Anna Komnene, An Historian Born to the Purple
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
It is the 941st anniversary of the birth of Anna Komnene (in Greek: Ἄννα Κομνηνή, Romanized as Ánna Komnēnḗ; 01 December 1083–1153), who was born a true princess of the blood in the Porphyry chamber of the Great Palace of Constantinople on this date in 1083 AD. Komnene was the daughter of Alexios I Komnenos, Byzantine emperor from 1081 to 1118.
The tradition of the color purple being associated with royalty goes back well before Byzantium. Purple dye was rare because its only source was the mucus secreted by a few species of Murex snails, found in the vicinity of Tyre, now in Lebanon, hence it came to be called Tyrian purple. It took tens of thousands of snails and an enormous amount of human labor to produce a little dye, making the dye rare and expensive, which led to its being reserved for royalty. Sumptuary laws are the laws that regulate consumption, especially luxury clothing and jewelry, which were obvious status markers that served a social purpose in differentiating elites, where it was considered problematic to blur the lines between classes. For us, sumptuary laws seem like a bizarre amalgam of money, prestige, power, and symbolism, which they were, but they served a function within ancient societies that no longer exists in our society, so it seems strange to us because the our social ontology has changed.
The Digest of Roman Law prepared under the reign to Junstinian I, had detailed classifications for clothing. Elaborate sumptuary laws were already in place during the Roman Republic to control the wearing of purple, and when the Republic gave way to the empire, only the Emperor was allowed to wear kekolumena, i.e., silk dyed in Tyrian purple. Pliny the Elder described the production process of Tyrian purple in his Natural History. Marcus Aurelius, who lived 900 years before Komnene, wrote in his Meditations:
“When we have meat before us and such eatables we receive the impression, that this is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a pig; and again, that this Falernian is only a little grape juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool dyed with the blood of a shell-fish: such then are these impressions, and they reach the things themselves and penetrate them, and so we see what kind of things they are. ”
It happened that the stone porphyry was, like Tyrian purple, also rare and expensive, and at the Royal Palace at Constantinople a special chamber was constructed entirely surfaced in porphyry, which was reserved for royal births. Anna Komnene herself described the royal chamber:
“This porphyry is a room in the Palace built in the form of a complete square from floor to ceiling, but the latter ends in a pyramid. The room affords a view of the sea and harbor where the stone oxen and the lions stand. Its floor is paved with marble and the walls are covered with marble panels. The stone used was not of the ordinary kind, nor marble which can be more easily obtained but at greater expense; it was in fact casually acquired in Rome by former emperors. This particular marble (porphyry) is generally of a purple colour throughout, but with white spots like sand sprinkled over it.”
This is what it meant to be born in the purple, which is how I initially described Anna Komnene. Why am I making a big deal out of Tyrian purple and porphyry? This appeal to the royal purple was part of Komnene’s legitimation strategy. Larisa Orlov Vilimonović wrote in her book Structure and Features of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad: Emergence of a Personal History:
“The fundamental basis of Anna’s political argument is her testimony to being imperial daughter, ‘born and bred in the purple’ — θυγάτηρ μὲν τῶν βασιλέων Ἀλεξιου καὶ Εἰρήνης, πορφύρας τιθήνημα τε καὶ γέννημα. Anna emphasized her imperial origin as a pivotal motive of her personal narrative, which supplied her with the recognisance of indisputable legitimacy. The first important ideological premise of her imperial legitimacy was primogeniture. The second premise, and more significant than the first one in the time when the Alexiad was written, was porphyrogennesis. Being born in the purple in the time of the Komnenian dynasty was the hallmark of imperial legitimacy. Actually, the time of the Komnenian dynasty changed the ideological conception of porphyrogennesis, when a distinctive Komnenian porphyrogennesis emerged, in which porphyrogennetos was the one who was born into the Komnenian family and not in the purple chamber, Porphyra.”
As a princess of the blood, Komnene had access to education not available to others. She used her social position to become one of the most learned individuals of her time, as related by Georgina Buckler in her book Anna Comnena: A Study:
“…in herself and her times and her writings Anna Comnena is surely one of the most interesting figures known to us… Anna Comnena could quote Homer and the Bible copiously and appositely, draw telling analogies from Greek history true or mythical, and handle terms of theological philosophy with at least perfect assurance… to the ordinary reader her battles are usually vivid and always intelligible; while her explanations as to liquid fire and the crossbow are among the loci classici for the two subjects. Her chronology is not impeccable, but it compares favourably with that of much later writers, even Froissart. We may dismiss many of her statements in religious matters as prejudiced or superstitious, but it demands some effort even now to wrestle as she does with Hypostasis and Henosis, or with the false doctrines of Monophysites and Bogomiles.”
There are many testimonies to Komnene’s educational attainment. Here is Leonora Neville in her Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian:
“Anna also explicitly testifies to her extreme education. The description of her study of Greek language, rhetoric, philosophy, and mathematics lays claim to a highly elite and unusual educational background. As described, Anna’s education goes far beyond the normal study of classical rhetoric. Anna was educated not only in classical Greek language and rhetoric that would allow her to understand classical texts, but in the philosophical discourses that use that language for substantive discussions of significant moral import.”
Komnene is primarily known for The Alexiad, which is an account of the reign of her father, Alexios I Komnenos. Here’s the poetic opening paragraph:
“Time, which flies irresistibly and perpetually, sweeps up and carries away with it everything that has seen the light of day and plunges it into utter darkness, whether deeds of no significance or those that are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright says, it brings to light that which had been obscure and shrouds from us what had been visible. Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of oblivion.”
Near the end of the book, Komnene pauses in her narrative of events to reflect on why she was writing history and on her personal connection to the events she related:
“But why am I writing of these things? I perceive that I am digressing from the main theme, because the subject of my history imposes on me a double theme: to relate and to describe the tragedy of the emperor’s life; that is to say, I have to give an account of his struggles and at the same time to do justice to all that has caused me heartfelt sorrow. Among the latter would count his death and the loss of all that I found worthwhile on earth. Yet I remember certain remarks made by my father which discouraged me from writing history, inviting me rather to compose elegies and dirges. For I often heard him speak thus; I even heard him once reprove the empress when she was ordering scholars to write a history of his labours, his many trials and tribulations, so that the record of them might be handed down to future generations; it would be better, he said, to grieve for him and deplore his misfortunes.”
This is a telling insight into a pre-modern conception of a life of great achievement. We are familiar with triumphal narratives of royal achievements, especially when they are written by those personally close to a monarch, but here we find an intrinsically pessimistic conception of life, in which even an emperor considered himself unfortunate. This attitude belongs to a world very different from our own. In my episode on Gregory of Tours I talked about how Gregory was born into a world very different from our own, and very changed from the cosmopolitan Roman Empire and preceded him. Anna Komnene was also born into a world radically different from our own, and it was also radically different from the world of Gregory of Tours. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Roman Empire didn’t experience the catastrophic failure of its institutions as occurred in the West. Constantinople became the second Rome, and it ruled what remained the Roman Empire until 1453 AD. Anna Komnene lived in the midst of a highly stable civilization with a history of well over the thousand years, and almost another four hundred years would elapse before Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 and the last remnant of the Roman Empire came to an end.
Today we can’t even imagine what it would be like to live in this kind of stable, essentially unchanging civilization. Today we say that change in the only constant, but this is historically recent. Komnene’s world was permanent for all practical purposes. For as many generations as you might go back into the past, life would have been essentially the same, and for as many generations as you might go into the future, life would remain essentially the same. There were ups and downs, invasions and conquests, years of plenty and years of want, but one dynasty followed another in an orderly succession down through the centuries. Komnene herself lived at a time when the Byzantine Empire was engaged in continual warfare and experienced many reversals, though the efforts of her father resulted in what is now called the Komnenian restoration, which stabilized Byzantium for a century under the Komnenian dynasty. Despite all this, life had a perennial quality, much like life in hunter-gatherer bands for hundreds of thousands of years before civilization — a period much longer than that of all civilizations combined. This was the human condition until recently, but it is no longer.
We don’t know what it’s like to live in a stable, mature civilization; we don’t know what it’s like to live in a long-lived civilization; we don’t know what it’s like to have a tradition continuously observed over a thousand years, and which will continue after us for another thousand years. Gregory of Tours also didn’t know what it was like to live in a stable world, being born into a time experiencing a transformation — which is a polite way of saying that his world was in ruins. Ancient history had come to an end in Europe in Gregory’s time, and the medieval world had not yet taken shape. So Gregory shared this social instability with us, and both Gregory and we differ from Anna Komnene in this respect.
There are historians who argue that there is no good reason to call the Byzantine empire Byzantine instead of Roman. The Byzantines themselves called themselves Romans, and the Byzantine label wasn’t used for them until they have been extinct for hundreds of years. We have, however, an historical parallel for what happened with Byzantium, and that’s what happened in Europe with the end of the Middle Ages. The transition from medieval to modern civilization in Europe was a continuous historical process without the kind of catastrophic institutional failure that attended the end of classical antiquity. The dark ages that followed classical antiquity in Western Europe, however poorly defined, served to demarcate the ancient world from the medieval world. There is no similar demarcation between the medieval world and the modern world, but we know that these are two radically different periods of Western history, and perhaps they constitute distinct civilizations. From this example we know that it’s possible for one civilization to be transformed into another civilization without any discrete demarcation, and it was an historical process of this kind that characterized the transformation of the eastern Roman Empire into Byzantium. This was a continuous historical process with no demarcation, but Byzantium was as distinct from Roman civilization as modern European civilization is from medieval European civilization.
Byzantium had a continuous history going back to classical antiquity, unlike European civilization during the life of Anna Komnene, which had had its continuity with the past broken by the dark ages. Even though Western civilization experienced this discontinuity, it was able to rebound. It rebounded in a different form, but it had the same sources. When Byzantium finally fell to the Turks in 1453, after the Turks had been whittling away at Byzantine territory for centuries, there was no coming back. There was something like a rump Byzantine state after the fall of Constantinople, the Despotate of the Morea, where some of the ruling class had escaped, and there were scholars who escaped with their books to Italy, and who contributed to the renaissance by teaching the Italians Greek so they could read Plato in the original language. Byzantine territory had been entirely taken over by another civilization, Islamic civilization, and this excluded the revival of Byzantium, even had it been possible. We can imagine a counterfactual history in which Byzantium failed but its lands were not taken by a civilization, and under these conditions a post-Byzantine dark age might have been followed by a neo-Byzantine social order.
The conditions in Western Europe, by contrast, did allow for the revival of Western civilization, even after hundreds of years of dormancy and the transformation of the Western tradition under the influence of Christianity. There were times when Islam came close to sweeping over Europe, but they were stopped by Charles Martel at the battle of Tours, also called the Battle of Poitiers, in 732. This battle was described by an unknown historian sometimes called Fredegar, who was one of the less distinguished continuators of Gregory of Tours. There were also times when the Vikings came close to breaking the incipient social order that was taking root in Europe before Charlemagne, but that is a story for another time. I’ve gotten away from Anna Komnene and her history of her father’s reign, the Alexiad, but it’s by expanding upon the worlds revealed to us by history that we better understand the structure of history overall, which means understanding ourselves and our place in history, and Anna Komnene can help us to do this.
