Thinkers Timeline

Anna Komnene was a Byzantine princess and historian. The Byzantine Empire was the eastern continuation of the Roman Empire. It survived for a thousand years after the western Roman Empire fell. Anna Komnene was born in the imperial palace in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 1083. Her father was the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos. She is widely considered the first known woman historian in European tradition, though women had certainly written history elsewhere before her. She was the eldest child of the emperor. Her parents had her educated to a high level, unusual for a woman of her time. She studied Greek classics, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. She read Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, and the Bible. She knew the Byzantine intellectual traditions of her time deeply. When her younger brother John was born, the line of imperial succession changed. As the eldest, Anna had expected to be empress, with her husband as a kind of co-ruler. The arrival of a male heir reduced her position. According to some sources, she later plotted to put her own husband on the throne instead of her brother. The plot failed. She and her husband were exiled within Constantinople, kept under watch but not killed. After her husband's death in 1137, she retired to a monastery. There, in her sixties, she began writing the Alexiad. The book is a long history of her father's reign as emperor, from 1081 to 1118. It runs to over 500 pages in modern translations. The book is one of the great sources for the history of the First Crusade, the Byzantine Empire, and the politics of the eastern Mediterranean in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. She died around 1153, aged about 70.