Part 62

In conclusion we may ask how Frankish society in Palestine compares with Frankish society in Cyprus and in the Latin Principalities of the present Greek Kingdom. Very different from either Frankish Palestine or Frankish Greece was the condition of the Kingdom of Cyprus, created by a mere accident of the Crusades, which nominally continued the tradition of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. While the reason of the latter’s existence was war, Cyprus was essentially a commercial state, to which the loss of Acre was a blessing in disguise. So long as the Kings of Cyprus, in their capacity of Kings of Jerusalem, had territory on the opposite coast of Syria, they were necessarily involved in continental wars, and could not devote themselves to the development of their own island; as was the case of the Kings of England, so long as they held the _damnosa hereditas_ of the Plantagenets in France. Cyprus was, like England, defended by the sea; like England, she became one of the marts of the world, in an age when the crusading spirit had died away, and trade was the attraction that led men to the East. The Popes, by prohibiting trade with the Saracens after the loss of the Holy Land, procured for Cyprus a monopoly; and Famagosta surpassed Constantinople, Venice and Alexandria. Moreover, warned by the example of Jerusalem, the Kings of Cyprus cut down the privileges of the nobles, who were denied the right of coinage and jurisdiction over the middle class. Consequently, the Cypriote monarchy was more independent, and continued to prosper until it allowed—and this should be to us a warning—foreign competitors, under the guise of commerce, to creep into its cities and ultimately to dictate its policy.

All the Latin states in the East, whether in Jerusalem, Cyprus, or Greece proper, presented examples of that difficult political experiment—the rule of a small alien minority over a large native majority of a different religion, an experiment worked most successfully in those states, like Lesbos under the Genoese Gattilusj, where the Latin rulers became assimilated with the ruled. But in Frankish Greece the feudal states were not commercial; and the Venetian and Genoese colonies were, except in Negroponte, quite distinct from them. The Frank conquerors of Greece did not go thither with the noble aims which led some of the leaders of the first Crusade to the Holy Land; on the contrary, they turned aside from the recovery of the Holy City to partition a Christian Empire. Yet the moral standard of the Franks in Greece was much higher than that of their predecessors in Palestine, or their contemporaries in Cyprus. Possibly, the reason was that they lived healthier lives, and had fewer temptations. Big maritime commercial towns, like Tyre and Acre, and Famagosta, did not exist, and country life was more developed. Certainly, the _Chronicle of the Morea_ is more edifying reading than the _Letters_ of Jacques de Vitry on the condition of Acre at the time of his appointment as its bishop in 1216. But in one respect Frankish Palestine and Frankish Greece present the same strange phenomenon—that union of antiquity with the Middle Ages, of the biblical and the classical with the romantic, which inspired the second part of _Faust_. To find the feudal system installed at Hebron and Athens, at Shechem and Sparta, at Tiberias and Thebes, to read of Princes of Galilee and of Princes of Achaia, causes surprise only surpassed by that which we should have felt in August, 1914, had we been told that before four Christmases had passed, Australians and New Zealanders would have shared in the taking of Jerusalem.

AUTHORITIES

1. _Recueil des Historiens des Croisades._ Seventeen vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1841-1906.

2. _Gesta Dei per Francos._ Ed. J. Bongars. Two vols. Hanover, 1611.

3. _Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem, 1100-1291._ Von R. Röhricht. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1898.

4. _Regesta Regni Hierosolimitani, 1097-1291_, and _Additamentum_. Von R. Röhricht. Œniponti: Lib. Acad. Wagneriana, 1893-1904.

5. _Les Colonies franques de Syrie aux xiiᵐᵉ et xiiiᵐᵉ siècles._ Par E. Rey. Paris: Picard, 1883.

6. _Numismatique de l’Orient Latin, avec Supplément._ Par G. Schlumberger. Paris: Leroux, 1878-82.

7. _Renaud de Châtillon, prince d’Antioche._ Par G. Schlumberger. Paris: Plon, 1898.

8. _Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge._ Von H. Prutz. Berlin: Siegfried, 1883.

9. _Revue de l’Orient Latin._ Eleven vols. Paris: Leroux, 1893-1908.

6. A BYZANTINE BLUE STOCKING: ANNA COMNENA

One of the differences between classical and modern literature is the rarity of female writers in the former and their frequency in the latter. While we have lady historians and poets in considerable numbers, while the fair sex has greatly distinguished itself in fiction, including that branch of it which is called modern journalism, ancient Greek letters contain the names of few celebrated women except Sappho; Myrtis and Corinna, the competitors of Pindar; Erinna, whose poetic fancy her mother strove to restrain by chaining her to her neglected spinning-wheel; and Elephantis, whose poetry was considered too realistic for display upon drawing-room tables. Novels were in those days chiefly written by bishops—a class of men not now usually associated with light literature. In Latin literature, although Juvenal has drawn a picture of the learned lady weighing in the critical balance the respective claims of Homer and Virgil, the poem attributed to Sulpicia is almost the sole surviving example of female composition. It has been reserved for Byzantine literature to present us with the rare phenomenon of a first-class lady historian—first-class, that is to say, according to the standards of that day—in the person of the Imperial Princess, Anna Comnena, a writer better known to the general public than are most Byzantine authors owing to the fact that Sir Walter Scott introduced her as one of the characters in _Count Robert of Paris_, and based one of the chief episodes of that novel upon a historical event recorded in her life of her father.

Since Scott’s time, novelists and dramatists have done something to popularise Byzantine history. Neale, in his _Theodora Phranza_, daughter of the last Byzantine historian, has described the capture of Constantinople by the Turks; Sardou produced on the stage a far more famous Theodora, the consort of Justinian, whom Prokopios so virulently besmirched in his _Secret History_. Mr Frederic Harrison has portrayed in _Theophano_ the ambitious and unscrupulous wife and widow of the Emperors Romanos II and Nikephoros Phokas. Jean Lombard in _Byzance_ depicted, with immense erudition, the games and ceremonial of the Imperial city and court in the time of the Iconoclast Emperor, Constantine V Copronymos, and endeavoured to solve the Balkan question by marrying and placing on the throne the Slav Oupravda and the Greek Eustokkia; while Marion Crawford gave us in _Arethusa_ a story from a much later period, the year 1376, based upon the struggle at the Court of John V between the Venetian adventurer, Carlo Zeno, and the Genoese, for the possession of the isle of Tenedos, the key of the Dardanelles.

Anna Comnena was born in 1083 at an interesting moment in the history not only of the Greek Empire, but of Christendom. It was the time when the Mediæval West and the Mediæval East first met; when the Normans, after their recent conquest of England and Southern Italy, first crossed the Adriatic and Ionian seas to attack the Greek Empire, soon to be followed by the hosts of the First Crusade. Just as, with the accession of William the Conqueror fifteen years earlier, a new order of things had begun in Northern Europe, so with the accession of her father, the Emperor Alexios I Comnenos, in 1081, two years before her birth, a new era, and practically a new dynasty—though Alexios was not the first of the family to seize the throne—had begun at Byzantium. From 1025, the end of the long and glorious reign of Basil II, whom the Greeks of to-day still admire as the “Bulgar-slayer,” the destroyer of the first Bulgarian Empire on those self-same battlefields of Macedonia where King Constantine defeated the Bulgarians in the second Balkan war of 1913, the Byzantine throne had been occupied by no less than twelve sovereigns, whose consecutive reigns filled a period scarcely longer than that embraced by the single reign of the great Basil. After the death of his brother and successor, Constantine VIII, there began a period of palace intrigues and female influence, for Constantine’s two mature daughters, Zoe and Theodora, assigned the throne to whomsoever they chose; and the successive marriages of the elderly Zoe furnished Psellos with a _chronique scandaleuse_ of the Imperial Court and boudoir, and MM. Schlumberger and Diehl with their brilliant modern paraphrases of the contemporary writer. When, with the death of Theodora, the Macedonian dynasty came to an end in the person of its last representative, revolution succeeded revolution. Every general of aristocratic birth was justified in believing that he carried in his baggage the red boots which were the peculiar mark of the Imperial dignity, and a female regency enabled the Empress Eudokia to bestow the Empire with her hand. At last, the ablest and astutest of the Byzantine commanders, Alexios Comnenos, deposed the feeble old voluptuary, Nikephoros Botaneiates, whose Slavonic ministers had discredited his authority by their “barbarous” pronunciation and foreign origin, and placed himself and his descendants upon the throne for 100 years.

These internal dissensions had naturally injured the external prestige of the Empire and contracted its frontiers. It was then that there came the final separation between the Eastern and the Western Churches; it was then, too, that, by the loss of Bari, Brindisi, and Otranto, the Byzantine Empire forfeited its last Italian possessions. Meanwhile, the advance of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor had pushed back the Greek frontier in a second continent close to the capital; and Anna Comnena[949] declares that, on her father’s accession, “the Bosporus was the eastern, and Adrianople the western, limit of the Greek sceptre.” Alexios, she proudly adds, “widened the circle of the Empire, and made the Adriatic its western, the Euphrates and the Tigris its eastern, border.”

Yet, as she truly says, her father had to contend all the time against enormous difficulties, alike domestic and foreign. At the outset of his reign, his throne was surrounded with possible pretenders. Both his immediate predecessors were alive, although the one was a bishop, the other in a monastery, besides four sons of dethroned Emperors who had received the Imperial title during their fathers’ reigns, and several persons who had endeavoured unsuccessfully to seize and keep the crown. There were constant conspiracies against Alexios so long as he sat on the throne, while the eternal theological questions, which were the favourite mental distraction of Byzantium, caused him constant anxiety, for there, as in the Balkans to-day, theology and politics were inextricably mingled. From abroad there came, too, the menace of invasion on all sides—from the wild tribes of the Patzinaks and Cumans on the north, from the Normans on the west, from the Turks on the east. And, worse than all, the unhappy Alexios was suddenly called upon to cope with the hurricane of the First Crusade, and to find his Empire overrun by swarms of fierce warriors, whose motives he suspected and whose intentions he judged from their acts to be predatory.

Alexios owed his crown to a successful insurrection; but he was no vulgar upstart. He belonged to a rich family of Paphlagonia, where the Comnenoi held property at Kastamon, the modern Kastamouni, the place known in contemporary history as the exile for nearly thirty years of the late Mirdite Prince, Prenk Bib Doda. The Comnenoi had first come into prominence about a century earlier under Basil II; and one of the clan, the distinguished general, Isaac Comnenos, had occupied the throne from 1057 to 1059. Anna’s father was this man’s nephew, and, in spite of his uncle’s brief reign, the real founder of the dynasty. For the Emperor Isaac, in a moment of discouragement and disillusionment, not only abdicated but failed to induce his brother John, the father of Alexios, to accept the heavy burden of the crown. It was not, however, to his timorous and unambitious father, but to his energetic mother, Anna Dalassene, that Alexios owed his success. She was resolved that her son should be Emperor, and during four intervening reigns, she was waiting and intriguing for the diadem which her husband had allowed to go out of his family. A great lady herself, the daughter of an eminent official and soldier, whose skill in never failing to kill his man had earned him the nickname of “Charon,” she belonged, like the Comnenoi, to a powerful Asiatic family, one of whose members had been at first thought by Constantine VIII as worthy to succeed him, and had subsequently been regarded as a possible husband for the old Empress Zoe. Like many eminent Byzantine personages, she had known the reverses of fortune, and had at one time been exiled to Prinkipo. Such was the esteem which the Emperor Alexios felt for the mother, who had constantly encouraged and facilitated his ambition, that when, at the outset of his reign, he was compelled to leave his capital to fight against the Normans in Albania, he entrusted to her the absolute authority over the Empire during his absence. This is only one of many instances proving the influence of women in the Byzantine system. Thus, the mother of Alexios made history, his daughter wrote it; his mother made him Emperor, his daughter preserved the memory of his reign. Such were the origin and parents of the hero of the _Alexiad_. Let us now look at its author.

The literary Princess has given us in her history of her father a considerable amount of autobiographical information. Anna Comnena was not at all disposed to hide her light under a bushel, nor did she ever forget that she had been born in the purple chamber—the room to which an Empress was always removed when her confinement was imminent. Like most members of the reigning Imperial family, she received an excellent literary education. “I am not destitute of letters,” she writes in her preface, “but have thoroughly studied classical Greek”; and she adds that she had applied herself diligently to the mathematical quadrivium, to rhetoric, the philosophy of Aristotle, and the dialogues of Plato. In another passage she alludes to her knowledge of geometry. Her quotations show a wide range of reading. Her history contains citations from, or allusions to, Homer, Sappho, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, the _Tactics_ of Ælian, and the astronomer Eudoxos, while she repeats a whole sentence from Polybios and another from John of Epiphania, and shows, as Byzantine writers always do, great familiarity with the Bible. Niketas summed her up as “acquainted with every art.”

Nor need we, who have in our own history a similarly learned lady of royal lineage, Lady Jane Grey, wonder at the erudition of this Byzantine blue stocking. There had been a recrudescence of literary culture in the eleventh century at Byzantium[950], as in the sixteenth century in London. Shortly before Anna’s birth the Imperial Court had been the scene of the many-sided activities of that remarkable man, Michael Psellos, “the Prince of Philosophers,” as he was called by his contemporaries, the Voltaire of mediæval Greek literature, at once philosopher, historian, lawyer, monk, courtier and prime minister, who demonstrated, as other learned statesmen have proved in our own time, that great intellectual attainments may coincide with a poor character and political ineptitude. Another writer, the historian Michael of Adalia, or Attaleiates, who had gained by his legal abilities the favour of successive sovereigns, dedicated his history of his own time to the Emperor Nikephoros Botaneiates, and made a sufficient fortune out of speculations in real estate to found an almshouse for his less fortunate fellows. But in the time of Psellos and Attaleiates learning had disciples on the throne, as well as in the lecture-hall. The Imperial family of Doukas was noted for its devotion to literature; the collection of genealogies of gods and heroes, known under the title of _Ionia_ (or _Violarium_), has been by some ascribed to the ambitious Empress Eudokia, wife of Constantine X Doukas and of his successor; while the Emperor Michael VII Doukas, who had been a pupil of Psellos and is known in history by the nickname of “Parapinakes,” or the “Peck-filcher,” from his fraudulent manipulation of the corn-monopoly, spent his time in composing iambics and anapæsts quite in the fashion of our classically-educated eighteenth century statesmen, who lost us the American colonies and were stronger at Greek verses than at political economy. Even the old _roué_ Botaneiates, was, if we believe his panegyrist Attaleiates, a lover of books. When Alexios succeeded him, he further encouraged literature; one of his physicians, Kallikles, was a writer of epitaphs, not always on his own patients; and the historian, John Skylitzes, who was a captain of the bodyguard, dedicated some legal treatises to this Emperor.

It was not, therefore, remarkable that Alexios’ daughter was highly educated, nor that her husband, Nikephoros Bryennios, was, like herself, a historian, although, like Julius Cæsar, he modestly described his work as merely supplying “the materials for those who wished to write history.” A soldier by profession, the son of the pretender of the same name who had revolted against Michael VII, and had been crushed by Alexios, he defended Constantinople against Godfrey of Bouillon in 1097, and fought against the Sultan of Ikonium in 1116. Taking Xenophon, another literary soldier, as his model, he possessed, like Attaleiates, a much simpler and more straightforward style than his learned consort, and his soldierly prose is, although a glorification of his father-in-law, pleasing to read.

But the cultured Anna, unlike her husband, had other besides literary ambitions, of which her distracted account of her father’s death-bed shows no trace. We learn, however, from the later historian, Niketas, of the mundane designs which agitated the bosoms of the Empress and her daughter at that solemn moment, of the efforts made by Irene to induce her expiring husband to disinherit his son in favour of his son-in-law, and how, when the dying Emperor lifted up his hands to heaven with a forced smile on his pallid cheeks, his wife bitterly reproached him with the words: “Husband, all thy life thou hast been versed in every kind of deceit, saying one thing and thinking another; and now that thou art dying, thou art true to thine old ways.” Gibbon has summed up the remark in the caustic sarcasm: “You die as you have lived—a hypocrite.” Nor was the virtuous Anna inclined to acquiesce in the accession of her brother John II. She had been, till his birth, the heiress-presumptive, and as such had been betrothed as a child to the son of the dethroned Emperor, Michael VII, the young Constantine Doukas, who died, however, before their marriage. She had thus missed the throne once, and was determined not to miss it again.

Scott, in his novel, has completely misrepresented the character of her husband by representing him as plotting to seize the throne, even during the lifetime of Alexios. Such a conception of the honest Bryennios is quite erroneous. For Anna’s plot was entirely frustrated by the sluggish indifference and greater humanity of her consort. So greatly annoyed was his wife at his reluctance to accept the crown by killing or blinding his brother-in-law, that she bitterly reproached nature in a phrase which must be left in the obscurity of the original language, for having made the mistake of creating her a woman and him a man. The conspiracy was discovered; but the Emperor treated his sister with more mercy than she deserved, contenting himself with bestowing her richly furnished palace upon his favourite and faithful minister. Even this punishment, at the instance of the minister himself, was rescinded; her palace was restored to the princess; her husband held office under the new Emperor and accompanied him in the Syrian campaign of 1137; but her pride was wounded by her brother’s magnanimity. She retired in Byzantine fashion to the convent of Our Lady of Grace, founded by her mother, the ex-Empress Irene, whose charter has been preserved.

At the age of thirty-five her career at Court was over; her old friends, courtier-like, turned away from her to worship the rising sun; her mother, her favourite brother, her husband, whom, despite his weakness of character and unwillingness to reign, she loudly praises in her history and regarded with obvious affection[951], successively passed away. Their son, Alexios, who took his mother’s surname, held office under her nephew, the Emperor Manuel, as Lord High Admiral. She bitterly complains, with her customary rhetorical exaggeration, of her hard lot since her eighth year, when her brother John was associated with his father in the Imperial dignity; to enumerate her sufferings and her enemies, she exclaims, “requires the Siren eloquence of Isokrates, the deep voice of Pindar, the vehemence of Polemon, the muse of Homer, the lyre of Sappho.” For twenty-nine years she had not seen or spoken with any of her father’s friends, of whom many were dead, and many were afraid to visit her. She compares herself with Niobe, and introduces into her history transparent allusions to her treatment by “the great,” and to the folly of her father’s successors—both monarchs of distinction[952]. Under these circumstances, she endeavoured to console herself with the composition of her history—a work written mostly, as she tells us, under the reign of her nephew, Manuel I, who ascended the throne in 1143. By 1148, at the age of 65, she had finished her work; the date of her death is unknown.

The princess had set herself the filial task of writing a biography of her father from 1069 to his death in 1118, thus covering the whole of his reign and twelve years before it. Her history thus formed a continuation of those composed by Attaleiates and by her husband, the former of whom had narrated the events of the years 1034 to 1079, the latter those of the years 1070 to 1079. As it had been the object of the former to glorify the still living Botaneiates, so it was the aim of the latter to whitewash Alexios, representing him as a legitimate sovereign, who had merely renounced the throne, once occupied by his uncle.