Anna Komnene

Anna Komnene is the daughter and oldest child of Alexios, Emporer of the Byzantine Empire in the late 11th century. She was born in 1083 and both she and her fiancé, a young uncle on her mother's side, were named heirs to the throne. She is most well known for her status as author of the Alexiad, a historiography of her father. The Alexiad's exact date of completion is unknown, but in 1148, at the age of sixty-five, Anna Komnene was known to still be writing (Laiou 2000). Although her parents encouraged her education, studying classical Greek sources was outside the parameters of Christian canon, so it was with great difficulty that she studied them. She struggled through them alone as a child and eventually studied them more in depth with the help of a eunuch chosen for her by her mother (Reinsch 2000). She is celebrated for her skill at painting portraits of people within her writing. Anna studied Aristotle and Plato in literary circles, quotes Homer regularly (even the title Alexiad is reminiscent of Homer's Iliad), and draws parallels between the "events of her own day and the history of classical Greece (Laiou 2000)."

A great source of lamentation for Anna seems to be that she was not born male. It limited her studies somewhat, but more importantly, restrained her from inheriting the throne. Although she was originally intended as heir to the Empire, three things happened to shatter this intent: her brother John was born, her fiancé died, and she was affianced to a Macedonian in a political alliance. Her mother tried until her father's death to convince him to hand over the brown to Bryennios (Anna's husband), but he refused to allow a Macedonian to seize the throne and her brother John succeeded. She later unsuccessfully tried to overthrow him, but Bryennios refused to join her army and was loyal to John until his death. The only reason for her failure, even without her husband's support was that John neglected to attend his father's funeral in order to secure control of the palace (Hill 2000).

Although still barred from entering the military, Byzantine women of the higher classes enjoyed a semi-equal status to men. Education was not withheld from them and women were persons who "encouraged literature and to whom literature was addressed," but only in rare circumstances did women contribute to the body of knowledge through writing literature (Reinsch 2000). However, Byzantine women often participated in composing hymns (Anderson 2000). Anna Komnene's mother Irene hosted her own literary-philosophical salon but repeatedly urged her son, not her daughter, to become his father's historian.

Anna's positionality can be thought of in a multitude of ways. Whose affirmation was she seeking? Solely her own? Her male contemporaries, a female, or perhaps even a mixed-gender audience? Philosophical epistemology says that underneath the interpretation is a basic truth, feminist epistemology says that there can be no objectivity because everything we think and do is dictated by what we know and how we interpret it. Anna Komnene had a very subjective approach to history and unapologetically positions herself often as "born in the purple" and having tremendous filial devotion (Comnena 1979). She defends her father at every opportunity and presents him as the perfection of masculine authority. She speaks often of the privilege of her education and in fact identifies herself both through her familial connections and her education in her works (Laiou 2000).

Howard-Johnston has asserted that because of the large portions of military descriptions, Anna Komnene is not the true author of the Alexiad or perhaps only the author of portions. Macrides (2000) criticizes him for his line of thinking because historians were rarely involved in the military themselves, so it is unlikely that her gender, and therefore her lack of military experience, would have interfered with her skills as a historian. Simone de Beauvoir says that "it is vexing to hear a man say: "You think thus and so because you are a woman"; ... it would be out of the question to reply: "And you think the contrary because you are a man...(2002)." Such a statement would not have been made to a man who was in the military. To assume that she cannot write about history involving the military simply because as a woman she was not permitted to join is an injustice.

There are repeated assumptions that Anna should not be considered a feminist (Gouma-Peterson 2000 and Hill 2000). Although it is true, as Hill (2000) states, that she did not adhere to the ideologies of western feminists, I find this to be a problematic assertion because even the group labeled western feminists is not a cohesive one. There is no one set of ideals that defines "a feminist," it is the basic belief in the advancement and equality of women. In this respect, Anna is a sterling example of a feminist; she led a revolt against her brother, although she was a devout Christian, went against the Church by studying the sexual content of Aristotle and Plato. She has studied Aristotle with his idea that "the female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, we should regard the female nautre as afflicted with a natural defectiveness (Beauvoir 2002)." Even after studying such misogyny, she still devotes precious page space to explaining the impact of her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother on her father's life.

To take any one of these initiatives would separate her from the normative picture of a medieval woman, but combined, they paint a picture of a woman showing no qualms about claiming space for herself as a woman, a major premise of feminist theory. She has to sort through the same dichotomy of the fallen Eve and the immaculate Virgin Mother images that the Church presents to women to uphold, and manages to carve out her own space in spite of the fact that she was born by chance as a female, and condemned to a life "full of troubles, full of revolution (Comnena 1979). She even goes so far as to imply that the only positive circumstance of her life was her imperial birth. She stresses her opinion that her grandmother, mother and herself are all models of female virtue and as good, if not better, than men. She makes these assertions living in exile after having been banished by her brother and having lost both of her parents.

In the Introduction to a collection of essays concerning Anna Komnene, Angeliki Laiou (2000) relates the opinion that Anna Komnene protests too much on behalf of objectivity, and omits all sorts of things that would bring no glory to her father or her family; nevertheless her protestations show that she had a good idea as to how one should write history. It is difficult to ascertain if she asserted that she would be objective simply because it was the common style of the day to claim objectivity or because she truly believed she was being unbiased. I am fearful of an underlying suspicion: someone might conclude that in composing the history of my father I am glorifying myself; the history wherever I express admiration for any act of his, may seem wholly false and mere panagyric (Comnena 1979). It seems more reasonable to assume that it was simply a writing style and that she had no delusions of reporting a dry factual biography. She had many reasons to focus on her gender throughout the book. Her attempted usurpation of the throne from her brother proves that she believed things would be very different if she were to assume the throne, in other words, if she had been born male. She cannot escape this positionality; it has played too large a part in the formation of her life for it to escape her.

She is able to pick and choose events of her lifetime in the manner most conducive to making her family appear as she wishes. Scholars have been able to dissect her works and make their own assumptions based upon other sources of information from the reign of Alexios that were further removed from the situation, but perhaps just as well-informed. For example, in spite of Anna's protestations that the imperial couple was devoted to one another, scholars disagree on her exact role as empress and the nature of their relationship (Hill 2000). Another instance of Anna presenting the side of her family she wishes to show is her handling of John's absence from their father's funeral. She presents herself first and foremost as loyal to her parents wishes and uses this instance of John's lapse in duty to contrast herself from him even further. She further accents this with the story of listening to her mother from the womb as labor began to wait until her father returned from war, which she did by prolonging labor for 2 full days (Comnena 1979).

Anna Komnene's life was in fact ruled by the fact that she was born female instead of male, oldest child, but not oldest son. It will forever remain a quandary whether her actions and ideas would have changed had she been born a boy, but we cannot harbor any misconceptions that she would have been received differently. Even in the instance of reading the Alexiad today, would anyone question whether or not she wrote the entire biography when everyone agrees that at least parts of it were in her hand? It seems unlikely that the contradictions taken so seriously and analyzed so closely would be questioned so often by scholars looking at her life. Scholars might marvel at the outright positioning of herself within her narrative instead of thinking of it as female sentimentality. I think that it is safe to conclude that she would not have felt that the only time fortune had smiled upon her was when she was born into the imperial family because every source of conflict for her was based upon her sex.

• Anderson, Jeffrey C. (2000). Anna Komnene, learned women, and the book in Byzantine art. In T. Gouma-Peterson (Ed.), Anna Komnene and Her Times (pp. 125-156). New York: Garland.
• Beauvoir, Simone. (2002). The Second Sex: Introduction. In McCann and Kim (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (pp.32-40). New York: Routledge.
• Comnena, Anna. (1979). The Alexiad of Anna Comnena (E.R.A. Sewter, Trans.). New York: Penguin Books. (Original work 12th century)
• Gouma-Peterson, Thalia. (2000). Gender and power : passages to the maternal in Anna Komnene's Alexiad. In T. Gouma-Peterson (Ed.), Anna Komnene and Her Times (pp. 107-124). New York: Garland.
• Hill, Barbara. (2000). Actions speak louder than words : Anna Komnene's attempted usurpation. In T. Gouma-Peterson (Ed.), Anna Komnene and Her Times (pp. 45-62). New York: Garland.
• Laiou, Angeliki. (2000). Introduction: Why Anna Komnene? In T. Gouma- Peterson (Ed.), Anna Komnene and Her Times (pp. 1-14). New York: Garland.
• Macrides, Ruth. (2000). The Pen and the sword : Who Wrote the Alexiad? In T. Gouma-Peterson (Ed.), Anna Komnene and Her Times (pp. 63-81). New York: Garland.
• Riensch, Diether R. (2000). Women's literature in the Byzantium? - The case of Anna Komnene. In T. Gouma-Peterson (Ed.), Anna Komnene and Her Times (pp. 83-105). New York: Garland.