She tells us that her father hated not only lying but the appearance of lying; yet, she naïvely applauds his sharp practice in sending letters to Bohemond’s officers, in which he thanked them for letters to himself which they had never written, in order to compromise them with their chief; she acknowledges without a blush how he deceived the Crusaders at the taking of Nice; and she describes with admiration how he invited the Bogomile heretic, Basil, to a private colloquy, telling him that he admired his virtue and urging him to make a full statement of his doctrine, while all the time a secretary, concealed behind a curtain, took down the statements which fell from the unsuspecting heresiarch’s mouth and which were used as evidence against him to send him to the stake. Such tactics only evoke from the complaisant daughter the laudatory comment, that her father’s theological skill in dealing with heretics like the Manichæans should earn him the title of “the thirteenth apostle[958].” Modern readers will agree with Finlay that “even Anna’s account makes the Bogomilian a noble enthusiast, and her father a mean traitor.”
Yet Alexios was, in spite of these moral defects, a brave soldier, who, however, usually followed the plan of gaining a victory by craft, if craft were possible. His character was a combination, not uncommon in the Near East, of courage and intrigue; he was no coward, but he was a born schemer, rather than a statesman. Like many Byzantine rulers, he had a weakness for theology—a dangerous taste in an autocrat—and his daughter describes with admiration how he lectured the heretic Neilos on the doctrine of the Trinity, and how he ordered a monk named Zygavenos to compile a list and refutation of all the heresies, under the title of “A Dogmatic Panoply.” He had the politician’s love for an immediate success, rather than for a lasting benefit, although he was, as his daughter tells us, fond of playing chess, in which immediate success counts for less than a far-seeing plan. Thus, to obtain the temporary advantage of securing the aid of the Venetian fleet against the Normans, he gave the Venetians enormous commercial concessions throughout his Empire, which were one of the causes, 120 years later, of the Latin capture of Constantinople. The policy of Alexios Comnenos has had disciples in Southern and South-Eastern Europe in our own day; but the most successful Greek statesman of our time attained his wonderful triumphs by frankness and honesty of purpose, to which the Byzantine Emperor was a stranger.
But Anna’s partiality is not limited to her father; it extends to other members of her family, except, of course, her brother, the Emperor John II, who was, in reality, an excellent sovereign. Although she despised her husband’s weakness in not seizing the throne, she praises in Homeric language his skill as an archer, and devotes a long passage to the learning and wisdom, the strength and physical beauty, which made “my Cæsar,” as she affectionately calls him, what Achilles was among the Homeric Greeks. Like Achilles, he was a fine soldier, but, like not a few soldiers of Byzantium, he was also a student and a writer, who composed his history at the command of that “most learned mind and intelligence” as he called his wife’s mother, the Empress Irene[959]. Of that lady her daughter writes with enthusiasm, comparing her with Athena, and praising her for her zealous study of the branch of science which was most appreciated at the Byzantine Court—dogmatic theology. The Empress, so her daughter tells us, did not like publicity; she preferred to stay at home and read religious books; and, when she was obliged to perform any Court function, she blushed like a girl[960].
Of her fiancé, the young Constantine, the Princess writes with an enthusiasm which seems to come from the heart. She describes him as “a living statue,” and says that “if any one merely looked at him, he would speak of him as a descendant of the fabled age of gold”; and she confesses that after all these years the memory of this youth filled her eyes with tears. To the beauty of his mother, the Dowager-Empress Maria, by whom she was in part educated, she has dedicated a glowing passage, in which she likens her to a cypress in stature, with a skin white as snow—in short, a statue such as neither Phidias nor Apelles ever produced, “for such a harmony of all the members was never yet seen in any human body.” Thus, the Court circle of the reign of Alexios Comnenos, if we may believe his daughter, was a galaxy of that beauty which modern society journals assume to be the attribute of royal ladies.
It must not, however, be imagined that Anna Comnena, because she wrote like a Princess and a daughter, is not a valuable historian. She possessed a first-hand knowledge of the events of a large part of her father’s reign; and, as she tells us, she drew her information about the events, of which she had not been an eyewitness, largely from her father’s fellow-comrades in war, men like George Palaiologos, the defender of Durazzo, as well as from her father himself. Writing in the reign of Manuel I, when no one was interested in flattering the long-dead Alexios, she could claim, like Tacitus, that the time had arrived to describe his distant reign “sine irâ et studio.” From her birth and position, she possessed what mere scribes in all ages lack, an intimate acquaintance with the men who are really making history. She knew courts, and, a princess of the blood royal herself, she made the frank admission that even her father, against whom there were constant plots, was no exception to the rule that subjects usually dislike their sovereigns[961].
She had access to State papers, which to the ordinary literary man would have remained inaccessible for generations. Thus, she gives us the ipsissima verba of the golden bull appointing the Empress-mother, Anna Dalassene, regent in the absence of her son, and the text of her father’s letter to the Emperor Henry IV, his “most Christian brother,” urging him to attack Guiscard in Southern Italy, offering him money, and suggesting a marriage between one of Henry’s daughters and his own nephew. These curious pieces are of interest as a specimen of the Byzantine Chancery’s epistolary style; and we note the care with which the Byzantine Emperor, who regarded himself as the sole heir of all the Cæsars, avoided giving the Imperial title to this Western “brother,” whom Anna describes by the Latinised form rex, while reserving for her father the more dignified title of basileús[962]. She gives, too, the full text of the lengthy agreement made between Alexios and Bohemond in 1108, which she probably had from her husband, who negotiated that treaty—a document of much value for the historical geography of the Holy Land during the Latin domination[963]. She has apparently used for her account of Guiscard a now lost Latin Chronicle, perhaps the work of the Archdeacon John of Bari, which was employed by William the Apulian as material for his Latin poem on that Norman chief, for she quotes the envoy of the Bishop of Bari as having described to her an incident in the campaign of Guiscard, at which he was present[964].
She had access, also, to the simple and unvarnished memoirs of retired veterans, and was therefore well posted in military affairs. Her accurate use of technical military terms would do credit to a war-correspondent of the scientific school, while the glowing rhetoric of some of her descriptions would win the admiration of the modern descriptive writer, who, not being allowed to see anything of the operations, has to fall back upon the scenery. As examples of her military phraseology[965] may be cited the words ἐξώπολον for the circle outside the camp, κοπός (or σκοπός) used in soldiers’ slang to designate their “fatigue parties,” and ἀρχοντόπουλοι, a term originally applied to the corps of soldiers’ sons first formed by her father, but extended in modern Greek to mean the children of any notables. She twice uses the technical term for a galley, and gives an elaborate description of the cross-bow, then an unknown weapon to the Greeks. More interesting still, she allows us to read, imbedded in her severely literary Greek, occasional specimens of the vulgar idiom used by the ordinary people in their conversation. Thus, she has preserved the popular lines about the successful conspiracy which placed her father on the throne; she cites a satiric verse about him during the Cuman war, and alludes to the comic song, sung in the vernacular, during the conveyance to execution of Michael Anemas, who had tried to kill him[966]. She so far forgets the dignity of historical narrative as to perpetrate two atrocious puns.
We find in her pages, too, some of the modern geographical names which had already, in popular speech, replaced the classical denominations for various Balkan mountains, rivers and towns. Thus, like her husband, she uses the modern name “Vardar” for the famous Macedonian river, instead of the classical “Axios”; she calls the Homeric “Ossa” by its present title of “Kissavos”; she describes the poetic “Peneios” as the “Salamvrias,” and uses the contemporary term “Dyrrachion” (whence comes the modern Italian “Durazzo” and the modern Serbian “Dratch”), as well as the older form “Epidamnos.” She apologetically asks no one to blame her for using such a vulgar name as “Vojussa,” with which the war has made us so familiar, for the classic river “Aoos[967].”
As a rule she adopts an exaggeratedly lofty style. Just as it was said of Dr Johnson, that he would have made “little fishes talk like whales,” so the learned Princess makes a man address a crew of boatmen in the language of Homer[968]. Her contemporary, the annalist Zonaras, says of her that “she employed an accurately Attic Greek style,” and that “she had applied herself to books and to learned men and did not merely hold incidental converse with them.” But she frequently descends to quite every-day words, with which students of such mediæval Greek works as the Chronicle of the Morea and of the ordinary language of to-day are familiar. Thus, she describes an army, just as the Chronicler described it, as φοσσάτον; the French forms “liege” and “sergeants” are scarcely disguised under her Greek renderings λίζιος and σεργέντιοι. The classic word for “plains” (πεδία) becomes, in her prose, κάμπαι; the poetic τέμπη assume (as in Attaleiates) the guise of κλεισούραι, while κουλᾶ thrice displaces the classic ἀκρόπολις; φάμουσα, the vulgar word for “libels,” has crept into her pages; and πιγκέρνης has supplanted οἰνοχόος as the term for the court butler[969]. She remarks that those who led a nomadic life were called in “the common dialect, ‘Vlachoi’”; she quotes the popular Byzantine mot, that “the Scythians (i.e. Cumans) missed seeing May by a single day,” because they were defeated on April 29, and makes her father, when Bohemond at first rejected his presents, humorously apply to himself the current saying, “Let a bad thing return to its own master” (αὐθέντην)[970].
One of the most interesting features of Anna Comnena’s history is the aspect which the First Crusade assumes in her pages. To Western historians the Crusades appeared as, on the whole, a great material benefit to Europe, quite apart from their religious and moral motives and results. But we learn from this Byzantine Princess, herself an eye-witness of the Crusaders’ arrival in her father’s capital, how this religious movement struck the Eastern Christians. The incursion of vast masses of more or less undisciplined soldiers into the Byzantine Empire naturally inspired alarm in the mind of its ruler, who feared—and the diversion of the Fourth Crusade from the redemption of the Holy Land to the capture of Constantinople three generations later justified his fears—that the pilgrims might be tempted to occupy his territories on the way. East and West rarely thoroughly understand one another; and the mutual reproaches of bad faith, which Greek historians have flung at the Crusaders and Latin historians at Alexios, were probably largely due, as is usually the case when two different nationalities quarrel, to a misunderstanding of one another’s mentality.