Alexiad
A history of the reign of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos by his daughter, in fifteen books. Books 10 and 11 give a Byzantine account of the First Crusade, written decades afterwards.
Read the text at sourcebooks.fordham.edu ↗Book 10, on the arrival of the crusaders (Fordham Medieval Sourcebook) ↗
Anna Komnene was a daughter of Alexios I Komnenos. In her preface she names herself the daughter of Alexios and Irene, “born and bred in the purple”. A. C. Krey notes that she was barely fourteen when the crusading armies reached Constantinople and began her history some forty years later; its hero is her father.
Her account shows how the expedition looked from the capital it passed through: as a mass movement of “Franks” whose leaders had to be watched, supplied and bound by oath. In book 10 she traces it to the preaching of Peter the Hermit. A. C. Krey, in 1921, judged her chronology uncertain and her facts often inexact, and valued the work as a statement of the Byzantine attitude to the Latins.
Cited in
- 1095 to 1099, firm date