ABSTRACT
At the age of fifty-five, Anna Comnena began writing the Alexiad, a prose epic which remains one of the foremost histories of the First Crusade, as well as of the Comnenus family and the Byzantine state, providing a mirror of Byzantine politics and society during her lifetime. Anna had been given a crown as a child and had fully expected that at her father’s death she would become the Basilissa of the Eastern Empire. Anna’s brother John, fearing that the family connived against him, “deserted his father on his deathbed in order to secure control of the Great Palace.” Once Anna’s plotting to do away with brother John was bared, the family sent her off to Kecharitomene where she might devote herself to authorship. Her work is only nominally and partly about Alexius, however, for it is a monumental history in fifteen books, modeled on Homer with Christianized Byzantine variations.
