Schlumberger. Paris: Plon, 1898.
8. Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge. Von H. Prutz. Berlin: Siegfried, 1883.
9. Revue de l’Orient Latin. Eleven vols. Paris: Leroux, 1893-1908.
6. A BYZANTINE BLUE STOCKING: ANNA COMNENA
One of the differences between classical and modern literature is the rarity of female writers in the former and their frequency in the latter. While we have lady historians and poets in considerable numbers, while the fair sex has greatly distinguished itself in fiction, including that branch of it which is called modern journalism, ancient Greek letters contain the names of few celebrated women except Sappho; Myrtis and Corinna, the competitors of Pindar; Erinna, whose poetic fancy her mother strove to restrain by chaining her to her neglected spinning-wheel; and Elephantis, whose poetry was considered too realistic for display upon drawing-room tables. Novels were in those days chiefly written by bishops—a class of men not now usually associated with light literature. In Latin literature, although Juvenal has drawn a picture of the learned lady weighing in the critical balance the respective claims of Homer and Virgil, the poem attributed to Sulpicia is almost the sole surviving example of female composition. It has been reserved for Byzantine literature to present us with the rare phenomenon of a first-class lady historian—first-class, that is to say, according to the standards of that day—in the person of the Imperial Princess, Anna Comnena, a writer better known to the general public than are most Byzantine authors owing to the fact that Sir Walter Scott introduced her as one of the characters in Count Robert of Paris, and based one of the chief episodes of that novel upon a historical event recorded in her life of her father.
Since Scott’s time, novelists and dramatists have done something to popularise Byzantine history. Neale, in his Theodora Phranza, daughter of the last Byzantine historian, has described the capture of Constantinople by the Turks; Sardou produced on the stage a far more famous Theodora, the consort of Justinian, whom Prokopios so virulently besmirched in his Secret History. Mr Frederic Harrison has portrayed in Theophano the ambitious and unscrupulous wife and widow of the Emperors Romanos II and Nikephoros Phokas. Jean Lombard in Byzance depicted, with immense erudition, the games and ceremonial of the Imperial city and court in the time of the Iconoclast Emperor, Constantine V Copronymos, and endeavoured to solve the Balkan question by marrying and placing on the throne the Slav Oupravda and the Greek Eustokkia; while Marion Crawford gave us in Arethusa a story from a much later period, the year 1376, based upon the struggle at the Court of John V between the Venetian adventurer, Carlo Zeno, and the Genoese, for the possession of the isle of Tenedos, the key of the Dardanelles.
Anna Comnena was born in 1083 at an interesting moment in the history not only of the Greek Empire, but of Christendom. It was the time when the Mediæval West and the Mediæval East first met; when the Normans, after their recent conquest of England and Southern Italy, first crossed the Adriatic and Ionian seas to attack the Greek Empire, soon to be followed by the hosts of the First Crusade. Just as, with the accession of William the Conqueror fifteen years earlier, a new order of things had begun in Northern Europe, so with the accession of her father, the Emperor Alexios I Comnenos, in 1081, two years before her birth, a new era, and practically a new dynasty—though Alexios was not the first of the family to seize the throne—had begun at Byzantium. From 1025, the end of the long and glorious reign of Basil II, whom the Greeks of to-day still admire as the “Bulgar-slayer,” the destroyer of the first Bulgarian Empire on those self-same battlefields of Macedonia where King Constantine defeated the Bulgarians in the second Balkan war of 1913, the Byzantine throne had been occupied by no less than twelve sovereigns, whose consecutive reigns filled a period scarcely longer than that embraced by the single reign of the great Basil. After the death of his brother and successor, Constantine VIII, there began a period of palace intrigues and female influence, for Constantine’s two mature daughters, Zoe and Theodora, assigned the throne to whomsoever they chose; and the successive marriages of the elderly Zoe furnished Psellos with a chronique scandaleuse of the Imperial Court and boudoir, and MM. Schlumberger and Diehl with their brilliant modern paraphrases of the contemporary writer. When, with the death of Theodora, the Macedonian dynasty came to an end in the person of its last representative, revolution succeeded revolution. Every general of aristocratic birth was justified in believing that he carried in his baggage the red boots which were the peculiar mark of the Imperial dignity, and a female regency enabled the Empress Eudokia to bestow the Empire with her hand. At last, the ablest and astutest of the Byzantine commanders, Alexios Comnenos, deposed the feeble old voluptuary, Nikephoros Botaneiates, whose Slavonic ministers had discredited his authority by their “barbarous” pronunciation and foreign origin, and placed himself and his descendants upon the throne for 100 years.
These internal dissensions had naturally injured the external prestige of the Empire and contracted its frontiers. It was then that there came the final separation between the Eastern and the Western Churches; it was then, too, that, by the loss of Bari, Brindisi, and Otranto, the Byzantine Empire forfeited its last Italian possessions. Meanwhile, the advance of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor had pushed back the Greek frontier in a second continent close to the capital; and Anna Comnena[949] declares that, on her father’s accession, “the Bosporus was the eastern, and Adrianople the western, limit of the Greek sceptre.” Alexios, she proudly adds, “widened the circle of the Empire, and made the Adriatic its western, the Euphrates and the Tigris its eastern, border.”
Yet, as she truly says, her father had to contend all the time against enormous difficulties, alike domestic and foreign. At the outset of his reign, his throne was surrounded with possible pretenders. Both his immediate predecessors were alive, although the one was a bishop, the other in a monastery, besides four sons of dethroned Emperors who had received the Imperial title during their fathers’ reigns, and several persons who had endeavoured unsuccessfully to seize and keep the crown. There were constant conspiracies against Alexios so long as he sat on the throne, while the eternal theological questions, which were the favourite mental distraction of Byzantium, caused him constant anxiety, for there, as in the Balkans to-day, theology and politics were inextricably mingled. From abroad there came, too, the menace of invasion on all sides—from the wild tribes of the Patzinaks and Cumans on the north, from the Normans on the west, from the Turks on the east. And, worse than all, the unhappy Alexios was suddenly called upon to cope with the hurricane of the First Crusade, and to find his Empire overrun by swarms of fierce warriors, whose motives he suspected and whose intentions he judged from their acts to be predatory.
Alexios owed his crown to a successful insurrection; but he was no vulgar upstart. He belonged to a rich family of Paphlagonia, where the Comnenoi held property at Kastamon, the modern Kastamouni, the place known in contemporary history as the exile for nearly thirty years of the late Mirdite Prince, Prenk Bib Doda. The Comnenoi had first come into prominence about a century earlier under Basil II; and one of the clan, the distinguished general, Isaac Comnenos, had occupied the throne from 1057 to 1059. Anna’s father was this man’s nephew, and, in spite of his uncle’s brief reign, the real founder of the dynasty. For the Emperor Isaac, in a moment of discouragement and disillusionment, not only abdicated but failed to induce his brother John, the father of Alexios, to accept the heavy burden of the crown. It was not, however, to his timorous and unambitious father, but to his energetic mother, Anna Dalassene, that Alexios owed his success. She was resolved that her son should be Emperor, and during four intervening reigns, she was waiting and intriguing for the diadem which her husband had allowed to go out of his family. A great lady herself, the daughter of an eminent official and soldier, whose skill in never failing to kill his man had earned him the nickname of “Charon,” she belonged, like the Comnenoi, to a powerful Asiatic family, one of whose members had been at first thought by Constantine VIII as worthy to succeed him, and had subsequently been regarded as a possible husband for the old Empress Zoe. Like many eminent Byzantine personages, she had known the reverses of fortune, and had at one time been exiled to Prinkipo. Such was the esteem which the Emperor Alexios felt for the mother, who had constantly encouraged and facilitated his ambition, that when, at the outset of his reign, he was compelled to leave his capital to fight against the Normans in Albania, he entrusted to her the absolute authority over the Empire during his absence. This is only one of many instances proving the influence of women in the Byzantine system. Thus, the mother of Alexios made history, his daughter wrote it; his mother made him Emperor, his daughter preserved the memory of his reign. Such were the origin and parents of the hero of the Alexiad. Let us now look at its author.