SOURCE: "Byzantium and the Crusades: Education, Learning, Literature, and Art," in History of the Byzantine Empire 324-1453, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1952, pp. 487-505.

[In the following excerpt, Vasiliev examines the strong literary background of the Comneni imperial family.]

The time of the Macedonian dynasty was marked by intense cultural activity in the field of learning, literature, education, and art. The activity of such men as Photius in the ninth century, Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the tenth, and Michael Psellus in the eleventh, with their cultural environment, as well as the revival of the High School of Constantinople, which was reformed in the eleventh century, created favorable conditions for the cultural renaissance of the epoch of the Comneni and Angeli. Enthusiasm for ancient literature was a distinctive feature of the time. Hesiod, Homer, Plato, the historians Thucydides and Polybius, the orators Isocrates and Demosthenes, the Greek tragedians and Aristophanes and other eminent representatives of various sections of ancient literature were studied and imitated by the writers of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth. This imitation was particularly evident in the language, which, in its excessive tendency towards the purity of the ancient Attic dialect, became artificial, grandiloquent, sometimes hard to read and difficult to understand, entirely different from the living spoken tongue. It was the literature of men who, as the English scholar Bury said, "were the slaves of tradition; it was a bondage to noble masters, but still it was a bondage."³³⁹ But some writers expert in the beauty of the classic tongue nevertheless did not neglect the popular spoken language of their time and left very interesting specimens of the living tongue of the twelfth century. Writers of the epoch of the Comneni and Angeli understood the superiority of Byzantine culture over that of the western peoples, whom a source called "those dark and wandering tribes the greater part of which, if they did not receive birth from Constantinople, were at least raised and nourished by her, and among whom neither grace nor muse takes shelter," to whom pleasant singing seems "the cry of vultures or croak of crow."³⁴⁰

In the field of literature this epoch has a great number of interesting and eminent writers in both ecclesiastic and secular circles. The cultural movement also affected the family of the Comneni themselves, among whom many members, yielding to the influence of their environment, devoted a part of their time to learning and literature. The highly educated and clever mother of Alexius³⁴¹ I Comnenus, Anna Dalassena, whom her learned granddaughter Anna Comnena calls "this greatest pride not only of women but also of men, and ornament of human nature," often came to a dinner party with a book in her hands and there discussed dogmatic problems of the Church Fathers and spoke of the philosopher and martyr Maxim in particular.³⁴² The Emperor Alexius Comnenus himself wrote some theological treatises against heretics; Alexius' Muses, written a short time before his death, were published in 1913. They were written in iambic meter in the form of an "exhortation" and dedicated to his son and heir John.³⁴³ These Muses were a kind of political will, concerned not only with abstract problems of morality, but also with many contemporary historical events, such as the First Crusade.

Alexius' daughter Anna and her husband Nicephorus Bryennius occupy an honorable place in Byzantine historiography. Nicephorus Bryennius, who survived Alexius and played an important role in state affairs under him and his son John, intended to write a history of Alexius Comnenus. Death prevented Nicephorus from carrying out his plan, but he succeeded in composing a sort of family chronicle or memoir the purpose of which was to show the causes of the elevation of the house of the Comneni and which was brought almost down to the accession of Alexius to the throne. The detailed narrative of Bryennius discusses the events from 1070 to 1079, that is to say, to the beginning of the rule of Nicephorus III Botaniates; since he discussed the activities of the members of the house of the Comneni, his work is marked by some partiality. The style of Bryennius is rather simple and has none of the artificial perfection that is, for example, peculiar to the style of his learned wife. The influence of Xenophon is clearly evident in his work. Bryennius' work is of great importance both for internal court history and for external policy, and throws special light on the increase of Turkish danger to Byzantium.

The gifted and highly educated wife of Bryennius, the eldest daughter of Emperor Alexius, Anna Comnena, is the authoress of the Alexiad, an epic poem in prose.³⁴⁴ This first important achievement of the literary renaissance of the epoch of the Comneni is devoted to describing the glorious rule of Anna's father, "the Great Alexius, the luminary of the universe, the sun of Anna."³⁴⁵ One of Anna's biographers remarked: "Almost as far down as the nineteenth century a woman as an historian was indeed a rara avis. When therefore a princess arose in one of the most momentous movements in human history she surely deserves the respectful attention of posterity."³⁴⁶ In the fifteen books of her great work Anna described the time from 1069 to 1118; she drew a picture of the gradual elevation of the house of the Comneni in the period before the accession of Alexius to the throne and brought the narrative down to his death, thus making an addition to and a continuation of the work of her husband, Nicephorus Bryennius. The tendency to panegyrize her father is evident throughout the whole Alexiad, which endeavors to show to the reader the superiority of Alexius, this "thirteenth Apostle,"³⁴⁷ over the other members of the Comneni family. Anna had received an excellent education and had read many of the most eminent writers of antiquity, Homer, the lyric writers, the tragedians, Aristophanes, the historians Thucydides and Polybius, the orators Isocrates and Demosthenes, the philosophers Aristotle and Plato. All this reading affected the style of the Alexiad, in which Anna adopted the external form of the ancient Hellenic tongue and used, as Krumbacher said, an artificial, "almost entirely mummiform school language which is diametrically opposed to the popular spoken language which was used in the literature of that time."³⁴⁸ Anna even apologized to her readers when she chanced to give the barbarian names of the western or Russian (Scythian) leaders, which "deform the loftiness and subject of history."³⁴⁹ Despite her unhistorical partiality for her father, Anna produced a work which is extremely important from the historical point of view, a work based not only upon her personal observation and oral reports, but also upon the documents of the state archives, diplomatic correspondence, and imperial decrees. The Alexiad is one of the most important sources for the First Crusade. Modern scholars acknowledge that "in spite of all defects, those memoirs of the daughter about her father remain one of the most eminent works of medieval Greek historiography,"³⁵⁰ and "will always remain the noblest document" of the Greek state regenerated by Alexius Comnenus.³⁵¹

It is not known whether Alexius' son and successor, John, who spent almost all his life in military expeditions, was in accord with the literary taste of his environment or not. But his younger brother sebastokrator Isaak was not only an educated man who was fond of literature but was even the author of two small works on the history of the transformation of the Homeric epic in the Middle Ages, as well as of the introduction to the so-called Constantinopolitan Code of the Octateuch in the Library of Seraglio. Some investigations suppose that the writings of the sebastokrator Isaac Comnenus were much more various than might be judged from two or three published short texts, and that in him there is a new writer, who arouses interest from various points of view.³⁵²

The Emperor Manuel, who was fond of astrology, wrote a defense "of astronomic science," that is to say, of astrology, against the attacks made upon it by the clergy, and in addition he was the author of various theological writings and of public imperial speeches.³⁵³ Because of Manuel's theological studies, his panegyrist, Eustathius of Thessalonica, calls his rule an "imperial priesthood" or "a kingdom of priests" (Exodus, 19:6).³⁵⁴ Manuel was not only himself interested in literature and theology but he endeavored to interest others. He sent Ptolemy's famous work, the Almagest, as a present to the king of Sicily and some other manuscripts were brought to Sicily from Manuel's library at Constantinople. The first Latin version of the Almagest was made from the manuscript at about 1160.³⁵⁵ Manuel's sister-in-law Irene distinguished herself by her love for learning and by her literary talent. Her special poet and, probably, teacher, Theodore Prodromus, dedicated to her many verses, and Constantine Manasses composed his chronicle in verse in her honor, calling her in the prologue "a real friend of literature,"….³⁵⁶A Dialogue Against the Jews, which is sometimes ascribed to the period of Andronicus I, belongs to a later time.

This brief sketch shows how powerfully the imperial family of the Comneni was imbued with literary interests. But, of course, this phenomenon reflected the general rise of culture which found expression especially in the development of literature and was one of the distinctive features of the epoch of the Comneni. From the time of the Comneni and Angeli, historians and poets, theological writers as well as the writers in various fields of antiquity, and, finally, chroniclers, left works which give evidence of the literary interests of the epoch.

Notes

³³⁹ Bury, Romances of Chivalry, 3.

³⁴⁰ Nicetas Choniates, Historia, Bonn ed., 391, 764, 791.

³⁴¹ On this subject see the extremely interesting and instructive popular sketch by Charles Diehl, "La Société byzantine à l'époque des Comnènes," Revue historique du sud-est européen, VI (1929), 198-280.

³⁴² Anna Comnena, Alexias, III, 8; V, 9; ed. Reifferscheid, I, 113, 181-82.

³⁴³ Maas, "Die Musen des Kaisers Alexios I," Byzantinische Zeitschrift, XXII (1913), 348-67.

³⁴⁴ Hesseling, Byzantium, 336; in French, 321; complete English translation by E. Dawes (1928).

³⁴⁵ Anna Comnena, Alexias, XV, 11 ; ed. Reifferscheid, II, 315, 316.

³⁴⁶ F. J. Foakes-Jackson, "Anna Comnena," Hibbert Journal, XXXIII (1934-35), 430.

³⁴⁷ Anna Comnena, Alexias, XIV, 8; ed. Reifferscheid, II, 259.

³⁴⁸ Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur, 277.

³⁴⁹ Anna Comnena, Alexias, X, 8; VI, 14; ed. Reifferscheid, I, 122; II, 81.

³⁵⁰ Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur, 276.

³⁵¹ C. Neumann, Geschichte Geschichtschreiber und Geschichtsquellen im zwölflen Jahrhundert, 28. For long Anna Comnena has been known chiefly by the appearance of her name in Sir Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris, but she has been so transformed "by the touch of the Wizard of the North" as to be quite unrecognizable. In one of the scenes of the novel (in chap. IV) Anna reads an extract from her history, the story of the retreat of Laodicea, which does not appear in the Alexiad. Foakes-Jackson, "Anna Comnena," Hibbert Journal, XXXIII (1934-35), 441.

³⁵² Th. I. Uspensky, "The Constantinopolitan Code of Seraglio," Transactions of the Russian Archeological Institute at Constantinople, XII (1907), 30-31.

³⁵³ Cinnamus, Historia, Bonn ed., 290. Nicetas Choniates, De Manuele, VII, 5; Bonn ed., 274-75. Manuel's defense of astrology is written in the form of a letter to a monk who had "disparaged astronomic science and called its study impiety," and is published in the Catalogus codicum astrologorum, V (1), 108-25.

³⁵⁴Fontes rerum byzantinarum, I (1), 6; see also vii.

³⁵⁵ See C. H. Haskins, "The Spread of Ideas in the Middle Ages," Speculum, I (1926), 24. Haskins, Studies in Medieval Science, 143, 161. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 292.

³⁵⁶Compendium chronicum, Bonn ed., 3, v. 3.

Bibliography

Bury, J. B. Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil. Oxford, 1911.

Cinnamus, John. Historia. Ed. Meineke, A. (Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae.) Bonn, 1838.

Fontes rerum byzantinarum. Ed. Regel, W. St. Petersburg, 1892. Vol. 2. Petrograd, 1917.

Krumbacher, K. Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur von Justinian bis zum ende des oströmischen reiches (527-1453). Munich, 1891. 2nd ed., 1897.

Neumann, C. Griechische Geschichtschreiber und Geschichtsquellen im zwölften Jahrhundert. Studien zu Anna Comnena, Theodor Prodromus, Johannes Cinnamus. Leipzig, 1888.