Anna Komnene

Also known as Anna Comnena, Anna Komnena

Byzantine princess and historian whose Alexiad — the biography of her father, Emperor Alexios I — gives the only sustained narrative of the First Crusade's passage through Constantinople from a Greek point of view.

Anna was the eldest daughter of Alexios I Komnenos and Irene Doukaina, born in the imperial purple chamber in 1083 and raised at the heart of the Byzantine court. She was an exceptionally educated woman — read in Aristotle, Homer, and the Church Fathers — and after the failure of her plot to secure the throne for her husband on her father's death she retired to the monastery of Kecharitomene, where in old age she composed the Alexiad.

The Alexiad covers her father's reign from 1081 to 1118 in fifteen books, and devotes its tenth and eleventh to the arrival of the First Crusade in 1096–97. Her sketches of the western leaders are unforgettable: Bohemond of Taranto, whom she clearly admired and feared, is rendered as a heroic giant whose blue eyes 'concealed an immense amount of guile'; Godfrey of Bouillon and the rest emerge mostly as quarrelsome barbarians whom her father had to bribe past Constantinople by careful turns.

The book is a Greek aristocratic eulogy of a beloved father, openly partisan and shaped by classical models — but it is the only contemporary view of the crusade from the receiving end, and the foundation for everything we know about Byzantine policy toward the Latin east in the years before the Crusader states took shape.

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