Alexios could scarcely feel reassured, when he heard that one of the Crusading chiefs was that same Bohemond who had fought against him in Thessaly, and whose father had sought a shadowy pretext to invade his Empire and capture Durazzo, “the Metropolis of Illyricum[971].” Anna tells us what were the Emperor’s feelings when he first heard the news of the forthcoming Crusade and the approaching advent of vast Frankish armies. “He feared,” she wrote, “their attack, knowing their unrestrainable dash, their changeable and easily influenced minds, and all the other qualities, or concomitant attributes, of the French character.... For the French race is extremely hot-blooded and keen, and whenever it has once started on any course, impossible to check.” She accused the Crusaders of treating treaties like “scraps of paper” and of inordinate love of lucre; “for the Latin race,” she wrote, “is in other respects most devoted to money.” In her eyes these “barbarians,” as she called them in the contemptuous language of a highly cultivated Greek, were actuated by motives very different from the ostensible aim of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidels. “In appearance,” she remarked, “they were on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but in truth they wanted to oust the Emperor from his throne and seize the capital.” She noticed the sudden ups and downs of the French character, rapidly going from one extreme to the other, and pathetically described how one cause of her father’s rheumatism in his feet was the constant exertion to which they subjected that patient monarch, by worrying him with their requests all day and all night, so that he could not even find time to take his meals[972]!

In these circumstances, it was perhaps hardly to be expected that he should be very enthusiastic about taking an active part in the Crusade, although he more than once ransomed captured Crusaders. Nor was his enthusiasm increased by such acts of spoliation as the erection into a Latin County and a Latin Principality respectively of Edessa, still governed at the time of the Latin conquest by a Greek governor, and of Antioch, which only fourteen years earlier had been nominally a part of the Greek Empire. Again, no sovereign, and not least the ceremonious Emperor of Byzantium, could have been expected to put up with such an affront as that described by Sir Walter Scott after Anna Comnena, when a boorish Crusading noble seated himself on the Emperor’s seat. Yet Alexios took this unwarranted act of rudeness with great tact and dignity, even though it had been accompanied by an insulting remark about “a yokel remaining alone seated while so many nobles were standing in his presence.” Indeed, he not only deigned to ask who this unmannerly churl might be, but gave him some excellent advice, derived from long personal experience, of the safest way to wage war against the Turks. The arrogant Frank paid with his life at the battle of Dorylæum for his neglect of the Emperor’s well-meant warning[973].

The literary Princess was not, however, so far led away by her national prejudices as to see no good in the Crusaders. She said of a very good Greek horseman, that “one would have thought him to be not a Greek, but of Norman origin,” so well did he ride. Indeed, the incapacity of the French to fight on foot struck her so forcibly that she remarked: “A Frenchman on horseback is unrestrainable and would ride through the walls of Babylon, but once dismounted he is at the mercy of the first comer.” For that reason her father bade his archers kill the horses of the Western cavaliers, for then the riders would be helpless[974]. She specially eulogises the honesty of the Comte de St Gilles, Isangeles, as she calls him, who “differed in all things from all the Latins, as much as the sun differs from the stars[975].” While she expresses the horror felt by her fellow-countrymen at the Church militant as represented by the fighting Latin clergy, armed with shield and spear[976], in her character of Guiscard, who did so much harm to her father, she praises his courage and strategic ability, and her description of Bohemond’s personal appearance is so detailed and so flattering that it may have been prompted by a very feminine motive. “No such man, whether barbarian or Greek,” she wrote of him, “was ever seen in the land of the Greeks (for he was a marvel to behold and a wonder to be narrated)[977].” Of the warlike wife of Guiscard, Gaïta, she says with mixed admiration and alarm, that “she was a Pallas, but not an Athena,” skilled in battle but not in arts, and terrible when armed with her lance and piercing voice.

Students of Balkan geography are no less indebted to Anna Comnena than are historians of the First Crusade. Her pages are full of the names of places, rendered household words to us by the events of the last seven years. On this subject she had access to a very high authority, her father, who possessed a minute knowledge of both coasts of the Adriatic with their harbours, a list of which he sent to his Admiral, and with the prevailing winds of that turbulent sea. Alexios was, in fact, an Adriatic specialist, as he would be described in the jargon of to-day. No writer on the historical geography of Durazzo could afford to neglect our author, who minutely describes the origin, topography, and contemporary condition of that famous town. She tells us that at that time most of the inhabitants were colonists from Amalfi and Venice; and she describes the walls of that now squalid little Albanian town as at that time so broad that more than four horsemen could safely ride abreast along them, while there stood a bronze equestrian statue over the eastern gate. She talks of the old Bulgarian capitals of “Pliskova” and “Great Pristhlava” (Pliska and Prêslav); she narrates the origin of Philippopolis, where she herself had lived for some time; and she makes one interesting allusion to the comparatively recent Norman Conquest of England in the passage, in which she says that Bohemond was aided in his second invasion of Albania by men from “Thule” (Britain)[978], which she also mentions as furnishing the Varangian guard. We know from a contemporary British historian how glad the English exiles were to fight in Greece against the Normans, and how Alexios built a town for them at Civetot, the modern Guemlek, on the Asiatic coast near Constantinople. We hear, too, how 300 of them defended Kastoria.

She uses the correct word jupan (or “count”) for the Serbian chieftains[979], but designates both King Michael (who was the first ruler of Dioklitia to bear the royal title and whose dominions included Scutari, Montenegro, the Herzegovina and the coast), and his son and co-regent, Bodin, as Exarchs of the Dalmatians[980]. She mentions also the contemporary “great” jupan of the other and inland Serbian state of Rascia, the modern sandjak of Novibazar, Vukan, describing him as “wielding the entire authority over the Dalmatians,” of whom she says that, “although they were Dalmatians, still they were Christians.” It is interesting to find in this passage that one of his nephews already bore the name of Urosh, so famous in the later Serbian dynasty of Nemanja, which etymologists derive from the Magyar word úr, meaning “lord.” The identification of the Serbians with “Dalmatians” would tend to prove the predominantly Serbian character of Southern Dalmatia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. She was acquainted, too, with the pirates, who infested the mouth of the river Narenta, and whom she twice mentions under the name of “Vetones.”

The name of the Albanians was known to Anna Comnena, as to her predecessors, Attaleiates and Skylitzes, the first Byzantine authors who applied it to that mysterious race. She notices the exclusive admiration felt by the Albanians, as by the modern British school-boy, for physical prowess, and remarks that in that country bodily strength and size were the principal requirements that made a man a suitable candidate for the purple and the diadem[981]. In the case, however, of that tall but inane guardsman, Prince William of Wied, gigantic size was not sufficient to ensure the loyalty of the Albanians. Anna Comnena is also the first writer who mentions the existence of the Wallachs[982] in Thessaly, soon to be called “Great Wallachia” by her successor Niketas, and “Wallachia” by Benjamin of Tudela, at a place called Ezeva near Mount Ossa. Notices of this kind are what make her history valuable to us rather than the classical reminiscences, which to her and her contemporaries were doubtless its chief merit. She complained of having to insert “barbarous names[983],” which “befouled” her historical style, in her polished narrative, just as some modern imitators of Cicero objected to employing words for recent inventions unknown to the Roman orator. She cited as an excuse the example of Homer, who disdained not to mention the Bœotians and certain barbarous islands for the sake of historical accuracy. Fortunately, the more plastic Greek language is usually quite equal to this difficulty, and even the uncouth names of French Crusaders and Serbian jupani are admitted to the honours of the Greek declensions by this skilled writer, of whom a contemporary said that, if the ancients had known her, “they would have added a fourth Grace and a tenth Muse.”

The time has come when it is no longer the fashion to decry Byzantine history and to deny the name of literature to the writings of the mediæval Greeks. Finlay rehabilitated the Byzantine Empire from the contempt which Gibbon had thrown upon it; in Greece a succession of modern writers, beginning with Paparregopoulos, in his great History of the Hellenic Nation, have reminded his countrymen that Greek history is a whole, and that contemporary Hellas owes as much, or more, to the great figures of the Middle Ages as to the heroes of classical antiquity; in France MM. Schlumberger and Diehl have combined, in truly French fashion, great erudition with great literary skill in dealing with the “Byzantine epic” of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and with the female figures that in various ages filled the Court of Constantinople. Of these Anna Comnena is perhaps the most curious. We are too much accustomed to regard Byzantine personages as merely so many stained-glass portraits, all decorations and angles, instead of men and women of like passions with ourselves. Anna Comnena was, in her loves and her dislikes, her vanities and her ambitions, very much a woman. Beneath her Attic prose, acquired by study and polished by art, there transpire the feminine feelings, which lend a peculiar turn to her history. Among the sovereigns, lawyers, statesmen, soldiers, and ecclesiastics who form the corpus of the Byzantine historians, she is the only woman.

AUTHORITIES

1. Nicephori Bryennii Commentarii. Bonn: Weber, 1836.

2. Michaelis Attaliotæ Historia. Bonn: Weber, 1853.