Download PDF | Loulia Kolovou - Anna Komnene and the Alexiad_ The Byzantine Princess and the First Crusade-Pen and Sword History (2020).
221 Pages
Foreword
Anna Komnene is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of an intriguing empire. The Eastern Roman Empire, as it was properly called, or Byzantine, as it is mostly known, took over from Rome in 330 AD and flourished for over a thousand year until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Anna was an imperial princess, daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081-1118) and his wife, Empress Eirene Doukaina. A woman of extraordinary education and intellect, Anna Komnene is the only Byzantine female historian and one of the first and foremost historians in medieval Europe.
Yet not many people know her outside the rather narrow world of Byzantine Studies. And those who do know her have generally received a biased, skewered impression of the intellectual princess and powerful author, mediated through centuries of misreading and misogyny. They see her as an angry, bitter old woman who was forced to live the cloistered life of a nun for over thirty years as punishment for her murderous intentions. She had wanted the throne, the story goes, and coldheartedly conspired to overthrow and kill her brother, the lawful Emperor John I! Komnenos. She was the ultimate ‘nasty woman’, the unnatural shrew whose arrogance, ambition, and fury at having been thwarted led her to write an account of her father’s reign undoubtedly vivid and fascinating yet false, hypocritical, and vengeful. Right? Wrong.
Recent scholarship, new editions of old texts, modern readings help to establish the facts of Anna’s life in a very different light! Anna Komnene was an intellectual of an unprecedented calibre, author of an epic history of her father’s reign, the Alexiad, styled on the classical tradition in which Anna was raised and educated. She did write that history in her later years, after her husband, an aristocratic statesman and soldier, and a historian too, died and left her a widow, and she did write it in a convent which her mother built and endowed and of which Anna was the governor. But she was not exiled, and she was not a nun, at least not until the very last hours of her life. Her history could be said to be biased, but no more biased, and probably much more rigorous, than many of the historical accounts of her own time. And most importantly, she was not a conspirator, in spite of the historical tradition, formed on conjectures many decades after her death and prevailing for centuries due to the facility with which strong, self-asserting, authoritative women are condemned and maligned even in our own, more enlightened times.
This book aims to present Anna Komnene, the fascinating woman, pioneer intellectual, and charismatic author to the general public. Drawing on original medieval Greek texts as well as on the latest academic research to reconstruct Anna’s life, personality, and work, it moves away from the myth of Anna the conspirator and ‘power-hungry woman’ which has been unfairly built around her over centuries of misrepresentation. At the same time, it places Anna Komnene in the context of her own time, the medieval Eastern Roman Empire, known as Byzantium for its capital city, the ancient Greek colony and later magnificent city of Constantinople. A world renowned capital city of dazzling wealth, beauty, spirituality, and mystery (at least in Western eyes), Byzantium or Constantinople is the setting of an epic clash between East and West, of power games among the big aristocratic houses for the crown and the purple mantle and scarlet buskins — the Byzantine insignia of imperial power. The book sets Anna in the context of her own powerful family, whose strong women maintained the gilded throne for the dynasty for over a century; and all this within the epic power struggles of the great aristocratic houses against each other and against the rising powers of Western crusaders and Seljuk Turks.
My main source for the Greek primary texts was the amazing digitalised corpus of ancient Greek texts at the University of Calinforina, Irvine, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Literature. The TLG has all the latest editions of Greek texts, and sometimes links to English translations in the public domain: . Some of the texts cited below are freely accessible, others require registration and an account. All the original Greek texts cited were retrieved from the TLG in the editions as cited in Primary Sources. The translations throughout the book are mine unless otherwise stated.
I wrote this book in an effort to give the general public an idea of Anna Komnene and her world. I hope it will motivate readers to seek Anna’s book and know her through her own writing. In her inimitable Alexiad, Anna Komnene’s voice comes clear and convincing, the voice of a strong, intelligent, opinionated, exciting woman, as relevant, and perhaps more today as in her own time.
Glasgow, June 2019
Prologue
Time, which flies irresistibly and perpetually, sweeps up and carries away with it everything that has seen the light of day and plunges it into utter darkness, whether deeds of no significance or those that are mighty and worthy of commemoration ... Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of oblivion.
(Anna Komnene, The Alexiad, tr. E.R.A. Sewter revised by Peter Frankopan)
The past is a place / And it is lost / In the gloaming (Martin Cathcart Froden, ‘Fickle Fortune’)
Constantinople, Year of the World 6657 (AD 1147)
For the duration of that autumn, Constantinople, ancient Byzantium, Queen of Cities, the World’s Desire, had resembled an ocean hit by tempest. With approximately a quarter of a million permanent inhabitants plus thousands of visiting merchants, mercenaries, foreign envoys, scholars, pilgrims, and curious travellers of all colours and tongues, the city had always attracted the attention of the world. Often this attention has been unwanted and frightening, like recently when foreign armies stopped in the city, whether as friends or enemies it was not clear. These armies were on their way to liberate the Holy Land, ironically looting and burning and killing fellow Christians in their passage. Emperor Manuel Komnenos had received the leaders of those armies. King Conrad of Germany, his own kinsman, brother of his wife, Bertha of Sulzbach, and King Louis of France with his beauteous queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine stayed in his splendidly refurbished Palace of Blachernai, while their uncouth, undisciplined soldiers vandalised the suburbs of the great city itself, terrorising the populace. Such acts stirred the memories of another such passage, fifty years earlier, rekindling old fears.
For this was not the first time that Western armies had descended upon the city on their way to the Holy Land. Emperor Manuel would not remember; this was long before his time. His grandfather Emperor Alexios Komnenos had been sitting on the gilded throne then and his father, Emperor John Komnenos of blessed memory, had only been a child of 10. But there was one member in the family old enough to remember: his aunt Anna, the eldest sister of his late father, estranged from palace and court for as long as Manuel could remember. He was not interested in old aunts, especially when they were as terrifyingly clever and sharptongued as his Aunt Anna, an unusual woman whose intelligence and erudition frankly made everyone uneasy. His own mother of blessed memory, Eirene Piroska of Hungary, and his wife Eirene-Bertha, both silent, unobtrusive ladies of foreign royal blood, quietly preoccupied with their children and charitable works, were the proper models of what an imperial woman should be like. What business did a woman have being a scholar and a philosopher?
Not far from the Palace of Blachernai, in the western part of the city, in the neighbourhood called Defteron, the night is drawing in over the convent of Theotokos Kecharitomene (Mother of God Full of Grace). The air is ringing with the insistent metallic rapping of the semantron, calling the small congregation of twenty-five nuns to Vespers and Compline, its call reciprocated from the adjacent male monastery of Christ Philanthropos. Intricate patterns of sound waft towards a palatial building situated within the high convent walls, but set well apart from the nuns’ quarters, separated from them with extensive, leafy grounds and a low wall with a door locked on both sides. In a high, airy, comfortable room, filled with books and papers, infused with light from the large windows in daytime, but now obscured with the long shadows of the evening, well-trained servants enter and begin to light the lamps, filling the room with pools of soft yellow light.
An aged lady is sitting at the scriptorium by the window, still working on a manuscript in the gloaming. She is dressed in austere black robes and maphorion, a black veil covering her head and shoulders; her garments, of the very best quality money can buy, are not those of a nun but of a widow. Her face is still beautiful, largely unlined, somewhat retaining the bloom of youth; it is an arresting face, with brilliant, penetrating eyes under arched eyebrows and an aquiline nose. The servants glide around her silently, respectfully. She puts down her pen and rubs her tired eyes and aching temples and fingers. She has been working all day; beyond the physical exertion of writing, it is the efforts of the mind that have exhausted her the most. She has been recalling events that took place a good many years ago, more than the lifespan of many of her servants and of the nuns who are now filing into church for the last service of the day, blissfully unaware of such toils as hers. They pray; she writes. Hers is a long and arduous task, for she is building up a rampart against time, against forgetfulness which like an immense river threatens to drown heroic deeds of men long gone. Her rampart is made of memory and its name is History. She, Anna Komnene, princess Porphyrogenita Kaisarissa, is writing about her father, Emperor Lord Alexios I Komnenos of blessed memory, dead for over thirty years, but now slowly coming back to life, resurrected in the writing of his daughter.
Anna Komnene’s historical work in fifteen volumes, entitled The Alexiad — an homage to Homer’s Iliad, the model for many authors writing in the classical tradition — is one of the most important medieval Greek works of history and the only one in the whole corpus written by a woman. The Alexiad, as the name itself betrays, focusses on Alexios as the main hero of the story. In a brilliant and colourful narrative, Anna describes Alexios’ rise to power and his ceaseless, untiring efforts to limit the damage done to the empire by half a century of feckless predecessors and almost two decades of disastrous civil wars. A vast array of other characters, major players in the events of the late eleventh century, march through Anna’s pages, vividly and shrewdly described. Many of them were personally known to Anna or were even members of her own family, since she was related by blood or marriage to many of the most important families in the empire. Much of her information comes straight from the sources, from the personal reminisces of historical events which she heard straight from the protagonists — a privileged position for a historian. Additionally, she spoke to many other eyewitnesses or to those who had collected information from those witnesses, ‘men who are now mostly in monasteries and who have written down their accounts of those events in plain language’ and she had access to many of the state archives and documents. What is more, she had the best models for writing history, the great classical historians of Antiquity Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, and the best guides for literary style, anong whom Homer was most prominent.
Anna’s history reconstructs a time when her world came into large-scale contact, initially with wary friendliness, later with open hostility and violence, with Western Europeans, at the time of the Crusades. Anna witnessed the First Crusade (1095-1099) and was the only Greek historian to write about it. According to some modern historians, it was Anna’s father, Emperor Alexios Komnenos, who triggered or incited the First Crusade by his call for help to Pope Urban II in 1095, as the empire was threatened in its eastern borders. Whether Alexios’ desperate plea at a time when his empire was besieged by the Seljuk Turks was the definitive reason for the Crusades or not, it is certain that the history of the Eastern Roman Empire would from now on be inextricably linked with the West, for better or for worse. Anna Komnene, writing her historical work on the First Crusade possibly at the time of the Second (1047-1049), seems to have been the first and possibly only historian of her time to grasp the significance of those events for the future of the empire, which was ruled by her own family.
Anna Komnene’s formidable intellect and acute historical perception were admired by Edward Gibbon, if we consider real admiration to reside in acts rather than words: Gibbon used Anna’s history extensively as source in his magisterial History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1775-1881) and essentially agreed with her judgments, nevertheless disparaging her as a ‘vain female author’ in the misogynistic context of his era. The fact that Anna was a woman played an important part in how she was perceived not only as an author but as a historical character as well. The denial of authority to women, pervasive in the premodern and early modern eras, meant that a woman with the intellectual authority of a historian was viewed suspiciously as a trespasser into fields of masculine authority, and therefore as an unnatural, ‘manly’ woman.
In Anna case, things became a little more complicated by the fact that she was the firstbom daughter of an emperor, married to a powerful aristocrat, Nikephoros Bryennios the Younger (c. 1078-1138), whose grandfather Nikephoros Bryennios the Elder had been a contestant for the throne in the civil wars of 1070s. The younger Bryennios had great power and influence at court and was a great favourite with his mother-in-law, Anna’s mother, Empress Eirene Doukaina. As other historians of the time noted, on the day Alexios Komnenos died, the behaviour of his son and heir John Komnenos (1088-1143), who abandoned his dying father to rush to the Great Palace and by tricking the Varangian Guard to enter and establish himself as emperor, was rather strange, giving rise to gossip about imminent moves of other members of the family to grab power; some of the gossip implicated Anna indirectly or, later, directly. Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates (c. 11501127), writing about ninety years after these events, presents it as a fact that Anna herself had conspired against her brother for the throne, although no contemporary source confirms this view.
But consequent historians by repeating Choniates’ story with interpretative comments of their own, consolidated Anna’s reputation as a ‘power-hungry’ woman, a conspirator, and a traitor who ended up writing her history in bitterness and regret for the lost throne she had allegedly coveted. But recently this view has been undergoing some revision, as the historical evidence is re-examined and Anna’s place in history reconsidered. Literature saw in Anna the ‘power-hungry’, masculine woman, but also the first model of a modern intellectual woman striving to balance family and writing. At the same time, her Alexiad is still in print (in the English language it is available in the Penguin Classics series in an excellent and flowing translation, doing justice to Anna’s vibrant storytelling). Her vivid and powerful writing makes its own case for Anna’s value as a historian and writer, regardless of whether she was a conspirator and usurper manque.
Much of what we know and can surmise about daily life in general and Anna Komnene’s life in particular also comes from texts. The following portrait of the family is reconstructed on the basis of contemporary sources, beginning with Anna herself, who left us descriptions of her parents and some of her siblings in the Alexiad. Her historian husband, Nikephoros Bryennios, wrote in detail about the generation of their parents and grandparents. Anna’s contemporary and friend George Tornikes, Bishop of Ephesus, wrote a long obituary full of details about her personal life and character. Although we must be aware that much of what he says may be an idealised rather than a factual account of Anna’s character and features, we still manage to get a glimpse of her life and get as near Anna as possible beyond her own writings. Another contemporary, historian and judge John Zonaras, presents some of the dysfunctional aspects of the Komnenos — Doukas family dynamics in his critique of Alexios Komnenos and his regime; and Niketas Choniates, a historian and courtier who wrote many decades later, paints an even darker picture of Anna and her family.
There are snippets of information to be gleaned in court poetry written mostly by Theodore Prodromos or other court poets at the occasion of important family events, such as weddings and funerals, some of them involving Anna’s children. The foundation charter written by Eirene Doukaina, Anna’s mother, for the convent she established in Constantinople in the 1110s, gives us clues about Anna’s final years. Finally, we have the intriguing prologue to Anna’s own last will and testament, but sadly not the body of the will itself. But we must make do with what we have, which is enough to allow a glimpse of Anna’s life at home, making allowances for the unavoidable rhetorical exaggeration and decorum of the sources.
As Anna Komnene puts her pen down after a day of hard work at the scriptorium, she has a strong sense of the importance of her book and of history books in general: history, she tells us in the prologue of her book, is a dam erected by the historian to stop the river of time from letting important events sink and perish into the sea of forgetfulness. As a historian, it is her duty not to allow the deeds of Emperor Alexios Komnenos to sink into obscurity.
The act of writing history is also an act of personal commemoration: these are the deeds not only of important historical characters but also of members of her family, people she has known and loved and now are long gone. The act of history is also an act of mourning, inevitable when recalling the past and all that was lost. As the sun sets over the land, Porphyrogenita Kaisarissa Lady Anna Komnene Doukaina Bryennaina, daughter, sister, great-niece and aunt of emperors, the most educated woman of her times, recalls the dead as their dear faces rise in the gloaming. Putting away her pen, she prepares to turn in for the night. Tomorrow she will continue building her bulwark of memory against oblivion.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق