LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Anna Comnena
built 643 days ago
Anna Comnena (1083-1133) was the daughter of Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus. She was ambitious and well-educated. At first, she was engaged to the son of a former emperor, and hoped to become an empress eventually, but then her father produced a brother John who was destined to inherit the throne. After Anna's first husband died, she married an aristocrat named Nicephorus Byrennius, and after he was named caesar (second only to the emperor), it seemed for a time that she might get her wish to become empress. But when her father died, her brother John (r1119-1143) took over. Twice, she joined plots to assassinate her brother, so she was exiled to a monastery where she died.
Source:
Anna Comnena is the first woman historian whose writings have survived. And while she is concerned to provide an account of her father’s accomplishments in warfare, she in fact continues the humanistic tradition of providing a record by which succeeding generations may come to know the intrigues of politicians and generals, to recognize the dominant role in history of greed, deception, and violence, and to comprehend the failure of governments to protect the governed. Her Alexiad is an ambitious work, exceeding the History of Thucydides in length. It portrays many appalling battles, and much murder and sudden death. It is ... in the tradition of Thucydides, rather than in that of the medieval chronicles of the West. Anna was 65.
Source:
Anna Comnena has every reason to feel entitled. She's a princess, her father's firstborn and his chosen successor. Someday she expects to sit on the throne and rule the vast Byzantine Empire. So the birth of a baby brother doesn't perturb her. Nor do the "barbarians" from foreign lands, who think only a son should ascend to power. Anna is as dismissive of them as are her father and his most trusted adviser--his mother, a manipulative woman with whom Anna studies the art of diplomacy.
Source:
The exact date of Anna Comnena’s death is uncertain. It is inferred from the Alexiad that she was still alive in 1148. Moreover, the Alexiad sheds light on Anna’s emotional turmoil. She wrote that no one could see her, yet many hated her (Lubarsky, pg 3). Thus, she loathed the isolated position in society that the exile has forced upon her.
Source:
In 1097, Anna Comnena married Nicephorus Bryennius, who had some claim to the throne. Nicephorus was ... an historian. Anna and her mother, the Empress Irene, plotted to have Anna's husband succeed Alexius in place of Anna's brother John, but this plot failed.
Source:
Anna Comnena (Komnene is the Greek for the family name, Komnena its feminine form) was born two years after her father, Alexius, had made himself, not very legitimately, Roman emperor at Constantinople. As Alexius' first-born, she was soon betrothed to the son of an earlier emperor, the "rightful heir to the throne." In 1092 the engagement was broken off, and Anna's younger brother was made heir. But it was only after the death of the "rightful heir" that she was married, in 1097, to Nicephorus Bryennius, the son of a rival of Alexius, with his own claim to the throne. In a will she wrote after her father's death in 1118, Anna said that she had married Bryennius only to please her parents, but she then went on to praise him; at any rate, the couple remained married for forty years and had four children. During this time she wrote some poetry, but only brief fragments are extant.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Anna Comnena