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The Apparition of Leo of Chalcedon Anna Komnene’S Reproduction of a Lost Family Account of the Doukai

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The Apparition of Leo of Chalcedon Anna Komnene’S Reproduction of a Lost Family Account of the Doukai Chapter 8 The Apparition of Leo of Chalcedon Anna Komnene’s Reproduction of a Lost Family Account of the Doukai Peter Bara In August 1087 Alexios i Komnenos led a military campaign against the Pech- enegs to the borderlands of Thrace in the Lower Danube region. His troops were utterly defeated, the emperor was injured, and the commanders of the army suggested withdrawal. George Palaiologos, the brother-in-law of the basi- leus, also fled. Anna Komnene records the events in her Alexiad:1 And Palaiologos that day while his brigades were routed in flight, fell from his horse and lost it. Being in a desperate situation and seeing the danger looming over his head, he looked around to see whether he could find his horse anywhere. [Then] he set his eyes on Leo, bishop of Chalce- don, […] who was wearing a priestly robe and gave a horse to Palaiologos. [The commander] mounted the horse and had the chance to flee. Palaiologos could not see that man anymore, who seemed to be a saintly person.2 1 A highly selective set of starting points as an introduction to the Alexiad: Anna Komnene: The Alexiad trans. Georgina Buckler and Peter Frankopan, (London, 2009). Anna Komnene as a female author: Leonora A. Neville, Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian (Oxford, 2016). For an overarching literary approach to the work, see: Georgina Buckler, Anna Comnena. A Study (London 1929), Penelope Buckley, The Alexiad of Anna Komnene: Artistic Strategy in the Making of a Myth (Cambridge, 2014). Concerning the structure of the Alexiad: Julian Chrysostomides, “A Byzantine Historian: Anna Comnena,” in Medieval Historical Writ- ing in the Christian and Islamic Worlds, ed. David O. Morgan (London, 1982), pp. 30–46. On authorship and use of sources: Thalia Gouma-Peterson, ed., Anna Komnene and her Times (New York 2000). In lieu of a missing commentary on the Alexiad, see the German translation by Reinsch: Dieter R. Reinsch, trans., Anna Comnena: Alexias, 2 vols. (Berlin and New York, 2001). 2 Anna Komnene, Alexias, ed. Dieter R. Reinsch and Athanasios Kambylis (Berlin and New York, 2001), 2 vols., 1: Prolegomena et Textus, 2: Indices, Al. henceforth. The English transla- tions are those of Robert Sewter and Peter Frankopan (Robert Sewter and Peter Frankopan, transl., Anna Komnene: The Alexiad (London, 2009)) with my occasional modifications. Al. 7.4.1: “ὁ δὲ Παλαιολόγος ἐν τῷ φεῦγειν τῶν ταγμάτων ἡττηθέντων κατὰ τὴν ἡμέραν ἐκείνην κατενεχθεὶς τοῦ ἵππου ἀπώλεσε τοῦτον. ἐν ἀμηχανίᾳ δὲ ὢν καὶ τὸν κίνδυνον ἱστάμενον ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς ὁρῶν περιαθρήσας εἴ που γένοιτό οἱ τοῦτον θεάσασθαι, ὁρᾷ τὸν τῆς Χαλκηδόνος πρόεδρον Λέοντα © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004409460_009 <UN> 200 Bara The holy man saved the life of a Byzantine general in a battle that had al- ready been lost. It is not particularly obvious why Anna Komnene should in- clude this kind of imagery in her history, or what narrative purpose the episode might serve. Why would the princess cast a banished, controversial Byzantine prelate as the mediator of divine help in the aftermath of one of the greatest military disasters of her father’s reign? Did the princess conform to a fossilised hagiographical tradition and transmit one of its elements without modifica- tion? Anna Komnene seldom inserted passages into her historical work that mirrored characteristics of hagiographical narratives. In addition to the pas- sage under analysis, only two visions in dreams and one other apparition are mentioned by the historian.3 Modern scholarship has not supplied a satisfactory analysis of the passage. It has been asserted that she had used dreams and apparitions to “underline the providential destiny of the hero and the Orthodoxy of his faith in divine Providence.”4 Dion Smythe observes that Anna had created a hagiographical atmosphere and that the metropolitan is here portrayed in a more favourable light than in Book 5, in which details of Leo’s controversy with Alexios i are provided.5 Penelope Buckley argues that Leo’s apparition is “deeply traditional: the idea of the holy man, saint or angel who intervenes in battle on the Byzan- tine side has been sanctioned as part of the empire’s armoury since Herakleios at least. [Anna Komnene] treats the phenomenon with respect”.6 Buckley sees the scenario as the narratological means by which Anna expressed that tenets of the traditional Byzantine piety prevailed over Alexios as a savage soldier- emperor, for whom religiosity was of secondary importance. Thus, Buckley re- gards the Alexiad as a historical work in which Alexios i undergoes personal development: he transforms from a soldier-emperor to become ultimately a […] τὴν ἱερατικὴν στολὴν ἠμφιεσμένον ἵππον ἐπιδιδόντα αὐτῷ, ἐν ᾧ ἐπιβὰς εἴχετο τῆς φυγῆς· τὸν δὲ ἱεροπρεπῆ ἐκεῖνον ἄνδρα οὐκέτι τεθέαται.” 3 I will treat those passages below. The phenomenon itself is not surprising, since the Komne- nian epoch was not the golden age of hagiography and some intellectuals even rejected the paradigm of the holy man; see: Paul Magdalino, “The Byzantine Holy Man in the Twelfth Century,” in The Byzantine Saint, ed. Sergei Hackel (London, 1981), pp. 51–66; see also: Stefa- nos Efthymiadis, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, 1 (Farnham and Burlington, 2011), p. 143. 4 Paul Magdalino, “The Historiography of Dreaming in Medieval Byzantium,” in Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond, eds. Christina Angelidi and George T. Calofonos (Farnham and Burl- ington, 2014), pp. 125–144, esp. pp. 132–133. 5 Dion Smythe, “Alexios and the Heretics,” in Alexios i Komnenos, eds. Margaret Mullett and Dion Smythe (Belfast, 1996), p. 257. 6 Buckley, Alexiad, p. 156. <UN>.
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