Will I love The Alexiad?

Anna Komnene (1083-c.1148) takes up the story where Michael Psellus left off. Like him, she was writing from inside the court: she was the daughter of Alexios I who reigned from 1081 to 1118. She gives a laudatory account of her father’s reign during which the tide of disaster was turned back and Byzantium began to recover some of the ground that it had lost. Some of the most memorable passages in The Alexiad are those that describe the passage of the First Crusade through Byzantium in 1096-7. Komnene takes a rather ambivalent tone in describing the hordes of bellicose… show more.

Byzantium’s only woman historian, Anna was the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118) and the husband of the prominent general and Caesar Nicephorus Bryennius, whom she plotted to make her father’s successor. In disgrace after failing to displace her brother John II, Anna recorded the reign of her father, who had inherited an empire on the verge of collapse and slowly restored it to power and prosperity, dealing with many Western knights of the First Crusade who were ready to fight him instead of the Turks. 

While she sometimes depicts Alexius as more successful and admirable than… show more.