Anna Of Byzantium

“It was unfair. I was always the one visitors paid attention to. No one had ever wondered over my right to the throne, as these barbarians had. Could they have planted a seed of doubt in my father’s mind? He was always telling us that we had to be kind to our enemies—would that include making them like him more if he followed their ways?”

Anna’s use of rhetorical questions reveals the insecurity that she feels as a young girl living with high political stakes. Her youthful inexperience in politics leads her to take the emissaries’ attention for John personally, even though being ignored for the first time is not necessarily as “unfair” as she believes. Entitlement thus mixes within Anna’s mind to form a persistent jealousy over the treatment that John receives as a prince.

“Simon was wrong. There were no gods anymore to punish injustice. I would have to do it myself.”

By giving herself the job of a god—enacting divine retribution—Anna early on reveals her tendency toward hubris. Her dismissal of Simon’s advice and wisdom is also an indication that she does not understand his paternal treatment of her, and she has not realized that there are Competing Definitions of Family outside of a biological connection.

“Her voice was lulling me into a trance. I saw myself, looking like my father […] I saw the heavy crown glitter on my head, the purple slippers on my feet being kissed by kings and princes. I saw my word starting wars and ending them. I saw great churches rise where I so commanded, and ships depart from port on my order.”

Anna’s anaphoric repetition of “I saw” at the beginning of each sentence simulates the trance-like state that she is in. Her fixation on the material aspects of being empress, such as the valuable crown and expensive construction projects, indicates that the motivations for wanting to sit on the throne have a shallow basis. This moment solidifies Dalassene’s control as she lures Anna into dreaming about her future, but she does so by encouraging Anna to consider the more childlike desires that she could obtain rather than acknowledging the more mature responsibilities she would then have.

“Don’t fly too near to the sun, Little Beetle.”

Simon’s allusion to the classical Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus is a direct indication of Anna’s hubris, since he is likening her to the naive boy who thought he could fly like a god but was then killed when he got too close to the sun. Using his pet name for her, “Little Beetle,” however, softens this critique and indicates that it is delivered with loving concern.

“I was shocked. How could my father have allowed that? I pictured the terrified people running away from leather-clad warriors, knowing that wherever they went, they would encounter more. Surely this was not an honorable way to proceed.”

Just as with enslavement, Anna expresses a moral hesitance to accept the violence against civilians during her father’s coup, even though such military tactics were commonplace in the Middle Ages. Once again, she carries a more contemporary perspective, recognizing that Dalassene’s glorification of the violent coup is misguided.

“And when my husband was out of the city (as Constantine would often be), I would also be in charge of defense of the palace against invaders. I secretly hoped that would happen. I knew I would be good at battle.”

Just pages after expressing a distaste for the bloodshed during her father’s military victory over Constantinople, Anna hypocritically reveals that she will relish taking military command when she becomes empress. This contradiction, and the dark irony that she longs for a threat to her own safety in order to attain political glory, reveal the tension within Anna between morality and her desire for power.

“‘Why—she will tell me what to do. And I will do it,’ I said. It seemed obvious. ‘Then won’t she really be the empress, and not you?’ persisted Sophia.”

From the start, Sophia serves as a foil to Anna, challenging every assumption the princess makes despite her significantly inferior social standing. Here, her seemingly innocent question has dramatic implications for Anna’s future, forcing Anna to realize the fraught nature of her reliance on Dalassene’s council.

“My grandmother was not teaching me anything unseemly. Indeed, she was even more strict and rigid than my mother herself, and certainly more proper than Simon, with his scandalous tales of the old gods. She was teaching me the arts of diplomacy, leadership, finance—certainly all skills that I would need in the future. I still did not understand why my mother objected to these studies.”

Anna’s failure to understand the feud between her grandmother and mother is a reminder of her youth; as a child, she cannot grasp the preexisting political tensions that are determining her own experience in the palace. The feud between Irene and Dalassene also mirrors the internal struggles Anna is experiencing and embodies the dilemma of Lust for Power in a Religious Society.

“I told the slave to make it deep blue with red embroidery around the edges. Evidently she thought that purple would be a better color. She is not of our race, my son, and does not know the significance we place on imperial purple. I have already had the woman flogged for her mistake.”

Dalassene frequently lies in order to protect herself at the expense of others who have less power than her. Here, she takes advantage of the fact that most enslaved labor in service of the imperial family is performed by ethnic minorities, which helps her craft the convincing story that the weaver did not know that purple is prohibited in clothing that does not belong to the emperor or empress. Moments like this offer glimpses of the ethnic and cultural diversity that existed within the Byzantine Empire, even though figures like enslaved Turkish people exist mostly on the story’s periphery.

“The parrot had been executed for the crime of treason.”

The severe violence that John orders against the parrot and the equivalent treatment of human treason and treason committed by an animal—although potentially absurd from a modern perspective—indicate the gravity of crimes against the imperial family. Furthermore, the parrot’s demise foreshadows the cutthroat ways in which Irene and Anna will be treated for their attempt at assassinating John.

“She has not behaved like a princess. […] 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.”

Dalassene’s consistent use of juxtaposition between the Komnenos and Doukas families is a way of lifting herself up. In this binary outlook, the Doukases are purely bad, while the Komemni are purely good. For a young character like Anna, this is an easy way to understand things, but it is clearly a shallow form of prejudice meant to demonize behavior Dalassene doesn’t enjoy and pit Anna against her mother.

“I see, Mother, that you will have a struggle to maintain your influence if I fall in battle and it is Anna, not I, who sits in this throne!”

This observation, delivered obliviously by Alexios, has a dark subtext that Dalassene and Anna immediately recognize: Dalassene’s plot to control Anna will fail, and therefore, it is in Dalassene’s best interest to make sure that Anna does not become empress. This quote therefore marks a key turning point in Anna’s relationship with her grandmother, who subsequently betrays her by choosing to support John’s claim to the throne instead.

“My mistake, I thought to myself, was that I had let her know that when I was on the throne, I would make up my own mind instead of letting her rule through me, the way she did, I now reluctantly admitted to myself, through my father. Why, I thought, why hadn’t I hidden that part of myself? Simon had been right; I shouldn’t have flown so near the sun.”

In the fallout from her grandmother’s betrayal, Anna begins to recognize that Simon’s guidance has been correct all along. This recognition leads her down the path to seeing that there are Competing Definitions of Family and that Simon’s concern has made him more of a family member than even her own grandmother.

“What crime had I committed that everything was being taken away from me?”

Anna’s rhetorical question demonstrates her bewildered attitude as she struggles to understand politics from her immature perspective. Being young, she was easily taken advantage of, and now she’s unsure why she has been victimized by others. She is in the process of understanding that she can do everything she is told and still fail due to the selfish or amoral actions of others.

“I had grown accustomed to Sophia; I even would have said, if it had not sounded so absurd, that I liked her. I had to find some way to keep her with me.”

Here, Anna’s use of the conditional mood indicates that she is not being honest with herself about her friendship with Sophia. The “absurdity” that she perceives is reflective of the strict social hierarchies that she has clung to throughout her childhood, but it cannot prevent the two girls from bonding.

“It was only after I left the room that I realized that a banquet of that importance takes weeks to plan. My consent had been assumed, despite my father’s words. But it made little difference to me. I had come to realize that my wishes were not to be granted, that what I wanted and what happened had very little to do with each other.”

As Barrett portrays it, the gender politics of the Byzantine court are always working against Anna. Here, Anna’s say in her marriage to the historian Nikephoros is irrelevant because she is a girl and her marriage is a matter of political import. The same was true of her betrothal to Constantine, who she was engaged to from birth; she only accepted this more easily because she developed a crush on him. Anna’s accepting tone in this situation, however, is markedly different than her youthful indignance when she realized that John’s gender caused others to treat him differently. This shows her increasing maturity.

“I knew she had understood me: The emperor had once decreed that I, not John, should rule. This was the decree that I would not permit to be changed. I wondered if the little monkey had understood as well.”

Anna and Dalassene once again speak to each other through subtext—in this case, the subtext of Anna’s speech during her betrothal banquet to Nikephoros. The princess’s ability to use this code-speak effectively is an indicator that she has grown into a more adept politician than she was when Dalassene first bested her.

“A satisfactory story, I thought, until the end. Only a fool would choose to live in an abbey when she could have a palace!”

The irony of Anna’s conclusion about Kassia is that she, too, will wind up living in an abbey instead of a palace. Barrett places this sentence at the end of the chapter to emphasize its ironic quality, suggesting that readers should pay close attention to the parallels between Anna and Kassia and understand that her interpretation could potentially be foreshadowing.

“I felt dizzy, as though time had reversed its course and I was once more a little girl in the hot courtyard, and Sophia was taking the chalice from me. Saving me.”

Anna’s flashback to the scene where Sophia hid the chalice for her draws a parallel between the two moments and highlights Sophia’s consistent loyalty to her throughout the years. The dizzying quality of this flashback speaks to how overwhelmed Anna is by the high-stakes situation and by Sophia’s ability to save her both times.

“If I was a descendant of Atreus, my brother was too, and if there was any way I could make the curse fall on his head, I determined to do it.”

Another allusion to classical myth passed onto Anna by Simon, her invocation of Atreus reveals that Anna does not grasp the meaning of the lessons that her tutor gives. Rather than recognizing the Mycenaean king’s story as a warning about becoming overly greedy for power, Anna takes it as a license to get revenge for John’s betrayal.

“He is not my son. […] No son could say such things about a mother. 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.”

Irene’s declaration that John has been possessed by a devil is a development upon her previous religious demeanor, which dictated that she value peace above all else. Here, she uses her religious convictions to the opposite effect, justifying her decision to overthrow John. This further complicates the family dynamics within the story, as John is being demonized from birth, a time when he had no control over himself or his future. While John is a central antagonist, he is also manipulated by those older than him, just like Anna. This rejection from his mother makes him a more sympathetic character, if only minorly.

“It was as if a little cub had turned into a lion and bitten its trainer. Even in my misery, I enjoyed her look of disbelief as she struggled to speak. Now you see him for what he really is! I thought. You are rarely deceived in people, Grandmother, but this time he managed to conceal his true nature from you.”

Anna’s simile likening John to a lion cub and Dalassene to a lion trainer highlights the futility of Dalassene’s attempts to have complete control over her grandson, since lions have greater power than humans that try to train them. Though Anna’s words to Dalassene remain unspoken, her clear enjoyment of John’s triumph indicates that she understands Dalassene to be the greater of the two villains.

“I knew it was foolish, but before I could stop myself I had craned my neck to look back over the convent. Of course, there was no golden-winged angel hovering there, just as there had not been over the palace all those years before. But for a moment I had thought I would see one.”

By imagining herself in the world of Sophia’s favorite illuminated manuscript, Anna brings herself closer to the friend that she left behind in Constantinople. Her willingness to see the possibility of a guardian angel existing in the sky above her—even if logically she knows that it is improbable—also brings her closer to her mother’s spiritual worldview.