Anna Of Byzantium

Anna’s younger brother, John, is the family member she despises most and the figure she understands most clearly to be an antagonist, at least in the earliest chapters of the book. He and Anna compete for the throne and are pitted against each other by their grandmother, Anna Dalassene, who ultimately backs John and ensures his place as future emperor. Before this political dispute begins to occur, however, Anna dislikes that John takes up so much attention at court. Recalling that he immediately began to receive more attention than the female imperial children as soon as he was born, Anna thinks, “[T]his little boy irritated me. He was a whiny child, who screamed for what he wanted until the indulgent nurse gave in” (24). Anna’s hatred of John is therefore initially fueled by jealousy, but it morphs into a more concrete dislike as she sees how he behaves in entitled and erratic ways.

Though both siblings are power hungry and apathetic, one key difference that separates Anna and John is their reading abilities; whereas Anna reads voraciously, John refuses to learn at all and remains illiterate. When Irene confronts Simon about why John cannot seem to learn, he speaks vaguely of children who “had blind spots in their minds,” possibly alluding to a learning disability, although this is never clarified further by Barrett (47). Because of his inabilities in areas like reading, Anna underestimates John when they are children and is surprised later when he does what she could not do: outsmart their manipulative grandmother. Upon hearing that as emperor, John has restricted Dalassene to the palace’s women’s quarters, she thinks to herself, “Maybe there was hope for John” (203). Despite being a villain, John is the one who enacts poetic justice and defeats the book’s primary villain, Anna Dalassene.

Anna Dalassene, Anna’s grandmother whom she is named after, is the book’s primary antagonist. Dalassene has enjoyed disproportionate influence over her son, the emperor, during his reign, and her obsession with maintaining control over his successors motivates her to behave manipulatively and cruelly. Anna and John are the main targets of this behavior since they are both potential successors, but Dalassene also harbors a vitriolic hatred for their mother, Irene Doukaina. She repeatedly takes aim at the Doukas family, characterizing them as weak and inferior to the Komemni in all regards. When Anna is humiliated at her betrothal banquet, Dalassene offers the withering critique, “She has not behaved like a Comnenus. She has behaved like a Ducas, like a silly, weak girl, and she knows she has degraded herself by so doing” (95). Such insults are aimed at ingraining a hatred for the Doukas family within her grandchildren, even though their own mother is a Doukas herself.

Without realizing it, Anna is playing a political game with Dalassene throughout much of her early childhood, and she also fails to realize that Dalassene is a superior strategist to her. As soon as Anna makes it known that she can rebel against her grandmother’s authority, Dalassene betrays the young girl and backs John. For her part, Dalassene does not realize that John is even better at strategy and is shocked when the young emperor undermines her power: “You are rarely deceived in people, Grandmother, but this time he managed to conceal his true nature from you” (190). Dalassene is therefore one link in a long chain of deception and betrayal that exists within the imperial family. Though she is easily the cruelest character in the book, she turns out not to be as politically invincible as she thinks she is.

Irene Doukaina is Anna’s mother, the empress of the Byzantine Empire, and Anna Dalassene’s bitter rival. She is characterized primarily by her opposition to Dalassene, both politically and in terms of their contrasting values. Whereas Dalassene prioritizes power above all else, Irene has a pious approach to life and always tries to remind Anna of religious values. During a confrontation with Dalassene, she asserts, “I have God’s law […] I have compassion, mercy, and justice. And I too know what is expected of a ruler” (53). This religiosity is also illustrated by her excitement to receive a finger bone relic of St. Irene from her husband when he returns from the First Crusade. As such, Irene represents the deeply religious streak of Byzantine society, where characters like Dalassene represent the empire’s ruthless politics. These two values seem at odds with one another as Anna tries to mitigate her own Lust for Power in a Religious Society, but by embodying them in Irene and Dalassene, Barrett demonstrates that they coexisted within the Byzantine imperial sphere.

Although Irene’s eventual assassination attempt on her own son may seem to be at odds with her normally pious character—as is pointed out by Alexios when he calls her an “unnatural mother”—she maintains religious justification for all her actions. She tells Anna, “A devil slipped into my son’s cradle when he was a baby and took his place […] And we cannot allow him to continue saying these things” (177). Though this claim could be interpreted metaphorically, Irene’s medieval religious convictions lend themselves to a more literal meaning; she thinks that her son has been possessed by a satanic entity since birth and therefore overthrowing him is the godly thing to do. Such an extreme stance suggests that the strain of imperial politics is wearing on her mental health, and indeed she starts behaving unpredictably as she makes the assassination attempt.

Simon is a eunuch and an enslaved person who serves as the head tutor for the imperial children. He is Anna’s academic mentor. Although she does not realize it for most of the book, he also acts as a paternal figure to her: “I wished I could have told him that I loved him, that he had been my real father all along, and that I now realized he had not betrayed me, but saved me” (205). His paternal treatment of Anna manifests in the lessons he teaches her through classical mythology, most notably his warnings that she should not give in to hubris like Icarus. Although highly indirect, and therefore often unrecognizable to Anna, these warnings are his way of expressing his love and concern for her.

Like Sophia and Malik, Simon is representative of social and ethnic groups within the Byzantine Empire that were relegated to a lower status than the imperial Greek family. His enslavement is a matter that Anna feels uneasy about in her early childhood but learns to accept as she grows up, thinking, “[F]or how could I be empress if there were no slaves? For me to fulfill my destiny, Simon had to fulfill his” (8). For his part, Simon never expresses discontent about his low status, even describing himself as inhuman in the earliest portions of the book in seemingly full acceptance of what it means to be an enslaved person in the Byzantine Empire. Despite his supposed inhumanity, however, the paternal guidance and protection that he provides Anna with throughout the book renders Simon a more humane character than most, especially in comparison to members of the royal family who plot against one another without remorse.