GENDER THROUGH THE EYES OF A BYZANTINE WOMAN WRITER: AN OVERVIEW OF ANNA KOMNèNA’S ALEXIAD

The daughter of Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos I., Anna Komnena was raised as the future empress in the palace she grew up with her grandmother Anna Dalassena, one of the most powerful women of the Byzantine Empire, and her mother Irene Doukaina. However, when she got disappointed as a result of some unfortunate events she didn’t avoid engaging in a number of conflicts in order to gain the throne which she considered as her right and became unsuccessful. This failure led her to choose monasticism and write Alexiad, the only secular biographic and historical work written by a Byzantine woman. In the preface of Alexiad, Anna stated that her aim in writing this book was to prevent a significant subject to disappear in the dark side of history rather than displaying her writing skills. Written between 1143 and 1153, the subject which Anna didn’t want to disappear in Alexiad was the magnificent emperorship years of his father Alexios Komnenos I starting from the forty or sixty years before the date it was written. This long and personal history gives detailed information as Byzantine women. The Byzantine women, whom Anna Komnèna mentioned between the lines, continued to exist between 330 and 453 BC, and they openly express the view of women from an empire that defined their women as second class citizens. In this report we will examine the gender roles in the Byzantine Empire in the eyes of the single secular woman writer of the Byzantine Empire