Anna Komnene, from a nineteenth-century illustration (imagined likeness). Source · Public domain
About Anna Komnene
Anna Komnene (1083–c. 1153) was the eldest child of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos and the empress Irene Doukaina, born on 1 December 1083 in the Porphyra, the purple chamber of the palace in Constantinople. Betrothed as a child to Constantine Doukas, she was later married to the soldier and scholar Nikephoros Bryennios, who received the title of Caesar. She was educated in rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy and, by her funeral oration's testimony, medicine. After her father's death in 1118 she was implicated in a plot against her brother John II and spent her later decades in or beside the convent of the Theotokos Kecharitomene founded by her mother, where she sponsored commentaries on Aristotle and wrote the Alexiad. Her husband died in 1137 after returning ill from a campaign in Syria, and she was still at work on the history around 1148.
The Alexiad is the life and reign of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (ruled 1081–1118), written by his daughter Anna in fifteen books. In her preface Anna introduces herself as born in the purple and trained in Aristotle and Plato, explains that her husband, the Caesar Nikephoros Bryennios, had begun a history of her father but died of an illness brought home from campaign, and promises to praise or blame as the facts require.
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