SOURCE: "A Byzantine Bluestocking: Anna Comnena," in The Quarterly Review, Vol. 233, No. 462, January, 1920, pp. 62-81.

[In the following excerpt, Miller provides an overview of Anna's life: her family history, her education, and her importance as historian and historical geographer.]

One of the differences between classical and modern literature is the rarity of female writers in the former and their frequency in the latter. While we have lady historians and poets in considerable numbers, while the fair sex has greatly distinguished itself in fiction, including that branch of it which is called modern journalism, ancient Greek letters contain the names of few celebrated women except Sappho, Myrtis and Corinna, the competitors of Pindar; Erinna, whose poetic fancy her mother strove to restrain by chaining her to her neglected spinning-wheel; and Elephantis, whose poetry was considered too realistic for display upon drawing-room tables. Novels were in those days chiefly written by bishops—a class of men not now usually associated with light literature. In Latin literature, although Juvenal has drawn a picture of the learned lady weighing in the critical balance the respective claims of Homer and Virgil, the poem attributed to Sulpicia is almost the sole surviving example of female composition. It has been reserved for Byzantine literature to present us with the rare phenomenon of a first-class lady historian—first-class, that is to say, according to the standards of that day—in the person of the Imperial Princess, Anna Comnena, a writer better known to the general public than are most Byzantine authors owing to the fact that Sir Walter Scott introduced her as one of the characters in 'Count Robert of Paris,' and based one of the chief episodes of that novel upon a historical event recorded in her life of her father.

Since Scott's time, novelists and dramatists have done something to popularise Byzantine history. Neale, in his 'Theodora Phranza,' daughter of the last Byzantine historian, has described the capture of Constantinople by the Turks; Sardou produced on the stage a far more famous Theodora, the consort of Justinian, whom Prokopios so virulently besmirched in his 'Secret History.' Mr Frederic Harrison has portrayed in 'Theophano' the ambitious and unscrupulous wife and widow of the Emperors Romanos II and Nikephoros Phokas. Jean Lombard in 'Byzance' depicted, with immense erudition, the games and ceremonial of the Imperial city and court in the time of the Iconoclast Emperor, Constantine V Copronymus, and endeavoured to solve the Balkan question by marrying and placing on the throne the Slav Oupravda and the Greek Eustokkia; while Marion Crawford gave us in 'Arethusa' a story from a much later period, the year 1376, based upon the struggle at the Court of John V between the Venetian adventurer, Carlo Zeno, and the Genoese, for the possession of the isle of Tenedos, the key of the Dardanelles.

Anna Comnena was born in 1083 at an interesting moment in the history not only of the Greek Empire, but of Christendom. It was the time when the Mediæval West and the Mediæval East first met; when the Normans, after their recent conquest of England and Southern Italy, first crossed the Adriatic and Ionian seas to attack the Greek Empire, soon to be followed by the hosts of the First Crusade. Just as, with the accession of William the Conqueror fifteen years earlier, a new order of things had begun in Northern Europe, so with the accession of her father, the Emperor Alexios I Comnenus, in 1081, two years before her birth, a new era, and practically a new dynasty—though Alexios was not the first of the family to seize the throne—had begun at Byzantium. From 1025, the end of the long and glorious reign of Basil II, whom the Greeks of to-day still admire as the 'Bulgar-slayer,' the destroyer of the first Bulgarian Empire on those selfsame battlefields of Macedonia where ex-King Constantine defeated the Bulgarians in the second Balkan war of 1913, the Byzantine throne had been occupied by no less than twelve sovereigns, whose consecutive reigns filled a period scarcely longer than that embraced by the single reign of the great Basil. After the death of his brother and successor, Constantine VIII, there began a period of palace intrigues and female influence, for Constantine's two mature daughters, Zoé and Theodora, assigned the throne to whomsoever they chose; and the successive marriages of the elderly Zoé furnished Psellos with a chronique scandaleuse of the Imperial Court and boudoir, and MM. Schlumberger and Diehl with their brilliant modern paraphrases of the contemporary writer. When, with the death of Theodora, the Macedonian dynasty came to an end in the person of its last representative, revolution succeeded revolution. Every general of aristocratic birth was justified in believing that he carried in his baggage the red boots which were the peculiar mark of the Imperial dignity; and a female regency enabled the Empress Eudokia to bestow the Empire with her hand. At last, the ablest and astutest of the Byzantine commanders, Alexios Comnenus, deposed the feeble old voluptuary, Nikephoros Botaneiates, whose Slavonic ministers had discredited his authority by their 'barbarous' pronunciation and foreign origin, and placed himself and his descendants upon the throne for one hundred years.

These internal dissensions had naturally injured the external prestige of the Empire and contracted its frontiers. It was then that there came the final separation between the Eastern and the Western Churches; it was then, too, that, by the loss of Bari, Brindisi, and Otranto, the Byzantine Empire forfeited its last Italian possessions. Meanwhile, the advance of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor had pushed back the Greek frontier in a second continent close to the capital; and Anna Comnena declares that, on her father's accession, 'the Bosphorus was the eastern, and Adrianople the western, limit of the Greek sceptre.' Alexios, she proudly adds, 'widened the circle of the Empire, and made the Adriatic its western, the Euphrates and the Tigris its eastern, border' ('Alexias,' i, 214-215).

Yet, as she truly says, her father had to contend all the time against enormous difficulties, alike domestic and foreign. At the outset of his reign, his throne was surrounded with possible pretenders. Both his immediate predecessors were alive, although the one was a bishop, the other in a monastery, besides four sons of dethroned Emperors who had received the Imperial title during their fathers' reigns, and several persons who had endeavoured unsuccessfully to seize and keep the crown. There were constant conspiracies against Alexios so long as he sat on the throne, while the eternal theological questions, which were the favourite mental distraction of Byzantium, caused him constant anxiety; for there, as in the Balkans to-day, theology and politics were inextricably mingled. From abroad there came, too, the menace of invasion on all sides—from the wild tribes of the Patzinaks and Cumans on the north, from the Normans on the west, from the Turks on the east. And, worse than all, the unhappy Alexios was suddenly called upon to cope with the hurricane of the First Crusade, and to find his Empire overrun by swarms of fierce warriors, whose motives he suspected and whose intentions he judged from their acts to be predatory.

Alexios owed his crown to a successful insurrection; but he was no vulgar upstart. He belonged to a rich family of Paphlagonia, where the Comneni held property at Kastamon, the modern Kastamouni, the place known in contemporary history as the exile for nearly thirty years of the late Mirdite Prince, Prenk Bib Doda. The Comneni had first come into prominence about a century earlier under Basil II; and one of the clan, the distinguished general, Isaac Comnenus, had occupied the throne from 1057 to 1059. Anna's father was this man's nephew, and, in spite of his uncle's brief reign, the real founder of the dynasty. For the Emperor Isaac, in a moment of discouragement and disillusionment, not only abdicated but failed to induce his brother John, the father of Alexios, to accept the heavy burden of the crown. It was not, however, to his timorous and unambitious father, but to his energetic mother, Anna Dalassene, that Alexios owed his success. She was resolved that her son should be Emperor, and during four intervening reigns, she was waiting and intriguing for the diadem which her husband had allowed to go out of his family. A great lady herself, the daughter of an eminent official and soldier, whose skill in never failing to kill his man had earned him the nickname of 'Charon,' she belonged, like the Comneni, to a powerful Asiatic family, one of whose members had been at first thought by Constantine VIII as worthy to succeed him, and had subsequently been regarded as a possible husband for the old Empress Zoé. Like many eminent Byzantine personages, she had known the reverses of fortune, and had at one time been exiled to Prinkipo. Such was the esteem which the Emperor Alexios felt for the mother, who had constantly encouraged and facilitated his ambition, that when, at the outset of his reign, he was compelled to leave his capital to fight against the Normans in Albania, he entrusted to her the absolute authority over the Empire during his absence. This is only one of many instances proving the influence of women in the Byzantine system. Thus, the mother of Alexios made history, his daughter wrote it; his mother made him Emperor, his daughter preserved the memory of his reign. Such were the origin and parents of the hero of the Alexiad. Let us now look at its author.

The literary Princess has given us in her history of her father a considerable amount of autobiographical information. Anna Comnena was not at all disposed to hide her light under a bushel, nor did she ever forget that she had been born in the purple chamber—the room to which an Empress was always removed when her confinement was imminent. Like most members of the reigning Imperial family, she received an excellent literary education. 'I am not destitute of letters,' she writes in her preface, 'but have thoroughly studied classical Greek'; and she adds that she had applied herself diligently to the mathematical quadrivium, to rhetoric, the philosophy of Aristotle, and the dialogues of Plato. In another passage she alludes to her knowledge of geometry. Her quotations show a wide range of reading. Her history contains citations from, or allusions to, Homer, Sappho, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotos, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, the 'Tactics' of Aelian, and the astronomer Eudoxos, while she repeats a whole sentence from Polybios and another from John of Epiphania, and shows, as Byzantine writers always do, great familiarity with the Bible. Niketas summed her up as 'acquainted with every art.'

Nor need we, who have in our own history a similarly learned lady of royal lineage, Lady Jane Grey, wonder at the erudition of this Byzantine bluestocking. There had been a recrudescence of literary culture in the 11th century at Byzantium, as in the 16th century in London. Shortly before Anna's birth the Imperial Court had been the scene of the many-sided activities of that remarkable man, Michael Psellos, 'the Prince of Philosophers,' as he was called by his contemporaries, the Voltaire of mediaeval Greek literature, at once philosopher, historian, lawyer, monk, courtier, and Prime Minister, who demonstrated, as other learned statesmen have proved, that great intellectual attainments may coincide with a poor character and political ineptitude. Another writer, the historian Michael of Adalia, or Attaleiates, who had gained by his legal abilities the favour of successive sovereigns, dedicated his history of his own times to the Emperor Nikephoros Botaneiates, and made a sufficient fortune out of speculations in real estate to found an almshouse for his less fortunate fellows. But in the time of Psellos and Attaleiates learning had disciples on the throne, as well as in the lecture-hall. The Imperial family of Doukas was noted for its devotion to literature; the collection of genealogies of gods and heroes, known under the title of 'Ionia' (or 'Violarium'), has been by some ascribed to the ambitious Empress Eudokia, wife of Constantine X Doukas and of his successor; while the Emperor Michael VII Doukas, who had been a pupil of Psellos and is known in history by the nickname of 'Parapinakes,' or the 'Peck-filcher,' from his fraudulent manipulation of the corn-monopoly, spent his time in composing iambics and anapæsts quite in the fashion of our classically-educated 18th-century statesmen, who lost us the American colonies and were stronger at Greek verses than at political economy. Even the old roué Botaneiates, was, if we believe his panegyrist Attaleiates, a lover of books. When Alexios succeeded him, he further encouraged literature; one of his physicians, Kallikles, was a writer of epitaphs, not always on his own patients; and the historian, John Skylitzes, who was a captain of the bodyguard, dedicated some legal treatises to this Emperor.

It was not, therefore, remarkable that Alexios' daughter was highly educated, nor that her husband, Nikephoros Bryennios, was, like herself, an historian, although, like Julius Caesar, he modestly described his work as merely supplying 'the materials for those who wished to write history.' A soldier by profession, the son of the pretender of the same name who had revolted against Michael VII, and had been crushed by Alexios, he defended Constantinople against Godfrey of Bouillon in 1097, and fought against the Sultan of Ikonium in 1116. Taking Xenophon, another literary soldier, as his model, he possessed, like Attaleiates, a much simpler and more straightforward style than his learned consort; and his soldierly prose is, although a glorification of his father-in-law, pleasing to read.

But the cultured Anna, unlike her husband, had other besides literary ambitions, of which her distracted account of her father's deathbed shows no trace. We learn, however, from the later historian, Niketas, of the mundane designs which agitated the bosoms of the Empress and her daughter at that solemn moment, of the efforts made by Irene to induce her expiring husband to disinherit his son in favour of his son-in-law, and how, when the dying Emperor lifted up his hands to heaven with a forced smile on his pallid cheeks, his wife bitterly re proached him with the words: 'Husband, all thy life thou hast been versed in every kind of deceit, saying one thing and thinking another; and now that thou art dying, thou art true to thine old ways.' Gibbon has summed up the remark in the caustic sarcasm: 'You die as you have lived—a hypocrite.' Nor was the virtuous Anna inclined to acquiesce in the accession of her brother John II. She had been, till his birth, the heiress-presumptive, and as such had been betrothed as a child to the son of the dethroned Emperor, Michael VII, the young Constantine Doukas, who died, however, before their marriage. She had thus missed the throne once, and was determined not to miss it again.

Scott, in his novel, has completely misrepresented the character of her husband by representing him as plotting to seize the throne, even during the lifetime of Alexios. Such a conception of the honest Bryennios is quite erroneous, for Anna's plot was entirely frustrated by the sluggish indifference and greater humanity of her consort. So greatly annoyed was his wife at his reluctance to accept the crown by killing or blinding his brother-in-law, that she bitterly reproached nature in a phrase which must be left in the obscurity of the original language, for having made the mistake of creating her a woman and him a man. The conspiracy was discovered; but the Emperor treated his sister with more mercy than she deserved, contenting himself with bestowing her richly furnished palace upon his favourite and faithful minister. Even this punishment, at the instance of the minister himself, was rescinded; her palace was restored to the princess; her husband held office under the new Emperor and accompanied him in the Syrian campaign of 1137; but her pride was wounded by her brother's magnanimity. She retired in Byzantine fashion to the convent of Our Lady of Grace, founded by her mother, the ex-Empress Irene, whose charter has been preserved.

At the age of 35 her career at Court was over; her old friends, courtier-like, turned away from her to worship the rising sun; her mother, her favourite brother, her husband, whom, despite his weakness of character and unwillingness to reign, she loudly praises in her history and regarded with obvious affection, successively passed away. Their son, Alexios, who took his mother's surname, held office under her nephew, the Emperor Manuel, as Lord High Admiral. She bitterly complains, with her customary rhetorical exaggeration, of her hard lot since her eighth year, when her brother John was associated with his father in the Imperial dignity; to enumerate her sufferings and her enemies, she exclaims, 'requires the Siren eloquence of Isokrates, the deep voice of Pindar, the vehemence of Polemon, the muse of Homer, the lyre of Sappho.' For 29 years she had not seen or spoken with any of her father's friends, of whom many were dead, and many were afraid to visit her. She compares herself with Niobe, and introduces into her history transparent allusions to her treatment by 'the great,' and to the folly of her father's successors—both monarchs of distinction. It was in these circumstances that she endeavoured to console herself with the composition of her history—a work written mostly, as she tells us, under the reign of her nephew, Manuel I, who ascended the throne in 1143. By 1148, at the age of 65, she had finished her work; the date of her death is unknown.

The princess had set herself the filial task of writing a biography of her father from 1069 to his death in 1118, thus covering the whole of his reign and twelve years before it. Her history thus formed a continuation of those composed by Attaleiates and by her husband, the former of whom had narrated the events of the years 1034 to 1079, the latter those of the years 1070 to 1079. As it had been the object of the former to glorify the still living Botaneiates, so it was the aim of the latter to whitewash Alexios, representing him as a legitimate sovereign, who had merely renounced the throne once occupied by his uncle.

She begins her history by describing her father's exploits during the three previous reigns, the 'three labours of Hercules,' as she characteristically calls his suppression of the rebellions of Oursel Bailleul, or Russell Baliol (whom Scott has, by a pardonable anachronism, represented as a fellow-prisoner of Count Robert of Paris in the dungeon), and his victory over the two pretenders from Durazzo, her husband's father, Nikephoros Bryennios, and Basilakios. The second book is devoted to her father's revolt against the Emperor Nikephoros Botaneiates and his seizure of the throne. With the third book begins his reign. Much space is given to the Norman invasions and the exploits of Robert Guiscard, who took Durazzo and eventually died in Cephalonia. After an account of various military operations in Asia Minor and elsewhere, and a narrative of events in Crete, Cyprus and Dalmatia, the tenth book introduces us to the First Crusade. At this point the chief interest of this history for modern readers begins, for Anna Comnena is writing of a movement of worldwide importance, and her descriptions of the Crusading chiefs are those of an eyewitness. Their progress in Asia is described; the romantic figures of Baldwin I and Bohemund pass before us; and their relations with Alexios are explained. The last book ends with a somewhat mutilated description of the death of Alexios.

As its name implies, the Alexiad is a biography rather than a history, with the Emperor as the central figure, placed in what his admiring daughter regarded as the most favourable light, but what, according to modern ideas, is sometimes quite the reverse. The Imperial biographer was well aware that she would be accused of partiality, and is at considerable pains to repudiate in advance the charge of filial prejudice. She specially pleads her unbiased judgment in dealing with her father's career, declares that she does not like to praise her relatives or to repeat scandal, adapts Aristotle's famous saying about Plato by averring that, if her father is dear to her, truth is dearer, and sums up her aim as 'love of her father and love of truth.' She admits that he had some defects, that he stammered and found difficulty in pronouncing the letter R; and she candidly avows that he was merely an instrument in the hand of his mother, Anna Dalassene, an excellent woman of business, when he first ascended the throne. But she is apt to forget her precept of impartiality when she comes to describe his achievements. With characteristic exaggeration she exclaims that, 'not even if another Demosthenes and all the chorus of the orators, not even if all the Academy and all the Stoic philosophers combined together to extol the services of Alexios, could they attain unto them'; and in another passage she asks, 'what echo of Demosthenes or whirling words of Polemon, why, not all the muses of Homer, could worthily hymn his successes; I should say that not Plato himself, nor all the Porch and Academy combined could have philosophised in a manner such as befitted his soul.'

She tells us that her father hated not only lying but the appearance of lying; yet, she naïvely applauds his sharp practice in sending letters to Bohemund's officers, in which he thanked them for letters to himself which they had never written, in order to compromise them with their chief; she acknowledges without a blush how he deceived the Crusaders at the taking of Nice; and she describes with admiration how he invited the Bogomile heretic, Basil, to a private colloquy, telling him that he admired his virtue and urging him to make a full statement of his doctrine, while all the time a secretary, concealed behind a curtain, took down the statements which fell from the unsuspecting heresiarch's mouth and which were used as evidence against him to send him to the stake. Such tactics only evoke from the complaisant daughter the laudatory comment, that her father's theological skill in dealing with heretics like the Manichæans should earn him the title of 'the thirteenth apostle.' Modern readers will agree with Finlay that 'even Anna's account makes the Bogomilian a noble enthusiast, and her father a mean traitor.'

Yet Alexios was, in spite of these moral defects, a brave soldier, who, however, usually followed the plan of gaining a victory by craft, if craft were possible. His character was a combination, not uncommon in the Near East, of courage and intrigue; he was no coward, but he was a born schemer, rather than a statesman. Like many Byzantine rulers, he had a weakness for theology—a dangerous taste in an autocrat; and his daughter describes with admiration how he lectured the heretic Neîlos on the doctrine of the Trinity, and how he ordered a monk named Zygavenos to compile a list and refutation of all the heresies, under the title of 'A Dogmatic Panoply.' He had the politician's love for an immediate success, rather than for a lasting benefit. Thus, to obtain the temporary advantage of securing the aid of the Venetian fleet against the Normans, he gave the Venetians enormous commercial concessions throughout his Empire, which were one of the causes, 120 years later, of the Latin capture of Constantinople. The policy of Alexios Comnenus has had disciples in Southern and South Eastern Europe in our own day; but the most successful Greek statesman of our time has attained his wonderful triumphs by frankness and honesty of purpose, to which the Byzantine Emperor was a stranger.

But Anna's partiality is not limited to her father; it extends to other members of her family, except, of course, her brother, the Emperor John II, who was, in reality, an excellent sovereign. Although she despised her husband's weakness in not seizing the throne, she praises in Homeric language his skill as an archer, and devotes a long passage to the learning and wisdom, the strength and physical beauty, which made 'my Cæsar,' as she affectionately calls him, what Achilles was among the Homeric Greeks. Like Achilles, he was a fine soldier, but, like not a few soldiers of Byzantium, he was also a student and a writer, who composed his history at the command of that 'most learned mind and intelligence,' as he called his wife's mother, the Empress Irene. Of that lady her daughter writes with enthusiasm, comparing her with Athene, and praising her for her zealous study of the branch of science which was most appreciated at the Byzantine Court—dogmatic theology. The Empress, so her daughter tells us, did not like publicity; she preferred to stay at home and read religious books; and, when she was obliged to perform any Court function, she blushed like a girl.

Of her fiancé, the young Constantine, the princess writes with an enthusiasm which seems to come from the heart. She describes him as 'a living statue,' and says that 'if any one merely looked at him, he would speak of him as a descendant of the fabled age of gold'; and she confesses that after all these years the memory of this youth filled her eyes with tears. To the beauty of his mother, the Dowager-Empress Maria, by whom she was in part educated, she has dedicated a glowing passage, in which she likens her to a cypress in stature, with a skin white as snow—in short, a statue such as neither Pheidias nor Apelles ever produced, 'for such a harmony of all the members was never yet seen in any human body.' Thus, the Court circle of the reign of Alexios Comnenus, if we may believe his daughter, was a galaxy of that beauty which modern society journals assume to be the attribute of royal ladies.

It must not, however, be imagined that Anna Comnena, because she wrote like a princess and a daughter, is not a valuable historian. She possessed a first-hand knowledge of the events of a large part of her father's reign; and, as she tells us, she drew her information about the events, of which she had not been an eyewitness, largely from her father's fellow-comrades in war, men like George Palaiologos, the defender of Durazzo, as well as from her father himself. Writing in the reign of Manuel I, when no one was interested in flattering the long-dead Alexios, she could claim, like Tacitus, that the time had arrived to describe his distant reign 'sine ira et studio.' From her birth and position, she possessed what mere scribes in all ages lack, an intimate acquaintance with the men who are really making history. She knew courts; and, a princess of the blood royal herself, she makes the frank admission that even her father, against whom there were constant plots, was no exception to the rule that subjects usually dislike their sovereigns.

She had access to State papers, which to the ordinary literary man would have remained inaccessible for generations. Thus, she gives us the ipsissima verba of the golden bull appointing the Empress-mother, Anna Dalassene, regent in the absence of her son, and the text of her father's letter to the Emperor Henry IV, his 'most Christian brother,' urging him to attack Guiscard in Southern Italy, offering him money, and suggesting a marriage between one of Henry's daughters and his own nephew. These curious pieces are of interest as a specimen of the Byzantine Chancery's epistolary style; and we note the care with which the Byzantine Emperor, who regarded himself as the sole heir of all the Cæsars, avoided giving the Imperial title to this Western 'brother,' whom Anna describes by the Latinised form rex, while reserving for her father the more dignified title of basileus. She gives, too, the full text of the lengthy agreement made between Alexios and Bohemud in 1108, which she probably had from her husband, who negotiated that treaty—a document of much value for the historical geography of the Holy Land during the Latin domination. She has apparently used for her account of Guiscard a now lost Latin Chronicle, perhaps the work of the Archdeacon John of Bari, which was employed by William the Apulian as material for his Latin poem on that Norman chief, for she quotes the envoy of the Bishop of Bari as having described to her an incident in the campaign of Guiscard, at which he was present.

She had access, also, to the simple and unvarnished memoirs of retired veterans, and was therefore well posted in military affairs. Her accurate use of technical military terms would do credit to a war-correspondent of the scientific school, while the glowing rhetoric of some of her descriptions would win the admiration of the modern descriptive writer, who, not being allowed to see anything of the operations, has to fall back upon the scenery…. She twice uses the technical term for a galley, and gives an elaborate description of the crossbow, then an unknown weapon to the Greeks. More interesting still, she allows us to read, imbedded in her severely literary Greek, occasional specimens of the vulgar idiom used by the ordinary people in their conversation. Thus, she has preserved the popular lines about the successful conspiracy which placed her father on the throne; she cites a satiric verse about him during the Cuman War, and alludes to the comic song, sung in the vernacular during the conveyance to execution of Michael Anemas, who had tried to kill him.

We find in her pages, too, some of the modern geographical names which had already, in popular speech, replaced the classical denominations for various Balkan mountains, rivers, and towns. Thus, like her husband, she uses the modern name ' Vardar' for the famous Macedonian river, instead of the classical 'Axios'; she calls the Homeric 'Ossa' by its present title of 'Kissavos'; she describes the poetic 'Peneios' as the 'Salamvrias,' and uses the contemporary term 'Dyrrachion' (whence comes the modern Italian 'Durazzo' and the modern Serbian 'Dratch'), as well as the older form 'Epidamnos.' She apologetically asks no one to blame her for using such a vulgar name as ' Vojussa,' with which the war has made us so familiar, for the classic river 'Aôos.'

As a rule she adopts an exaggeratedly lofty style. Just as it was said of Dr Johnson, that he would have made 'little fishes talk like whales,' so the learned princess makes a man address a crew of boatmen in the language of Homer. Her contemporary, the annalist Zonaras, says of her that 'she employed an accurately Attic Greek style,' and that 'she had applied herself to books and to learned men and did not merely hold incidental converse with them.' But she frequently descends to quite everyday words, with which students of such mediasval Greek works as the 'Chronicles of the Morea' and of the ordinary language of to-day are familiar….

One of the most interesting features of Anna Comnena's history is the aspect which the First Crusade assumes in her pages. To Western historians the Crusades appeared as, on the whole, a great material benefit to Europe, quite apart from their religious and moral motives and results. But we learn from this Byzantine princess, herself an eyewitness of the Crusaders' arrival in her father's capital, how this religious movement struck the Eastern Christians. The incursion of vast masses of more or less undisciplined soldiers into the Byzantine Empire naturally inspired alarm in the mind of its ruler, who feared—and the diversion of the Fourth Crusade from the redemption of the Holy Land to the capture of Constantinople three generations later justified his fears—that the pilgrims might be tempted to occupy his territories on the way. East and West rarely thoroughly understand one another; and the mutual reproaches of bad faith, which Greek historians have flung at the Crusaders and Latin historians at Alexios, were probably largely due, as is usually the case when two different nationalities quarrel, to a misunderstanding of one another's mentality.

Alexios could scarcely feel reassured, when he heard that one of the Crusading chiefs was that same Bohemund who had fought against him in Thessaly, and whose father had sought a shadowy pretext to invade his Empire and capture Durazzo, 'the Metropolis of Illyricum.' Anna tells us what were the Emperor's feelings when he first heard the news of the forthcoming Crusade and the approaching advent of vast Frankish armies. 'He feared,' she writes, 'their attack, knowing their unrestrainable dash, their changeable and easily influenced minds, and all the other qualities, or concomitant attributes, of the French character…. For the French race is extremely hot-blooded and keen, and whenever it has once started on any course, impossible to check.' She accuses the Crusaders of treating treaties like 'scraps of paper' and of inordinate love of lucre; 'for the Latin race,' she writes, 'is in other respects most devoted to money.' In her eyes these 'barbarians,' as she calls them in the contemptuous language of a highly cultivated Greek, were actuated by motives very different from the ostensible aim of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidels. 'In appearance,' she remarks, 'they were on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but in truth they wanted to oust the Emperor from his throne and seize the capital.' She notices the sudden ups and downs of the French character, rapidly going from one extreme to the other, and finds one cause of her father's rheumatism in the constant exertion to which the Franks subjected that patient monarch, by worrying him with their requests all day and all night, so that he could not even find time to take his meals!

In these circumstances, it was perhaps hardly to be expected that Alexios should be enthusiastic about taking an active part in the Crusade, although he more than once ransomed captured Crusaders. Nor was his enthusiasm increased by such acts of spoliation as the erection into a Latin county and a Latin principality respectively of Edessa, still governed at the time of the Latin conquest by a Greek governor, and of Antioch, which only fourteen years earlier had been nominally a part of the Greek Empire. Again, no sovereign, and not least the ceremonious Emperor of Byzantium, could have been expected to put up with such an affront as that described by Sir Walter Scott after Anna Comnena, when a boorish Crusading noble seated himself on the Emperor's seat. Yet Alexios took this unwarranted act of rudeness with great tact and dignity, even though it had been accompanied by an insulting remark about 'a yokel remaining alone seated while so many nobles were standing in his presence.' Indeed, he not only deigned to ask who this unmannerly churl might be, but gave him some excellent advice, derived from long personal experience, of the safest way to wage war against the Turks. The arrogant Frank paid with his life at the battle of Dorylæum for his neglect of the Emperor's well-meant warning.

The literary princess was not, however, so far led away by her national prejudices as to see no good in the Crusaders. She said of a very good Greek horseman, that 'one would have thought him to be not a Greek, but of Norman origin,' so well did he ride. Indeed, the incapacity of the French to fight on foot struck her so forcibly that she remarked: 'A Frenchman on horseback is unrestrainable and would ride through the walls of Babylon, but once dismounted he is at the mercy of the first comer.' For that reason her father bade his archers kill the horses of the Western cavaliers, for then the riders would be helpless. She specially eulogises the honesty of the Comte de St Gilles—Isangeles, as she calls him—who 'differed in all things from all the Latins, as much as the sun differs from the stars.' While she expresses the horror felt by her fellow-countrymen at the Church militant as represented by the fighting Latin clergy, armed with shield and spear, and in her character of Guiscard, who did so much harm to her father, she praises his courage and strategic ability; and her description of Bohemund's personal appearance is so detailed and so flattering that it may have been prompted by a very feminine motive. 'No such man, whether barbarian or Greek,' she wrote of him, 'was ever seen in the land of the Greeks, for he was a marvel to behold and a wonder to be narrated.' Of the warlike wife of Guiscard, Gaita, she says with mixed admiration and alarm, that 'she was a Pallas, but not an Athene,' skilled in battle but not in arts, and terrible when armed with her lance and piercing voice.

Students of Balkan geography are no less indebted to Anna Comnena than are historians of the First Crusade. Her pages are full of the names of places, rendered household words to us by the events of the last seven years. On this subject she had access to a very high authority, her father, who possessed a minute knowledge of both coasts of the Adriatic with their harbours (a list of which he sent to his admiral) and with the prevailing winds. No writer on the historical geography of Durazzo could afford to neglect our author, who minutely describes the origin, topography, and contemporary condition of that famous town. She tells us that at that time most of the inhabitants were colonists from Amalfi and Venice; and she describes the walls of that now squalid little Albanian town as at that time so broad that more than four horsemen could safely ride abreast along them, while there stood a bronze equestrian statue over the eastern gate. She talks of the old Bulgarian capitals of'Pliskova' and 'Great Pristhlava' (Pliska and Prêslav); she narrates the origin of Philippopolis, where she herself had lived for some time; and she makes one interesting allusion to the comparatively recent Norman Conquest of England in the passage in which she says that Bohemund was aided in his second invasion of Albania by men from 'Thule' (Britain), which she also mentions as furnishing the Varangian guard. We know from a contemporary British historian how glad the English exiles were to fight in Greece against the Normans, and how Alexios built a town for them at Civetot, the modern Geumlek, on the Asiatic coast near Constantinople. We hear, too, how 300 of them defended Castoria.

She uses the correct word jupan (or 'Count') for the Serbian chieftains, but designates both King Michael (who was the first ruler of Dioklitija to bear the royal title and whose dominions included Skutari, Montenegro, the Herzegovina and the coast), and his son and co-regent, Bodin, as Exarchs of the Dalmatians. She mentions also the contemporary 'great' jupan of the other and inland Serbian state of Rascia (the modern sandjak of Novibazar), Vukan, describing him as 'wielding the entire authority over the Dalmatians,' of whom she says that, 'although they were Dalmatians, still they were Christians.' It is interesting to find in this passage that one of his nephews already bore the name of Urosh, so famous in the later Serbian dynasty of Nemanja, which etymologists derive from the Magyar word úr, meaning 'lord.' The identification of Serbians with 'Dalmatians' would tend to prove the predominantly Serbian character of Southern Dalmatia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. She was acquainted, too, with the pirates who infested the mouth of the river Narenta, and twice mentions them under the name of 'Vetones.'

The name of the Albanians was known to Anna Comnena, as to her predecessors, Attaleiates and Skylitzes, the first Byzantine authors who applied it to that mysterious race. She notices the exclusive admiration felt by the Albanians, as by the modern British schoolboy, for physical prowess, and remarks that in that country bodily strength and size were the principal requirements that made a man a suitable candidate for the purple and the diadem. In the case, however, of that tall but inane guardsman, Prince William of Wied, gigantic size was not sufficient to ensure the loyalty of the Albanians. Anna Comnena is also the first writer who mentions the existence of the Wallachs in Thessaly, soon to be called 'Great Wallachia' by her successor Niketas, and 'Wallachia' by Benjamin of Tudela, at a place called Ezeva near Mount Ossa. Notices of this kind are what make her history valuable to us rather than the classical reminiscences, which to her and her contemporaries were doubtless its chief merit. She complained of having to insert 'barbarous names' which 'befouled' her historical style in her polished narrative, just as some modern imitators of Cicero objected to employing words for recent inventions unknown to the Roman orator. She cited as an excuse the example of Homer, who disdained not to mention the Bœotians and certain barbarous islands for the sake of historical accuracy. Fortunately, the more plastic Greek language is usually quite equal to this difficulty; and even the uncouth names of French Crusaders and Serbian jupans are admitted to the honours of the Greek declensions by this skilled writer, of whom a contemporary said that, if the ancients had known her, 'they would have added a fourth Grace and a tenth Muse.'

The time has come when it is no longer the fashion to decry Byzantine history and to deny the name of literature to the writings of the mediæval Greeks. Finlay rehabilitated the Byzantine Empire from the contempt which Gibbon had thrown upon it; in Greece a succession of modern writers, beginning with Paparrhegopoulos, in his great 'History of the Hellenic Nation,' have reminded his countrymen that Greek history is a whole, and that contemporary Hellas owes as much, or more, to the great figures of the Middle Ages as to the heroes of classical antiquity; in France MM. Schlumberger and Diehl have combined, in truly French fashion, great erudition with great literary skill in dealing with the 'Byzantine epic' of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and with the female figures that in various ages filled the Court of Constantinople. Of these Anna Comnena is perhaps the most curious. We are too much accustomed to regard Byzantine personages as merely so many stained-glass portraits, all decorations and angles, instead of men and women of like passions with ourselves. Anna Comnena was, in her loves and her dislikes, her vanities and her ambitions, very much a woman. Beneath her Attic prose, acquired by study and polished by art, there transpire the feminine feelings, which lend a peculiar turn to her history. Among the sovereigns, lawyers, statesmen, soldiers, and ecclesiastics who form the corpus of the Byzantine historians, she is the only woman.