The Alexiad

Summary

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. Books I–III follow the young general Alexios against the rebels Roussel of Bailleul, Nikephoros Bryennios the elder and Basilakios, and the coup of 1081 by which the Komnenos brothers seized Constantinople from Nikephoros III Botaneiates, with the help of the Doukas family and of Alexios's formidable mother Anna Dalassena, to whom he entrusted the civil government. Books IV–VI tell of the invasion by the Norman duke Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond, the defeat at Dyrrachium in 1081, the emperor's desperate seizure of church treasure, the trial of the philosopher John Italos, Robert's death in 1085, and, as a domestic interlude, Anna's own birth in 1083. Books VII–IX recount the wars with the nomadic Pechenegs (the 'Scythians'), from the rout at Dristra to their destruction at Levounion in 1091 with Cuman help, and campaigns against the Turkish emir Tzachas of Smyrna and against plotters such as Nikephoros Diogenes. Books X–XI turn to the First Crusade. Anna describes the arrival of Peter the Hermit and the great Frankish lords, among them Hugh of Vermandois, Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Bohemond, the oaths Alexios required of them, the recovery of Nicaea in 1097, the taking of Antioch and Jerusalem, and Bohemond's refusal to return Antioch to the empire. Books XII–XIII describe Bohemond's new invasion across the Adriatic, the second siege of Dyrrachium in 1107–1108, and the Treaty of Devol, whose text Anna reproduces. Books XIV–XV cover the Turkish wars in Asia Minor, the emperor's painful gout, the founding of the great Orphanage in Constantinople for the poor, the disabled and orphans, the trial and burning of the Bogomil leader Basil, and Alexios's last illness and death in August 1118, which Anna narrates in grief. Anna wrote in an elevated Attic Greek modeled on Thucydides and Polybius, drawing on her own memories, family papers, imperial documents and veterans' testimony. The library text is the English translation by Elizabeth A. S. Dawes, published in London by Kegan Paul in 1928, in an OCR transcription in which gaps in the medieval manuscripts appear as ellipses.

Top Lessons

• History as rescue from oblivion

  Anna opens with the image of time as a river that drowns all things, and of history as a bulwark against it. She writes so that great deeds will not be lost in silence, and she promises to blame friends and praise enemies when the facts require. Her history is both a daughter's tribute and an attempt at the historian's discipline, and readers can watch both at work.

• An empire seen from within

  The First Crusade is usually told from the side of the Western knights. Anna shows it from Constantinople: an emperor who had asked for mercenaries suddenly receives whole peoples on the march, must feed and guide them, secure oaths that cities taken will be returned, and guard his capital. Her view of the Franks as brave, talkative and grasping is one side of a meeting of two Christian worlds.

• Rule as endurance

  Anna's Alexios is less a conqueror than a man who holds an empire together through decades of crisis by patience, stratagem and labor. She shows him sitting like a bronze statue through endless audiences, campaigning while crippled by gout, and leading refugees home in a protected square. Endurance in duty is her measure of greatness.

• Charity in stone

  In Book XV Anna describes the Orphanage that Alexios built in Constantinople: a city within the city for orphans, the old, the blind and the lame, with servants assigned to the disabled and a school for the young. She compares it to Solomon's porch and to Christ's healing of the blind and lame. Public works of mercy are part of her portrait of a Christian emperor.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Alexiad is a political history, but its medical passages are unusually detailed and give a rare look at twelfth-century Byzantine court medicine from a learned layperson who, according to her funeral oration, had studied medicine herself. Anna traces her father's gout through Books XII–XV, attributing it to a polo injury, to long standing during audiences, and to anxiety, and records that Irene's rubbing eased the pain. Book XV narrates his last illness: first a 'rheumatic' flux that the physician Nicholas Kallikles wanted to purge before it moved from the extremities to the heart, opposed by Michael Pantechnes and the majority; then breathlessness, a sensation of a stone on the heart, swelling, diarrhoea and death. The dispute reflects Galenic humoral reasoning, and Anna presents herself as judging the physicians' arguments. Modern readers have proposed various retrospective diagnoses for the final illness, including heart failure; such readings are interpretive. In Book I Anna compares the empire's rebels to fevers whose causes physicians trace to climate, diet or the humours. The preface records her husband's fatal 'internal tumour'. Book XV describes the Orphanage, a charitable foundation housing orphans, the aged, the blind and the lame, part of the Byzantine tradition of philanthropic institutions that included hospitals.

• Preface, 3–4

  Nikephoros Bryennios returns from campaign with a fatal internal tumour; the family forbids him to talk for fear it may burst; Anna's grief.

• Book I

  Anna's analogy between the empire's rebels and fevers that physicians attribute to climate, diet or the humours.

• Book XII

  Irene accompanies Alexios on campaign partly because only her careful rubbing can ease his gout.

• Book XIV

  Anna's account of the causes of her father's gout: a polo injury, long audiences with the Frankish counts, and anxiety for the empire.

• Book XV, the Orphanage

  The charitable city for orphans, the aged, the blind and the lame, with servants assigned to the disabled.

• Book XV, last illness

  The physicians' dispute over purging, Alexios's breathlessness and swelling, the family's vigil, and his death in August 1118.