How did anna comnena die

Anna Komnene was a historian, intellectual, and daughter of Byzantine Emperor, Alexios I Komnenos. Dr. Leonora Neville joins the show to explore more about Anna’s life and writings. Professor Neville is John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair of Byzantine History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Some topics explored

• The Byzantine Empire during, and around, the time of her life
• Her upbringing and education, including what she studied
• General literacy levels in the empire in the 11th & 12th centuries
• Her authored history book, the Alexiad
• Anna’s assessment of her father in the Alexiad
• Potential ambitions that Anna had for writing the Alexiad
• Interpreting the lamentations that Anna made in the Alexiad
• Examining the allegation that she was involved in a coup against the empire
• Her father, Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos
• Her brother, Byzantine Emperor John I Komnenos
• Western Crusaders conquering Constantinople in 1204
• Anna’s husband Nikephorous Byrennios the Younger
• Nikephorous Byrennios’
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  The Empresses of Constantinople by Joseph McCabe

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  The distinguished family of the Comneni has already made its appearance in our narrative. It may be recalled that the last chapter opened with a march of the great provincial nobles upon the capital, and the placing of one of their ablest representatives, Isaac Comnenus, upon the throne. Isaac’s brave life had ended in heroic foolishness. Terrified by an apparition, he embraced the monastic life, ignored the natural desire of his brother John to succeed him, and handed the crown to the Ducas family. During the reign of Eudocia the widow of John Comnenus, Anna, remained in Constantinople to guard the fortunes of her children and eventually to help them to secure the throne. She was a woman of the old Roman build, rather than Byzantine; strong, ambitious, able and despotic. The Cæsar John Ducas looked on her with just suspicion, and accused her of treasonable correspondence with Romanus, when he was struggling to regain his throne. She boldly asserted that the letters were forged, and brandished an image of Christ in t

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  When we think of the names of the great historians of the past, a long and familiar list comes to mind: Herodotus, of course, the ‘father of history’; Thucydides and Xenophon; the great Roman historians such as Livy, Plutarch and Tacitus, to name but three; the historians of the Renaissance like Bruni or Machiavelli; Edward Gibbon, of course, and Thomas Carlyle; Leopold von Ranke and more recently Ferdinand Braudel.

  Lists are always contentious. They are bound to provoke debate and discussion about those who are included and those whose names are left off. Few, however, would name Anna Komnene in the list of great historians. That is a shame, because Anna’s contribution to history – as a historian, author and patron of scholarship – should place her in the first rank of those who wrote about the past.

  Anna was born in Constantinople in 1083, the daughter of Alexios Komnenos and his wife Eirene, rulers of the Byzantine Empire – the eastern half of the Roman empire that had not only survived but flourished following the sack and fall of Rome six hundred years earlier. Anna was the