Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium

As a member of the Komnenian court and husband to Anna Komnene, the writer of a famous Byzantine source for the history of the first Crusade and the transformative reign of Alexios I Komnenos, Nikephoros Bryennios is a significant figure. An aristocrat, whose grandfather was defeated by Alexios during the civil wars of the 1070s, Bryennios engages in his twelfth-century work with the critical years before the triumph of the Komnenoi. His text, full of heroic battlefield action, can be read as a prologue to Anna’s Alexiad and his eleventh-century protagonists shared the ostensibly chivalric ethos of the Komnenian court. Controversially, Bryennios has been treated as the brain behind Anna’s accounts of aristocratic brawn (J. Howard-Johnston, ‘Anna Komnene and the Alexiad’, in M. Mullett and D. Smythe, eds., Alexios I Komnenos [1996]), while contemporary sources cast him as a pliable individual manipulated by his wife, displaying Boulanger-like indolence before the threshold of imperial power

Ancient history · Art · Byzantine architecture · Eleventh · Ethos · Literature · Politics · Power (physics · Prologue · Reign · Theology · Wife · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Law · Philosophy