Part 63

She begins her history by describing her father’s exploits during the three previous reigns, the “three labours of Hercules[953],” as she characteristically calls his suppression of the rebellions of Oursel Bailleul, or Russell Balliol, a member of the family which founded Balliol College (whom Scott has, by a pardonable anachronism, represented as a fellow-prisoner of Count Robert of Paris in the dungeon), and his victory over the two pretenders from Durazzo, her husband’s father, Nikephoros Bryennios, and Basilakios. She then proceeds to trace the career of the famous Norman leader, Robert Guiscard, and the causes of his war against the Byzantine Empire, the first attack of the Latin West against the Greek East and the forerunner of the Fourth Crusade. The second book is devoted to her father’s revolt against the Emperor Nikephoros Botaneiates and his seizure of the throne. With the third book begins his reign. She describes the Norman invasion, how Guiscard crossed the Adriatic, besieged and took Durazzo, the historic town which has played so large a part in the Balkan history of the last seven years, and which was then the western gate of the Byzantine Empire, just as in the days of Catullus and Plautus it had been the “tavern of the Adriatic.” In the sixth book we have Guiscard’s second expedition and death at the Cephalonian village, which, under the name of Phiskardo, still recalls the end of that famous Norman leader. Here is related the legend that in the opposite island of Ithake there was a ruined city, called Jerusalem; and thus was fulfilled the prophesy that Guiscard should die when he had reached Jerusalem. Similar prophecies were similarly accomplished in the case of Pope Silvester II, who died after celebrating mass in the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and in that of our King Henry IV, dying, as Shakespeare has narrated, in the Jerusalem chamber. Next follow the military operations in Asia Minor and against the Cumans, or “Scythians,” as the classically-educated writer calls them, in Europe. Then, after some account of the affairs of Crete and Cyprus and of the Dalmatian revolt, the tenth book treats of the heresy of Neilos, and introduces us to the First Crusade.

At this point the chief interest of this history for modern readers begins, for Anna Comnena is writing of a movement of world-wide importance, and her descriptions of the Crusading chiefs are those of an eyewitness. The eleventh book deals with the progress of the Crusaders in Asia—the capture of Nice, the foundation of the Principality of Antioch and of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the accession of Baldwin I, the quarrel of Alexios and Bohemond about Antioch and Laodicea, and Bohemond’s strangely contrived journey to Italy in a coffin with the odorous carcase of a dead cock. Books twelve and thirteen describe his second invasion of Albania, his siege of Durazzo, and his second pact of vassalage with Alexios, who gave him Antioch as a fief for life with the County of Edessa. The fourteenth book records his death, the siege of Tyre and the Turkish war, and gives an interesting account of the Bogomile heretics at Philippopolis. The last book is also partly occupied with their treatment by the Emperor, and ends with a somewhat mutilated description of the death of Alexios. Thus, as a later Greek epigram expressed it, the _Alexiad_ ended when Alexios died.

As its name implies, the _Alexiad_ is a biography rather than a history, with the Emperor as the central figure, placed in what his admiring daughter regarded as the most favourable light, but what, according to modern ideas, is sometimes quite the reverse. The Imperial biographer was well aware that she would be accused of partiality, and is at considerable pains to repudiate in advance the charge of filial prejudice. She specially pleads her unbiased judgment in dealing with her father’s career, declares that she does not like to praise her relatives or to repeat scandal, adapts Aristotle’s famous saying about Plato by averring that, if her father is dear to her, truth is dearer, and sums up her aim as “love of her father and love of truth[954].” She admits that he had some defects, that he stammered[955] and found difficulty in pronouncing the letter R; and she candidly avows that he was merely an instrument in the hand of his mother, Anna Dalassene, an excellent woman of business, when he first ascended the throne[956]. But she is apt to forget her precept of impartiality when she comes to describe his achievements. With characteristic exaggeration she exclaims that, “not even if another Demosthenes and all the chorus of the orators, not even if all the Academy and all the Stoic philosophers combined together to extol the services of Alexios, could they attain unto them”; and in another passage she asks, “what echo of Demosthenes or whirling words of Polemon, why, not all the muses of Homer, could worthily hymn his successes; I should say that not Plato himself, nor all the Porch and Academy combined together could have philosophised in a manner such as befitted his soul[957].”

She tells us that her father hated not only lying but the appearance of lying; yet, she naïvely applauds his sharp practice in sending letters to Bohemond’s officers, in which he thanked them for letters to himself which they had never written, in order to compromise them with their chief; she acknowledges without a blush how he deceived the Crusaders at the taking of Nice; and she describes with admiration how he invited the Bogomile heretic, Basil, to a private colloquy, telling him that he admired his virtue and urging him to make a full statement of his doctrine, while all the time a secretary, concealed behind a curtain, took down the statements which fell from the unsuspecting heresiarch’s mouth and which were used as evidence against him to send him to the stake. Such tactics only evoke from the complaisant daughter the laudatory comment, that her father’s theological skill in dealing with heretics like the Manichæans should earn him the title of “the thirteenth apostle[958].” Modern readers will agree with Finlay that “even Anna’s account makes the Bogomilian a noble enthusiast, and her father a mean traitor.”

Yet Alexios was, in spite of these moral defects, a brave soldier, who, however, usually followed the plan of gaining a victory by craft, if craft were possible. His character was a combination, not uncommon in the Near East, of courage and intrigue; he was no coward, but he was a born schemer, rather than a statesman. Like many Byzantine rulers, he had a weakness for theology—a dangerous taste in an autocrat—and his daughter describes with admiration how he lectured the heretic Neilos on the doctrine of the Trinity, and how he ordered a monk named Zygavenos to compile a list and refutation of all the heresies, under the title of “A Dogmatic Panoply.” He had the politician’s love for an immediate success, rather than for a lasting benefit, although he was, as his daughter tells us, fond of playing chess, in which immediate success counts for less than a far-seeing plan. Thus, to obtain the temporary advantage of securing the aid of the Venetian fleet against the Normans, he gave the Venetians enormous commercial concessions throughout his Empire, which were one of the causes, 120 years later, of the Latin capture of Constantinople. The policy of Alexios Comnenos has had disciples in Southern and South-Eastern Europe in our own day; but the most successful Greek statesman of our time attained his wonderful triumphs by frankness and honesty of purpose, to which the Byzantine Emperor was a stranger.

But Anna’s partiality is not limited to her father; it extends to other members of her family, except, of course, her brother, the Emperor John II, who was, in reality, an excellent sovereign. Although she despised her husband’s weakness in not seizing the throne, she praises in Homeric language his skill as an archer, and devotes a long passage to the learning and wisdom, the strength and physical beauty, which made “my Cæsar,” as she affectionately calls him, what Achilles was among the Homeric Greeks. Like Achilles, he was a fine soldier, but, like not a few soldiers of Byzantium, he was also a student and a writer, who composed his history at the command of that “most learned mind and intelligence” as he called his wife’s mother, the Empress Irene[959]. Of that lady her daughter writes with enthusiasm, comparing her with Athena, and praising her for her zealous study of the branch of science which was most appreciated at the Byzantine Court—dogmatic theology. The Empress, so her daughter tells us, did not like publicity; she preferred to stay at home and read religious books; and, when she was obliged to perform any Court function, she blushed like a girl[960].

Of her _fiancé_, the young Constantine, the Princess writes with an enthusiasm which seems to come from the heart. She describes him as “a living statue,” and says that “if any one merely looked at him, he would speak of him as a descendant of the fabled age of gold”; and she confesses that after all these years the memory of this youth filled her eyes with tears. To the beauty of his mother, the Dowager-Empress Maria, by whom she was in part educated, she has dedicated a glowing passage, in which she likens her to a cypress in stature, with a skin white as snow—in short, a statue such as neither Phidias nor Apelles ever produced, “for such a harmony of all the members was never yet seen in any human body.” Thus, the Court circle of the reign of Alexios Comnenos, if we may believe his daughter, was a galaxy of that beauty which modern society journals assume to be the attribute of royal ladies.

It must not, however, be imagined that Anna Comnena, because she wrote like a Princess and a daughter, is not a valuable historian. She possessed a first-hand knowledge of the events of a large part of her father’s reign; and, as she tells us, she drew her information about the events, of which she had not been an eyewitness, largely from her father’s fellow-comrades in war, men like George Palaiologos, the defender of Durazzo, as well as from her father himself. Writing in the reign of Manuel I, when no one was interested in flattering the long-dead Alexios, she could claim, like Tacitus, that the time had arrived to describe his distant reign “sine irâ et studio.” From her birth and position, she possessed what mere scribes in all ages lack, an intimate acquaintance with the men who are really making history. She knew courts, and, a princess of the blood royal herself, she made the frank admission that even her father, against whom there were constant plots, was no exception to the rule that subjects usually dislike their sovereigns[961].

She had access to State papers, which to the ordinary literary man would have remained inaccessible for generations. Thus, she gives us the _ipsissima verba_ of the golden bull appointing the Empress-mother, Anna Dalassene, regent in the absence of her son, and the text of her father’s letter to the Emperor Henry IV, his “most Christian brother,” urging him to attack Guiscard in Southern Italy, offering him money, and suggesting a marriage between one of Henry’s daughters and his own nephew. These curious pieces are of interest as a specimen of the Byzantine Chancery’s epistolary style; and we note the care with which the Byzantine Emperor, who regarded himself as the sole heir of all the Cæsars, avoided giving the Imperial title to this Western “brother,” whom Anna describes by the Latinised form _rex_, while reserving for her father the more dignified title of _basileús_[962]. She gives, too, the full text of the lengthy agreement made between Alexios and Bohemond in 1108, which she probably had from her husband, who negotiated that treaty—a document of much value for the historical geography of the Holy Land during the Latin domination[963]. She has apparently used for her account of Guiscard a now lost Latin Chronicle, perhaps the work of the Archdeacon John of Bari, which was employed by William the Apulian as material for his Latin poem on that Norman chief, for she quotes the envoy of the Bishop of Bari as having described to her an incident in the campaign of Guiscard, at which he was present[964].

She had access, also, to the simple and unvarnished memoirs of retired veterans, and was therefore well posted in military affairs. Her accurate use of technical military terms would do credit to a war-correspondent of the scientific school, while the glowing rhetoric of some of her descriptions would win the admiration of the modern descriptive writer, who, not being allowed to see anything of the operations, has to fall back upon the scenery. As examples of her military phraseology[965] may be cited the words ἐξώπολον for the circle outside the camp, κοπός (or σκοπός) used in soldiers’ slang to designate their “fatigue parties,” and ἀρχοντόπουλοι, a term originally applied to the corps of soldiers’ sons first formed by her father, but extended in modern Greek to mean the children of any notables. She twice uses the technical term for a galley, and gives an elaborate description of the cross-bow, then an unknown weapon to the Greeks. More interesting still, she allows us to read, imbedded in her severely literary Greek, occasional specimens of the vulgar idiom used by the ordinary people in their conversation. Thus, she has preserved the popular lines about the successful conspiracy which placed her father on the throne; she cites a satiric verse about him during the Cuman war, and alludes to the comic song, sung in the vernacular, during the conveyance to execution of Michael Anemas, who had tried to kill him[966]. She so far forgets the dignity of historical narrative as to perpetrate two atrocious puns.

We find in her pages, too, some of the modern geographical names which had already, in popular speech, replaced the classical denominations for various Balkan mountains, rivers and towns. Thus, like her husband, she uses the modern name “Vardar” for the famous Macedonian river, instead of the classical “Axios”; she calls the Homeric “Ossa” by its present title of “Kissavos”; she describes the poetic “Peneios” as the “Salamvrias,” and uses the contemporary term “Dyrrachion” (whence comes the modern Italian “Durazzo” and the modern Serbian “Dratch”), as well as the older form “Epidamnos.” She apologetically asks no one to blame her for using such a vulgar name as “Vojussa,” with which the war has made us so familiar, for the classic river “Aoos[967].”

As a rule she adopts an exaggeratedly lofty style. Just as it was said of Dr Johnson, that he would have made “little fishes talk like whales,” so the learned Princess makes a man address a crew of boatmen in the language of Homer[968]. Her contemporary, the annalist Zonaras, says of her that “she employed an accurately Attic Greek style,” and that “she had applied herself to books and to learned men and did not merely hold incidental converse with them.” But she frequently descends to quite every-day words, with which students of such mediæval Greek works as the _Chronicle of the Morea_ and of the ordinary language of to-day are familiar. Thus, she describes an army, just as the Chronicler described it, as φοσσάτον; the French forms “liege” and “sergeants” are scarcely disguised under her Greek renderings λίζιος and σεργέντιοι. The classic word for “plains” (πεδία) becomes, in her prose, κάμπαι; the poetic τέμπη assume (as in Attaleiates) the guise of κλεισούραι, while κουλᾶ thrice displaces the classic ἀκρόπολις; φάμουσα, the vulgar word for “libels,” has crept into her pages; and πιγκέρνης has supplanted οἰνοχόος as the term for the court butler[969]. She remarks that those who led a nomadic life were called in “the common dialect, ‘Vlachoi’”; she quotes the popular Byzantine _mot_, that “the Scythians (_i.e._ Cumans) missed seeing May by a single day,” because they were defeated on April 29, and makes her father, when Bohemond at first rejected his presents, humorously apply to himself the current saying, “Let a bad thing return to its own master” (αὐθέντην)[970].

One of the most interesting features of Anna Comnena’s history is the aspect which the First Crusade assumes in her pages. To Western historians the Crusades appeared as, on the whole, a great material benefit to Europe, quite apart from their religious and moral motives and results. But we learn from this Byzantine Princess, herself an eye-witness of the Crusaders’ arrival in her father’s capital, how this religious movement struck the Eastern Christians. The incursion of vast masses of more or less undisciplined soldiers into the Byzantine Empire naturally inspired alarm in the mind of its ruler, who feared—and the diversion of the Fourth Crusade from the redemption of the Holy Land to the capture of Constantinople three generations later justified his fears—that the pilgrims might be tempted to occupy his territories on the way. East and West rarely thoroughly understand one another; and the mutual reproaches of bad faith, which Greek historians have flung at the Crusaders and Latin historians at Alexios, were probably largely due, as is usually the case when two different nationalities quarrel, to a misunderstanding of one another’s mentality.

Alexios could scarcely feel reassured, when he heard that one of the Crusading chiefs was that same Bohemond who had fought against him in Thessaly, and whose father had sought a shadowy pretext to invade his Empire and capture Durazzo, “the Metropolis of Illyricum[971].” Anna tells us what were the Emperor’s feelings when he first heard the news of the forthcoming Crusade and the approaching advent of vast Frankish armies. “He feared,” she wrote, “their attack, knowing their unrestrainable dash, their changeable and easily influenced minds, and all the other qualities, or concomitant attributes, of the French character.... For the French race is extremely hot-blooded and keen, and whenever it has once started on any course, impossible to check.” She accused the Crusaders of treating treaties like “scraps of paper” and of inordinate love of lucre; “for the Latin race,” she wrote, “is in other respects most devoted to money.” In her eyes these “barbarians,” as she called them in the contemptuous language of a highly cultivated Greek, were actuated by motives very different from the ostensible aim of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidels. “In appearance,” she remarked, “they were on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but in truth they wanted to oust the Emperor from his throne and seize the capital.” She noticed the sudden ups and downs of the French character, rapidly going from one extreme to the other, and pathetically described how one cause of her father’s rheumatism in his feet was the constant exertion to which they subjected that patient monarch, by worrying him with their requests all day and all night, so that he could not even find time to take his meals[972]!

In these circumstances, it was perhaps hardly to be expected that he should be very enthusiastic about taking an active part in the Crusade, although he more than once ransomed captured Crusaders. Nor was his enthusiasm increased by such acts of spoliation as the erection into a Latin County and a Latin Principality respectively of Edessa, still governed at the time of the Latin conquest by a Greek governor, and of Antioch, which only fourteen years earlier had been nominally a part of the Greek Empire. Again, no sovereign, and not least the ceremonious Emperor of Byzantium, could have been expected to put up with such an affront as that described by Sir Walter Scott after Anna Comnena, when a boorish Crusading noble seated himself on the Emperor’s seat. Yet Alexios took this unwarranted act of rudeness with great tact and dignity, even though it had been accompanied by an insulting remark about “a yokel remaining alone seated while so many nobles were standing in his presence.” Indeed, he not only deigned to ask who this unmannerly churl might be, but gave him some excellent advice, derived from long personal experience, of the safest way to wage war against the Turks. The arrogant Frank paid with his life at the battle of Dorylæum for his neglect of the Emperor’s well-meant warning[973].

The literary Princess was not, however, so far led away by her national prejudices as to see no good in the Crusaders. She said of a very good Greek horseman, that “one would have thought him to be not a Greek, but of Norman origin,” so well did he ride. Indeed, the incapacity of the French to fight on foot struck her so forcibly that she remarked: “A Frenchman on horseback is unrestrainable and would ride through the walls of Babylon, but once dismounted he is at the mercy of the first comer.” For that reason her father bade his archers kill the horses of the Western cavaliers, for then the riders would be helpless[974]. She specially eulogises the honesty of the Comte de St Gilles, Isangeles, as she calls him, who “differed in all things from all the Latins, as much as the sun differs from the stars[975].” While she expresses the horror felt by her fellow-countrymen at the Church militant as represented by the fighting Latin clergy, armed with shield and spear[976], in her character of Guiscard, who did so much harm to her father, she praises his courage and strategic ability, and her description of Bohemond’s personal appearance is so detailed and so flattering that it may have been prompted by a very feminine motive. “No such man, whether barbarian or Greek,” she wrote of him, “was ever seen in the land of the Greeks (for he was a marvel to behold and a wonder to be narrated)[977].” Of the warlike wife of Guiscard, Gaïta, she says with mixed admiration and alarm, that “she was a Pallas, but not an Athena,” skilled in battle but not in arts, and terrible when armed with her lance and piercing voice.

Students of Balkan geography are no less indebted to Anna Comnena than are historians of the First Crusade. Her pages are full of the names of places, rendered household words to us by the events of the last seven years. On this subject she had access to a very high authority, her father, who possessed a minute knowledge of both coasts of the Adriatic with their harbours, a list of which he sent to his Admiral, and with the prevailing winds of that turbulent sea. Alexios was, in fact, an Adriatic specialist, as he would be described in the jargon of to-day. No writer on the historical geography of Durazzo could afford to neglect our author, who minutely describes the origin, topography, and contemporary condition of that famous town. She tells us that at that time most of the inhabitants were colonists from Amalfi and Venice; and she describes the walls of that now squalid little Albanian town as at that time so broad that more than four horsemen could safely ride abreast along them, while there stood a bronze equestrian statue over the eastern gate. She talks of the old Bulgarian capitals of “Pliskova” and “Great Pristhlava” (Pliska and Prêslav); she narrates the origin of Philippopolis, where she herself had lived for some time; and she makes one interesting allusion to the comparatively recent Norman Conquest of England in the passage, in which she says that Bohemond was aided in his second invasion of Albania by men from “Thule” (Britain)[978], which she also mentions as furnishing the Varangian guard. We know from a contemporary British historian how glad the English exiles were to fight in Greece against the Normans, and how Alexios built a town for them at Civetot, the modern Guemlek, on the Asiatic coast near Constantinople. We hear, too, how 300 of them defended Kastoria.