A Byzantine princess who lost the throne wrote history's key account of the First Crusade era
Anna Komnene was presented with a crown at birth and raised as heir to Byzantium, until a baby brother displaced her. Whether she then plotted against him is still argued. What is certain is that in a convent she wrote the Alexiad, the most important source for her father's reign and the early Crusades.
She arrived on 1 December 1083 in the purple chamber of the palace in Constantinople, the room reserved for imperial births, and liked to call herself born and bred in the purple. Her father, Alexios I Komnenos, had seized power in 1081. To shore up his legitimacy she was betrothed as an infant to Constantine Doukas, son of a former emperor, and the pair stood in line for the throne until her brother John was named heir in 1092. Constantine died around 1094, and about three years later she married Nikephoros Bryennios, a soldier and historian from another former ruling family.
Her education was exceptional: literature, rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, geography, military affairs, mathematics and medicine. One funeral oration claims she read Homer in secret because her parents disapproved of its pagan gods. She put medicine into practice, treating her household, helping her father's doctors during his last illness, becoming an authority on gout and running a large Constantinople hospital.
The succession drama is where sources diverge. The historian Niketas Choniates portrays Anna and her mother pushing to replace John with Bryennios, John slipping the ring from his dying father's finger in 1118, and Anna scheming after the funeral until her husband refused to join, prompting her remark that nature had swapped their sexes. Some modern scholars accept that account; Leonora Neville argues that Choniates wrote almost a century later, that other sources give Anna a minor role, and that she was probably not involved.
She ended her life at the Kecharitomene convent her mother had founded, hosting learned gatherings on Aristotle. Bryennios had left a history of the era unfinished at his death, and she took up the task, writing the Alexiad in the 1140s or 1150s. She drew on veterans' recollections, family memories and imperial archives, apparently quoting Homer and the Bible from memory. She died in 1153.
Source: Anna Komnene
