Anna Of Byzantium

Anna Komnene (1083-1153) was a Byzantine princess, historian, and insurgent. The eldest daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081-1118) and sister of Emperor John II Komnenos, Anna was raised in the empire’s capital city, Constantinople, during a period of factional tension within Byzantine imperial circles. Her father had reinstated the Komnenos dynasty on the throne in 1081 after orchestrating a coup d’etat against the previous emperor, Nikephoros III Botaneiates (r. 1078-1081). Her grandmother, Anna Dalassene, was instrumental in carrying out this coup, along with members of the Doukas family, who sought to ensure that the son of Michael VII Doukas (r. 1071-1078), Constantine Doukas, would be ensured a spot in the line of inheritance.

In Anna of Byzantium, Barrett hinges much of her plotline on Dalassene’s rivalry with the Doukas family. This stemmed from a power struggle in the 1070s between the Doukas and the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes (r. 1068-1071), in which Dalassene had allied with Diogenes. When the Doukases regained power in 1071, Dalassene was accused of conspiracy with the former emperor and exiled along with her sons to the island of Prinkipos. Her residual resentment for the Doukases manifested in a dislike of her daughter-in-law, Empress Irene Doukaina. As historian Lynda Garland writes, “Irene had the advantages of youth and her status as consort, and was to emerge the eventual winner, but the contest must have been intense” (Garland, Lynda. Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium AD 527-1204. Routledge, 1998, p. 186). Tension amongst the imperial women of Alexios Komnenos’s reign would bleed over and become a central political factor during the reign of his son, John II. Anna Komnene was to be one of these central imperial women.

Much of what is known about Anna Komnene comes from her writings in the Alexiad, a monumental history of the Komnenos family and her father’s rise to power. As the oldest child of the emperor, Anna had claims to inherit the throne and was even betrothed to Constantine Doukas before her first brother, John, was born. When Alexios Komemnos replaced Anna with John as his successor, she was instead married to the historian Nikephoros Bryennios around the age of fourteen. She would go on to have four children with him. In the meantime, tensions brewed in the palace as the empress, Irene Doukaina, still firmly believed that Anna should inherit. Garland writes, “There was clearly a power struggle between John and the imperial women” (Byzantine Empresses 197). In 1118, after Alexios’s death, Irene and Anna were involved in a plot to murder John and reclaim power. Anna even concocted a second assassination attempt, but both fell through in large part because Bryennios refused to cooperate with them. Anna never supplanted her brother and instead retired to a convent in Constantinople after her coup attempts failed.

Her time at the convent proved to be an essential chapter of Anna’s life since she used that time to write the Alexiad, an account of Byzantine life and politics in the 11th and 12th centuries that remains one of the essential primary sources studied by historians. This text is also a key source for Barrett’s fictionalized account of Anna’s life in Anna of Byzantium. It was to be her last great accomplishment before her death at the convent in 1153.