The Komnene Dynasty

Byzantium's Struggle for Survival, 1057–1185

John Carr

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526702319
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The 128-year dynasty of the Komneni (1057 to 1185) was the last great epoch of Byzantium, when the empire had to fend off Turkish and Norman foes simultaneously. Starting with the extremely able Alexios I, and unable now to count on help from the West, the Komneni played their strategic cards very well. Though the dynasty ended in cruelty and incompetence under Andronikos I (the Terrible), it fought a valiant rear-guard action in keeping eastern Christendom alive. The Komnene dynasty saw several changes in Byzantine military practice, such as the adoption of heavy cavalry on the western model, the extensive use of foreign mercenaries and the neglect of the navy (both of which were to prove a huge and possibly fatal disadvantage). A chapter is devoted to the famous Varangian Guard, which included many Saxons in exile following the Norman conquest of England. The terrible defeat at Myriokephalon in 1176 sealed the doom of the dynasty, preparing the way for the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders.

Chapter 1

A lady not for turning

One windy day, probably in the autumn of 1106, a sudden strong gust blew down a very old bronze statue in the Forum of Constantine in Constantinople. More than 700 years old, the statue had originally been one of Apollo, but it was said that Constantine the Great, the founder of Constantinople, had it de-paganized and renamed after himself. That formality, like many such formalities, had not stuck and to the people of the capital it was the Anthelion, or ‘instead of the sun’, a reference to the ancient Apollo who in pagan times was believed to traverse the sky every day in his flaming chariot. So, when the Anthelion unexpectedly succumbed to a blustery southwester, the people were naturally alarmed and, as many still do with such phenomena, attributed a sinister metaphysical significance to it. The commonest interpretation was that the Anthelion’s fall portended the imminent death of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. And the mutterings, of course, reached the emperor’s ears.

According to Alexios’ daughter Anna, who may well have been present when her father was told of what the fearful people were saying, he laughed it off. ‘I am absolutely certain,’ he remarked with admirable aplomb, ‘that statues blowing over do not induce death.’ It is God, he said, who gives and takes away life, and not some sculptor’s product. It is a fine and noble reaction, and one worthy of an emperor, yet can we take Anna’s assertion at face value? It is impossible to say. Anna Komnene admired her father to the point of sanctification; in her famous memoir, the Alexiad, he comes across as a paragon of rulers, near-perfect in body and mind. Yet as she was also one of the most formidable intellects of her time, and not given to self-delusion, we may give her the benefit of the doubt by noting her honesty in an incident that occurred shortly after the statue’s fall.

Anna and her three younger sisters one day became aware of an extraordinary commotion coming from the direction of the Agora not far from the palace. Aged about 24 at the time, she was old enough to have known what it was: a conspiracy against her father had just been uncovered, and the ringleaders were being paraded for public ridicule. The girls—probably dressed plainly so as not to stand out in the crowd—slipped out incognito to join the jeering crowds. A jarring scene met their eyes. A group of men, all of them with shaved heads and beards and dressed in sackcloth, were seated sideways on oxen driven through the streets. Their bare heads were decorated with gory sheep’s intestines—symbolic ‘crowns’ for those who would dare to overthrow the emperor. Leading the procession were the equivalent of street wardens, brandishing rods and bawling obscene songs that made fun of the conspirators, all of whom knew what would come next: at the very least, their eyes would be gouged out.

But it was the behaviour of the ringleader that got Anna Komnene’s attention. This was Michael Anemas, one of four brothers who had hatched the plot to topple Alexios in league with several noble families and high-ranking army officers. As Anemas was brought into sight of the palace, he was seen to gaze up at the imposing edifice and make a series of gestures. Perhaps he and the other conspirators had been gagged, or simply Anemas could not have been heard above the din of the crowd; but as Anna and her sisters watched transfixed, he raised his hands as if in prayer, and made motions suggesting that he wished his arms and legs and head to be cut off. Whether this was because he truly repented of his acts or wished to die now to escape fearful tortures later, we cannot tell. But Anna seems to have come to the former conclusion—even though Anemas had been convicted of plotting to assassinate her beloved father.

Rushing back to the palace, Anna sought out her mother, the empress Irene Doukaina, who at that moment was in prayer seclusion with Alexios. Irene reluctantly responded to her daughter’s frantic gestures and tore herself away from her husband to join Anna at a palace window. Below, Michael Anemas and his accomplices were being led along on their oxen. Anemas’ nobility under stress had also impressed the mob, and his captors, noting the swelling signs of public sympathy, appeared reluctant to speed the victims to their fate. A few moments of the spectacle was enough for Irene, who ran back to Alexios begging tearfully for him to reprieve Anemas. ‘The truth is,’ Anna later wrote, ‘we cared for the men for the emperor’s sake: it hurt us to think that he was being deprived of such brave men.’

Irene’s pleas worked: an official was sent post-haste to halt the grim procession. He was almost too late, for it had arrived at a tall archway known as The Hands. It took its name from a pair of bronze hands on the top; these had been put up years before as a symbolic boundary beyond which a criminal could not hope for a royal pardon. If a condemned man had not yet reached The Hands on his punitive procession, it was always possible for a last-minute pardon to arrive, but once he was through the arch and on the wrong side of The Hands, hope was gone. By Anna’s account the imperial official caught up with Anemas right beneath the archway, literally at the last second, and the conspirator, instead of being blinded and possibly put to death, was jailed in a tower—later called the Anemas Tower—near the palace. (We don’t know what happened to the other conspirators.)

Anna Komnene’s candour and resolve are remarkable for the time. The twelfth century was not an age that exactly encouraged the rise of women in public life. In Europe, from England in the north-west to Byzantium in the south-east, it was kings, statesmen and generals who made things happen. In the concurrent Arab and Islamic world, control by men was even tighter. To be sure, kings and emperors and sultans had wives whose characters and perspicacity sometimes gave them influence in the domestic sphere, or could smooth out the more savage instincts of some leaders. But high-placed women rarely could achieve positions of real political power, which makes the career of Anna Komnene of Byzantium even more remarkable.

Giving her a considerable head start in life was the fact that she had been born (1083) two years into her father’s reign, which made her a true porphyrogennete, or ‘born into the purple’. This was a title given to anyone born while his or her father occupied the Byzantine throne as opposed to, say, being a prince or heir-apparent. Such royal births took place in the famous Purple Chamber of the palace that was set aside for precisely such portentous occasions, hence the designation. In the often-insecure royal environment of Byzantium, where emperors and their families had to spend much of their time and energy fending off rivals, conspirators and coup plots, being a porphyrogennetos (the more common masculine form of the term) carried a distinct cachet of legitimacy that could be decisive in keeping a dynasty such as the Komnenes in power.

By many accounts, Anna’s looks were a match for her brains. Unfortunately, for Byzantine rulers we have nothing like the startling accuracy of, for example, Hans Holbein’s iconic portrait of England’s Henry VIII. Any likenesses that have survived are heavily stylized and not to be trusted. The purpose of portraiture in those days, whether through paint or the more elaborate technique of mosaic, was not so much to render a faithful likeness for posterity as to bring out a deeper significance—the impressionistic majesty of what the subject represented rather than what he or she was like externally. Style thus totally dominated substance.

The only hint as to what she actually looked like comes from a contemporary poet and friend of hers, Theodore Prodromos, who wrote that she was dark-haired like her father, of medium height and with large, expressive and playful eyes. And that is pretty much all we have. The adjective ‘beautiful’ has been carelessly handed down from writer to writer, but without further detail. Anna seems to have also inherited the calm dignity of her mother Irene Doukaina, of the powerful Doukas clan. Anna’s own ecstatic description of her mother is rather over the top, and perhaps to be expected from an admiring daughter obsessed with her family’s image and power. But keeping this caveat in mind, Irene Doukaina still comes across as an impressive lady. Here is what admirers may have seen while she was still only 15 and betrothed to Alexios:

She stood upright [Anna wrote] like some young, proud, always blossoming shoot, each limb and her whole body in perfect symmetry... She never ceased to fascinate all who saw her... Her face shone with the soft light of the moon... There were rose blossoms on her cheeks, visible a long way off.

Irene’s light blue eyes, we are assured, could render speechless anyone who had cause to fear her wrath and her acid tongue, from lazy servants and courtiers to generals and senators. A twelfth century gold cloisonné plaque in Saint Mark’s in Venice shows Irene as a tall and regal figure, with neat dark hair framing a smallish face and aristocratic mouth. On the other hand, that style was a set standard for Byzantine artists depicting royal or noble women, so we cannot treat it as a lifelike portrait.

Conversely, we have a wealth of information about Anna Komnene’s social and intellectual attainments, and character. From an early age, and with the automatic sense of superiority and supreme self-confidence conferred by being a porphyrogennete, she considered herself indispensable to the power of the Komnene family and by extension to Byzantium itself. In hindsight, even her physical birth was rather extraordinary; she claimed in all seriousness that her mother endured labour pains for two days more than was necessary, telling her unborn daughter to be patient for a few days so that Alexios could return from a campaign and have Anna enter the world in his presence. The story, though implausible, is not impossible; it also introduces a military element into the beginning of Anna’s life in a way that stresses her future loyalty to the Empire and her interest in military and political affairs.

Some historians make the rather disingenuous claim that Anna Komnene, being a woman, could not really have had the breadth of military and political savvy she displayed in the Alexiad, on which she began working when she was pushing 60 and by then well out of public life. That claim cannot stand up to scrutiny. Besides the fact that there have been plenty of female political leaders and a few competent military figures through history, Anna’s own privileged upbringing and early life steeped her in affairs of state. She was often present when her father the emperor discussed weighty matters with politicians and generals, and was thus able to absorb ideas of how power and influence worked, who were defined as allies and who as enemies, whom to trust and whom not, the insidious traps of human trickery, and above all, the overarching need for the Christian Byzantine state to preserve itself and the ideals of nobility for which it stood.

According to one recent authority, it was this youthful experience that grew and matured into Anna’s deep identification of Alexios I with the state itself. In the Alexiad ‘the Byzantine Empire occupies the centre of the world, and her father occupies centre stage’ in ‘a cosmic struggle for dominance’. In her eyes, he was almost a second Christ, totally selfless, exerting and sacrificing himself for the greater good. Such a deep and subliminal sense can come only from formative childhood experiences. Of course, Alexios himself was not the near-saint his daughter held him up to be, but her basic notion of the purpose of the state and the military was authentic for its time.

As was de rigueur at the time, and has been for royal families until quite recently, Anna was betrothed in infancy. Her selected fiancé was a young noble of her mother’s family, Constantine Doukas. In some ways it was an odd match. Nine years older than Anna, Constantine was a son of Michael VII, the previous emperor-but-one, and as such, technically a distant uncle. The betrothal was obviously engineered by Irene to keep the Doukas family in the power loop, as it were. Anna, as the firstborn, was thus expected to become empress regnant (that is, in her own right as opposed to being merely an emperor’s consort). It could have been a match made in heaven. Constantine was an almost angelic being, ‘blond, with a skin as white as milk, his cheeks suffused with red like some dazzling rose that has just left its calyx’. We are also told that he was, like the typical high-born English boy of a later age, good at sports and games, ‘the picture of Eros’. In addition, he, too, was a true-purple porphyrogennetos, and at a tender age had the privilege of co-signing palace documents in red ink—an imperial prerogative that only the emperor shared.

The personal vista that spread out before the infant Anna was a glowing one. In time, she would share the throne, as an Augusta, with her handsome husband. But that vista collapsed with startling suddenness. The dynamite that blew it up was the birth of her little brother John on 13 September 1087. At one stroke, her prospects of being crowned in the cathedral of Sancta Sophia were scuppered. Except in extraordinary succession cases, where a male heir could not be rounded up or a male usurper might threaten to step in, any woman’s chances of ruling as Augusta in her own right were slim. She was only aged 4 at the time, and probably too young to fully understand what had happened. With the benefit of decades of hindsight, she acknowledged that family and Empire alike rejoiced at John’s birth, but there was—literally—a darker side to her memory of the event:

The child was dark in complexion, his forehead wide and cheeks weak... very dark eyes and a sharp character and mind.

Anna’s dismay at being pipped to the post of the succession almost certainly accounts for the sniffy and slightly racist tone of her description. True, John may not have approached the fair and angelic Constantine in the appearance stakes, but it was only one, and probably a minor, element in what was to ripen into a bitter and lifelong sibling rivalry.

Not long afterwards, the promising young Constantine Doukas disappeared. Sadly, we don’t know any more details, but he may not have been as robust as he looked. The consensus is that he died in the early 1090s, barely out of his teens, from some ailment. Possibly he had been banished after some unsuccessful Doukas plot against Alexios, who would have enough practical motivation for putting Constantine out of the way. If there was foul play, Anna would certainly have revealed it; in her memoir she confesses to ‘floods of tears’ whenever she thought of him, but makes no accusations. What was painfully obvious from the beginning was that Constantine’s demise pushed her yet further down the line of succession.

Knowing now that she would never become commander-in-chief of the Byzantine state and military structure, Anna Komnene grew up determined to make her mark anyway, as befitted a porphyrogennete. She was seriously groomed for power. Alexios and Irene provided her with the best education available, from a thorough grounding in the Scriptures to the cream of Greek and Roman literature and thought. Some believe that Alexios discouraged a more rounded education for Anna as unbecoming a woman not expected to play an active role in politics. If that is true, as it may well be, then Anna was able to easily circumvent that restriction by using her prerogative as a princess to gain access to any of the classics she wanted; this way she acquired a facility with classical Greek that few outside the clergy could have attained. She was particularly drawn to the ancient history of Athens and Sparta, which means she would have devoured both the Histories of Herodotus and the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides, which are the par excellence military histories of the classical period and our main sources for Spartan military prowess in particular. Especially enthralling to her was Homer’s hard-slogging, no-holds-barred epic of the last year of the Trojan War, the Iliad, a Y chromosome soldier’s narrative if ever there was one. And as if that were not enough, she read widely in medicine and metaphysics, and contributed to the corpus of western thought on Aristotle.

With the fleeting young Constantine Doukas out of the picture, the way was free for Anna to acquire a proper functional husband in the person of Nikephoros Bryennios, a member of a military family whose namesake grandfather had been blinded in punishment for an attempt on the throne in 1077. Thus there was no love lost between the Komnenes and the Bryennii; moreover, powerful military families were a constant threat, real or potential, to the throne. The senior Bryennios was under a cloud; though he had fought valiantly in the disastrous Battle of Manzikert six years earlier, sustaining three wounds, he had been unable to prevent the humiliating capture of Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes and the decimation of the Byzantine army at the hands of the Seljuk Turks. Under Alexios, however, the family seems to have been rehabilitated. No doubt Alexios wanted to patch up his differences with the Bryennii in the wider strategic interest, and one way of doing it was to marry off Anna to Nikephoros Bryennios junior, who would be named Kaisar (Caesar), one step beneath the emperor in the court hierarchy, with Anna as his Kaisarissa.

The union was clearly a political one, but Anna very likely found herself genuinely attracted to Nikephoros. Though she would later claim that her true desire was to remain unmarried after losing Constantine Doukas, the record does not support the assertion. By all accounts she had few, if any, qualms about the marriage. To her Nikephoros was ‘an extremely handsome man, very intelligent’, and indeed ‘the most outstanding man of the time’. We may take such lavish praise cautiously, as the product of long hindsight and perhaps unspoken regrets. Also, as in her memories of Constantine Doukas, when in later life she thought of Nikephoros, again there would be ‘floods of tears’.

He was a man surpassing all others... his literary attainments, his multifaceted political and religious wisdom... What joy suffused his body, that imposing stature, worthy of more than just a royal throne, of something higher and holier.

How seriously should we take such effusions? Separating truth from rosy hindsight is a perilous task. The nearest we can get to doing it is to suppose that, always in her words, the political, regal, military, spiritual and sexual sides of her marriage blend into an intoxicating chemical mix of power. In Anna’s mind all those elements constituted the one heady reality of the ruling class.

Anna and Nikephoros were bound in matrimony when she was a mere 15 years of age. That was by no means unusual in Roman and Byzantine times; young people had to grow up fast, without the extended adolescence that only relatively recently has become the norm in our coddled age. In western knightly circles, for example, it was widely believed that if a boy was still at school at 12, he was good for nothing but the priesthood. Even in modern Greece a common saying has lingered that a man should either marry very young or enter a monastery. Developed teenage girls were determinedly pushed into marriage as soon as possible, no doubt to safely channel sexual urges whose free use could destabilize society and fuel crime. Whether Byzantine morals in general were indeed improved by this custom, however, is debatable.

Anna bore the personable Bryennios no fewer than eight children, of whom just four survived infancy. Few personal details are available, but in her exhaustive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Illustrations
• Chapter 1: A lady not for turning
• Chapter 2: Constantine’s Legacy
• Chapter 3: A hard act to follow: The Macedonians
• Chapter 4: 1057: Isaac the Founder
• Chapter 5: Interregnum: Diogenes’ disaster
• Chapter 6: Enter Alexios
• Chapter 7: Holding the Empire together
• Chapter 8: The road to Micklegarth
• Chapter 9: The ‘greedy Latin race’: Alexios and the First Crusade
• Chapter 10: A fighter to the end
• Chapter 11: John the Good: A soldier’s soldier
• Chapter 12: Manuel I and the Second Crusade
• Chapter 13: Bloodstained Finale: Andronikos I
• Chapter 14: Twilight in Trebizond
• Bibliographical Note
• The House of Komnene Family Tree
• Plate section