The Alexiad of Anna Comnena

"The date was the first of December in the seventh indiction. [1083] He [Alexius I Comnenus] found the empress in the throes of childbirth, in the room set apart long ago for an empress's confinement. Our ancestors called it the porphyra--hence the world-famous name porphyrogenitus. At dawn (it was a Saturday) a baby girl was born to them, who resembled her father, so they said, in all respects. I was that baby."

Born in a room lined with purple marble, that baby was Anna Comnena, who went on to write a history of her father Alexius' reign as Emperor of Byzantium from 1081-1118. 

The Comneni were a prominent Byzantine family and Alexius' uncle had been emperor from 1057-1059. But to become emperor in 1081 he had to lead a coup. The previous emperor Nicephorus Boutaniates was elderly and had no clear successor. As Anna tells it, Alexius and his brother Isaac became worried at the machinations in the palace, and decided to simply leave Byzantium. Whether that was exactly so or not, they ultimately decided the safest thing for them was simply to seize power.

Alexius and Isaac were both senior figures in the Byzantine military, with Alexius, the younger of the two brothers, holding the more senior office, Great Domestic of the West, which meant he was the supreme commander of military forces in the European half of the Byzantine empire. After some discussion between them it was Alexius who became emperor, though his brother remained a top official. Alexius as a general had been successful in staving off the various threats, but still the state of the empire in 1081 was bad. The Byzantines had lost the disastrous battle of Manzikert in what is now eastern Turkey in 1071, and the lands they had firm control of were little more than the city itself by the time Alexius proclaims himself emperor:

"Alexius knew that the Empire was almost at its last gasp. The east was being horribly ravaged by the Turks; the west was in a bad condition, while Robert [Guiscard] strained every nerve to put on the throne the pseudo-Michael who had taken refuge with him...The Romans [for Anna, what's our Byzantine Empire is still the Roman Empire] had no worthwhile forces; in fact there were no more than 300 soldiers in the capital...In the imperial treasury there were no reserves of money with which he could summon allies..."

The first ten years are pretty much constant warfare. He has to beat back the Seljuk Turks, the Normans under Robert Guiscard, and both Cuman and Pecheneg nomads from north of the Danube. A Seljuk Turk attempts to create a new state centred on Smyrna and leads sea raids up the Turkish coast, taking over Lesbos and Chios. All of that has to be stopped.

As Anna tells it, Alexius has a number of quite competent military assistants and advisers, starting with George Palaeologus. He doesn't often listen to them, though, and hot-headedly charges into battle, leading from the front, and getting beaten, even after Palaeologus suggested maybe that wasn't wise. In particular he loses three times to the Normans before he finally manages to fight them to a standstill. In the end it's mostly the death of Robert Guiscard which slows that source of attack.

It gets easier after ten years, but still not easy. There are a number of internal rebellions and the Pechenegs haven't yet given up, but the empire's boundaries are a bit more stable. Then the First Crusade comes through town. This is both opportunity and threat. The avowed enemy of the crusaders are the Muslims, and in particular the Seljuk Turks, who were also a traditional enemy of Byzantium. But how committed are the crusaders actually to their stated mission? And anyway do the Western Christians actually think the Eastern Christians are legitimately Christian? It's in these years that Alexius' reputation for wiliness gets established--Anna admires wiliness, even in enemies such as Bohemond, Robert Guiscard's son--and Alexius mostly gets the Crusaders to move on towards Jerusalem, and some of their conquests end up in his hands.

Then in 1118, he dies. How old he was is not perfectly clear with a range of dates for his birthday from 1048 to 1057. He's succeeded by his son John.

It's actually a pretty lively read, especially the early battle scenes. Anna says her father didn't like to talk about his military exploits in public, but if it was just the family, he could be persuaded to yarn away at dinner. Palace politics were a little harder to follow, especially as there were far too many people named Nicephorus--her husband, her husband's grandfather, who'd also been an emperor, the previous emperor, at least two rebel leaders. Nicephorus is the Greek for bringer of victory, so it's a well-omened name, but still, what's wrong with a nice George or John? (Not that there aren't a couple of those...)

Anna writes this at the end of her life, after she's been sent to a convent: she led a rebellion against her brother after her father died and that was her punishment. She says she has some old veterans she can talk to and ask questions of; she's got some treaties that she reproduces. She frequently quotes both the Bible and Homer; her Bible quotes tend to be a little fuzzy; her Homer is pretty accurate. Make of that what you will. 

Edward Gibbon, he of The Decline and Fall, complains she's too biased a source to be trusted, but the translator E. R. A. Sewter writes in the introduction that he thinks she's pretty accurate, and that was the standard scholarly opinion of the time (1969).  She clearly likes her father, and acknowledges the possibility of bias:

"I regard him as dear, but truth is dearer still."

In any case Alexius did begin a century of rule by Comneni, which was a late good moment in the history of the empire. 

I've been meaning to read this since I read Sir Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris. Scott says he uses Anna Comnena as a source, and she's a character in the novel as well; in the novel she's as a bit of a bore who insists on droning on at her literary teas. That felt a bit unfair, even as I was reading Scott, and now I've read the history, it seems quite unfair. She's engaging. One of the conspirators against Alexius is Anna's husband (a Nicephorus, of course), but that's unfair, too; he was loyal to Alexius and died of a fever while on campaign. The husband is also presented a bit of an anti-intellectual bonehead. Not true: he wrote a history of the period just before Anna's book, and Sewter says it's useful, though not as good as Anna's.

Some of Scott does clearly come from Anna, though. There is a crusader knight who hops on the throne in Byzantium and is just a general jerk, but his name is Latinus, according to Anna, and not Count Robert. Still that was the clear source for some of Count Robert's behaviour. Scott says he modelled Robert's wife Brenhilda on Gaita, Robert Guiscard's wife:

"Robert's wife Gaita, who used to accompany him on campaign, like another Pallas, if not a second Athena, seeing the runaways and glaring fiercely at them, shouted in a very loud voice: 'How far will ye run? Halt! Be men!'"

Hmm, maybe. I still say Brenhilda has more to do with some female warrior from Ariosto than any more realistic source.

Anyway, an enjoyable and interesting read. But one I meant to finish a week earlier because then it would have been a Big Book of Summer, one from my 20 Books of Summer list, and a good entry for Women in Translation month. Oh, well... 😉 Still it does count for the European Reading Challenge. It chronicles fighting in what is now Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, but Constantinople and many of the battles make it my trip to Turkey for the year.