The Alexiad

"It’s a bit cheeky to get another Byzantine text in there. I met my wife at Cambridge and the first time we had coffee she asked me where gender, kinship, religion and ritual fit into my work. I was absolutely floored–I couldn’t answer it. I’m not stupid enough to argue a lost cause so I said it wasn’t really something I’d ever thought about. I wouldn’t say she radicalized me, as I come from a family of very strong female figures, but… There are several jewels of medieval Greek literature but Anna Komnene’s is probably the brightest. She was the daughter of one of the emperors—she was porphyrogenita—and it is the first narrative history written by a woman in any European language. It’s a text that is incredibly florid, very beautiful, and extremely interesting. It describes a world from about the 1080s onwards—the time of the first Christian response to the Islamic expansion, of the First Crusade. It describes credit crunches and quantitative easing—the same sort of things we have today. It talks about foreign relations and how to try and reinvigorate a Brexit-type world where peripheral regions are splitting off and being led into disaster by lunatics. It’s written by a woman and it’s therefore interesting in its own right, but the most interesting thing about it is that because it’s written by a woman, historians have completely ignored and misunderstood it. Edward Gibbon wrote that it betrayed the vanity of a female author on every page. It’s simply dismissed, with people saying it’s overly eulogistic praise of a ruler by an adoring daughter who is trying to make her father sound good. In fact, when I wrote a book about the First Crusade—which was heralded as ‘overturning a millennium of scholarship,’ a great thing to have on my tombstone—the doyen of Crusader historians wrote a very nice review but then said, ‘You can’t take anything this text said seriously because it was written by an old woman living in a convent.’ “Even though, in today’s world, we think people who go and commit acts of violence in the service of their God as being incredibly dangerous, we still glamourize the Crusaders.” But the material that is used by Crusader historians is all written by old men living in monasteries, thousands of miles away from the action. She was an eyewitness at all these events. She had access to the imperial library, she used letters written by and to her father, imperial documents. Not only did she have the archival material, but she met these people herself. Because her text isn’t written in chronological order, it has flummoxed scholars for the last thousand years. It’s about rehabilitating a text like that and understanding it. The title, The Alexiad, is a direct nod to The Iliad . She’s much better read than I am, so she’s quoting Homer and Hesiod and Plutarch and other classical authors, with lots of in-jokes and nods and puns. Although my Greek is good, you can’t always see those. Every single sentence has got some juice in it and if you can’t see it, it’s because you’re not smart enough. When I started doing my PhD research on it, I thought, ‘I’m going to write on an interesting book written by a woman and gender is going to be important here.’ In fact, it allowed me to completely reconfigure the background to the Crusades—which is the single most written about thing in history apart from World War I, World War II and the Tudors. We tend to think of the Crusades as a Christian response to the Islamic conquests. But the city of Jerusalem fell to the Muslims 450 years before the Crusades. Where was the Christian response? If we really thought it was that serious, why did it take nearly 500 years for there to be a military reply? I was very lucky working on this text because you could re-place events in a different order. Sometimes Anna deliberately gets them wrong, or makes a mistake. She says, ‘Look I’ve got lots of material in front of me, I’m not entirely sure what happened and when.’ That gave me the confidence to realise that you can actually go and tackle these sources head-on. You can go and read the Arabic, the Armenian and the Syriac sources on the Crusades—which nobody ever does because we’re too engaged with the knight-on-a-white-horse-fighting-for-his-faith. Even though, in today’s world, we think people who go and commit acts of violence in the service of their God as being incredibly dangerous, we still glamourize the Crusaders. Her father. He takes the throne at a moment of complete chaos. There has been a collapse of the economy and politics and there’s huge military pressure all around. He stabilises it. Part of it is through building relationships with Baghdad, part is through connections with Cairo into the Caucasus, with Russia and the West. But it’s a work of literature as well, you don’t need to know anything about the history to enjoy it. Anna is a very human author. She does intervene and say, ‘this is what I think.’ Or she’ll get to the end of a section and go, ‘The people who caused these kinds of problems are like dogs who return to eat their own vomit.’ Anna reminds us—as with our Brexit discussions here—that there are people who will be destructive and turbulent without thinking what the consequences are. There are ways of trying to understand and intervene and try to provide a guide, to say ‘Look, this is what happened and it had long term disastrous consequences for us.’ I translated The Alexiad for Penguin Classics. I probably translated that more than ten years ago now. It was a very sobering experience, as it’s quite a long text. I’m very proud I did it, but it was not the most pleasurable thing I’ve ever done. It’s like dealing with something incredibly fragile because it’s very hard to do justice to someone else’s voice. You have to learn how to listen, you have to learn how to render it into English, you have to learn how to carry those allusions, and you learn, I think, how to be a historian. That was a particular building block in my ability to both read history but also to write it: how do you convey things? What should the author’s role be in a text? But it’s absolutely fascinating. It’s tells you about a world that we should know a lot about because Alexius’s problems, that Anna writes about, are the same kind of problems that we’re dealing with today: What should you do with militant fundamentalists who set fire to churches or murder priests? How do you best deal with regimes nearby who are potentially volatile and unstable? And they also had migration crises—the population of big cities, what kind of mercy should they show to outsiders who are either from the same country or from different languages or backgrounds? The Alexiad is a kind of golden book for me. It was a very successful period in the Byzantine world. That’s why I sneaked it in too."