Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

The literary Princess has given us in her history of her father a considerable amount of autobiographical information. Anna Comnena was not at all disposed to hide her light under a bushel, nor did she ever forget that she had been born in the purple chamber—the room to which an Empress was always removed when her confinement was imminent. Like most members of the reigning Imperial family, she received an excellent literary education. “I am not destitute of letters,” she writes in her preface, “but have thoroughly studied classical Greek”; and she adds that she had applied herself diligently to the mathematical quadrivium, to rhetoric, the philosophy of Aristotle, and the dialogues of Plato. In another passage she alludes to her knowledge of geometry. Her quotations show a wide range of reading. Her history contains citations from, or allusions to, Homer, Sappho, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, the Tactics of Ælian, and the astronomer Eudoxos, while she repeats a whole sentence from Polybios and another from John of Epiphania, and shows, as Byzantine writers always do, great familiarity with the Bible. Niketas summed her up as “acquainted with every art.”

Nor need we, who have in our own history a similarly learned lady of royal lineage, Lady Jane Grey, wonder at the erudition of this Byzantine blue stocking. There had been a recrudescence of literary culture in the eleventh century at Byzantium[950], as in the sixteenth century in London. Shortly before Anna’s birth the Imperial Court had been the scene of the many-sided activities of that remarkable man, Michael Psellos, “the Prince of Philosophers,” as he was called by his contemporaries, the Voltaire of mediæval Greek literature, at once philosopher, historian, lawyer, monk, courtier and prime minister, who demonstrated, as other learned statesmen have proved in our own time, that great intellectual attainments may coincide with a poor character and political ineptitude. Another writer, the historian Michael of Adalia, or Attaleiates, who had gained by his legal abilities the favour of successive sovereigns, dedicated his history of his own time to the Emperor Nikephoros Botaneiates, and made a sufficient fortune out of speculations in real estate to found an almshouse for his less fortunate fellows. But in the time of Psellos and Attaleiates learning had disciples on the throne, as well as in the lecture-hall. The Imperial family of Doukas was noted for its devotion to literature; the collection of genealogies of gods and heroes, known under the title of Ionia (or Violarium), has been by some ascribed to the ambitious Empress Eudokia, wife of Constantine X Doukas and of his successor; while the Emperor Michael VII Doukas, who had been a pupil of Psellos and is known in history by the nickname of “Parapinakes,” or the “Peck-filcher,” from his fraudulent manipulation of the corn-monopoly, spent his time in composing iambics and anapæsts quite in the fashion of our classically-educated eighteenth century statesmen, who lost us the American colonies and were stronger at Greek verses than at political economy. Even the old roué Botaneiates, was, if we believe his panegyrist Attaleiates, a lover of books. When Alexios succeeded him, he further encouraged literature; one of his physicians, Kallikles, was a writer of epitaphs, not always on his own patients; and the historian, John Skylitzes, who was a captain of the bodyguard, dedicated some legal treatises to this Emperor.

It was not, therefore, remarkable that Alexios’ daughter was highly educated, nor that her husband, Nikephoros Bryennios, was, like herself, a historian, although, like Julius Cæsar, he modestly described his work as merely supplying “the materials for those who wished to write history.” A soldier by profession, the son of the pretender of the same name who had revolted against Michael VII, and had been crushed by Alexios, he defended Constantinople against Godfrey of Bouillon in 1097, and fought against the Sultan of Ikonium in 1116. Taking Xenophon, another literary soldier, as his model, he possessed, like Attaleiates, a much simpler and more straightforward style than his learned consort, and his soldierly prose is, although a glorification of his father-in-law, pleasing to read.

But the cultured Anna, unlike her husband, had other besides literary ambitions, of which her distracted account of her father’s death-bed shows no trace. We learn, however, from the later historian, Niketas, of the mundane designs which agitated the bosoms of the Empress and her daughter at that solemn moment, of the efforts made by Irene to induce her expiring husband to disinherit his son in favour of his son-in-law, and how, when the dying Emperor lifted up his hands to heaven with a forced smile on his pallid cheeks, his wife bitterly reproached him with the words: “Husband, all thy life thou hast been versed in every kind of deceit, saying one thing and thinking another; and now that thou art dying, thou art true to thine old ways.” Gibbon has summed up the remark in the caustic sarcasm: “You die as you have lived—a hypocrite.” Nor was the virtuous Anna inclined to acquiesce in the accession of her brother John II. She had been, till his birth, the heiress-presumptive, and as such had been betrothed as a child to the son of the dethroned Emperor, Michael VII, the young Constantine Doukas, who died, however, before their marriage. She had thus missed the throne once, and was determined not to miss it again.

Scott, in his novel, has completely misrepresented the character of her husband by representing him as plotting to seize the throne, even during the lifetime of Alexios. Such a conception of the honest Bryennios is quite erroneous. For Anna’s plot was entirely frustrated by the sluggish indifference and greater humanity of her consort. So greatly annoyed was his wife at his reluctance to accept the crown by killing or blinding his brother-in-law, that she bitterly reproached nature in a phrase which must be left in the obscurity of the original language, for having made the mistake of creating her a woman and him a man. The conspiracy was discovered; but the Emperor treated his sister with more mercy than she deserved, contenting himself with bestowing her richly furnished palace upon his favourite and faithful minister. Even this punishment, at the instance of the minister himself, was rescinded; her palace was restored to the princess; her husband held office under the new Emperor and accompanied him in the Syrian campaign of 1137; but her pride was wounded by her brother’s magnanimity. She retired in Byzantine fashion to the convent of Our Lady of Grace, founded by her mother, the ex-Empress Irene, whose charter has been preserved.

At the age of thirty-five her career at Court was over; her old friends, courtier-like, turned away from her to worship the rising sun; her mother, her favourite brother, her husband, whom, despite his weakness of character and unwillingness to reign, she loudly praises in her history and regarded with obvious affection[951], successively passed away. Their son, Alexios, who took his mother’s surname, held office under her nephew, the Emperor Manuel, as Lord High Admiral. She bitterly complains, with her customary rhetorical exaggeration, of her hard lot since her eighth year, when her brother John was associated with his father in the Imperial dignity; to enumerate her sufferings and her enemies, she exclaims, “requires the Siren eloquence of Isokrates, the deep voice of Pindar, the vehemence of Polemon, the muse of Homer, the lyre of Sappho.” For twenty-nine years she had not seen or spoken with any of her father’s friends, of whom many were dead, and many were afraid to visit her. She compares herself with Niobe, and introduces into her history transparent allusions to her treatment by “the great,” and to the folly of her father’s successors—both monarchs of distinction[952]. Under these circumstances, she endeavoured to console herself with the composition of her history—a work written mostly, as she tells us, under the reign of her nephew, Manuel I, who ascended the throne in 1143. By 1148, at the age of 65, she had finished her work; the date of her death is unknown.

The princess had set herself the filial task of writing a biography of her father from 1069 to his death in 1118, thus covering the whole of his reign and twelve years before it. Her history thus formed a continuation of those composed by Attaleiates and by her husband, the former of whom had narrated the events of the years 1034 to 1079, the latter those of the years 1070 to 1079. As it had been the object of the former to glorify the still living Botaneiates, so it was the aim of the latter to whitewash Alexios, representing him as a legitimate sovereign, who had merely renounced the throne, once occupied by his uncle.

She begins her history by describing her father’s exploits during the three previous reigns, the “three labours of Hercules[953],” as she characteristically calls his suppression of the rebellions of Oursel Bailleul, or Russell Balliol, a member of the family which founded Balliol College (whom Scott has, by a pardonable anachronism, represented as a fellow-prisoner of Count Robert of Paris in the dungeon), and his victory over the two pretenders from Durazzo, her husband’s father, Nikephoros Bryennios, and Basilakios. She then proceeds to trace the career of the famous Norman leader, Robert Guiscard, and the causes of his war against the Byzantine Empire, the first attack of the Latin West against the Greek East and the forerunner of the Fourth Crusade. The second book is devoted to her father’s revolt against the Emperor Nikephoros Botaneiates and his seizure of the throne. With the third book begins his reign. She describes the Norman invasion, how Guiscard crossed the Adriatic, besieged and took Durazzo, the historic town which has played so large a part in the Balkan history of the last seven years, and which was then the western gate of the Byzantine Empire, just as in the days of Catullus and Plautus it had been the “tavern of the Adriatic.” In the sixth book we have Guiscard’s second expedition and death at the Cephalonian village, which, under the name of Phiskardo, still recalls the end of that famous Norman leader. Here is related the legend that in the opposite island of Ithake there was a ruined city, called Jerusalem; and thus was fulfilled the prophesy that Guiscard should die when he had reached Jerusalem. Similar prophecies were similarly accomplished in the case of Pope Silvester II, who died after celebrating mass in the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and in that of our King Henry IV, dying, as Shakespeare has narrated, in the Jerusalem chamber. Next follow the military operations in Asia Minor and against the Cumans, or “Scythians,” as the classically-educated writer calls them, in Europe. Then, after some account of the affairs of Crete and Cyprus and of the Dalmatian revolt, the tenth book treats of the heresy of Neilos, and introduces us to the First Crusade.

At this point the chief interest of this history for modern readers begins, for Anna Comnena is writing of a movement of world-wide importance, and her descriptions of the Crusading chiefs are those of an eyewitness. The eleventh book deals with the progress of the Crusaders in Asia—the capture of Nice, the foundation of the Principality of Antioch and of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the accession of Baldwin I, the quarrel of Alexios and Bohemond about Antioch and Laodicea, and Bohemond’s strangely contrived journey to Italy in a coffin with the odorous carcase of a dead cock. Books twelve and thirteen describe his second invasion of Albania, his siege of Durazzo, and his second pact of vassalage with Alexios, who gave him Antioch as a fief for life with the County of Edessa. The fourteenth book records his death, the siege of Tyre and the Turkish war, and gives an interesting account of the Bogomile heretics at Philippopolis. The last book is also partly occupied with their treatment by the Emperor, and ends with a somewhat mutilated description of the death of Alexios. Thus, as a later Greek epigram expressed it, the Alexiad ended when Alexios died.

As its name implies, the Alexiad is a biography rather than a history, with the Emperor as the central figure, placed in what his admiring daughter regarded as the most favourable light, but what, according to modern ideas, is sometimes quite the reverse. The Imperial biographer was well aware that she would be accused of partiality, and is at considerable pains to repudiate in advance the charge of filial prejudice. She specially pleads her unbiased judgment in dealing with her father’s career, declares that she does not like to praise her relatives or to repeat scandal, adapts Aristotle’s famous saying about Plato by averring that, if her father is dear to her, truth is dearer, and sums up her aim as “love of her father and love of truth[954].” She admits that he had some defects, that he stammered[955] and found difficulty in pronouncing the letter R; and she candidly avows that he was merely an instrument in the hand of his mother, Anna Dalassene, an excellent woman of business, when he first ascended the throne[956]. But she is apt to forget her precept of impartiality when she comes to describe his achievements. With characteristic exaggeration she exclaims that, “not even if another Demosthenes and all the chorus of the orators, not even if all the Academy and all the Stoic philosophers combined together to extol the services of Alexios, could they attain unto them”; and in another passage she asks, “what echo of Demosthenes or whirling words of Polemon, why, not all the muses of Homer, could worthily hymn his successes; I should say that not Plato himself, nor all the Porch and Academy combined together could have philosophised in a manner such as befitted his soul[957].”