Alexius Comnenus: The True Story

Alexius Comnenus is a well-known Byzantine Emperor not least because his daughter, Anna, wrote one of the greatest works of medieval literature about him called “The Alexiad.” It’s a cracking read, full of vivid character descriptions, battle scenes, back-stabbing politics and written in an epic style that echoes the Roman and Greek classics. 

It’s not just central to the history of Byzantium but also to the Crusades since she’s our main non-western commentator on the First Crusade and wrote some of the best descriptions of the fiery leaders of that Crusade, like Count Bohemond. It is of course, a tribute, or a hagiography to use that term, to her father who emerges as an Odysseus-like hero. She describes him thus:“His dark eyebrows were curved, and beneath them the gaze of his eyes was both terrible and kind. When he came into a gathering and began to speak, you were conscious from the moment he opened his mouth of the fiery eloquence of his tongue…”

Alexius has gone down in history as the man who saved Byzantium largely because that’s what his daughter has told us, but historians are now questioning whether that was true and, in this episode, I want to suggest his reign was failing by 1095, and his appeal to the Pope for help against the Turks was the result of weakness, and not because he was in a strong position to launch a counter-offensive against the Turks as proposed in the Alexiad. 

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