Continuing my series of historical novels about strong young women...
I'm inclined to compare Anna of Byzantium to I, Claudius; I think the common theme I'm seeing is women behind the throne.
My favorite history professor always held up the BBC miniseries of I, Claudius as surprisingly historically accurate, particularly in its portrayal of the details of daily life among Roman aristocrats. I don't know as much about Byzantium as I do about Rome, but Anna seems to me to be accurate in much the same way: a creative, yet basically faithful, filling-in of personalities and events left out of the historical record.
I did have a hard time believing that Anna would have been so carefully educated to rule; still, Barrett defends the idea nicely. She also suggests that her version of Anna's education is partly a consequence of the way she compressed some major events in Anna's life into her adolescence. We know Anna was a scholar of politics and the author of the Alexiad, a major chronicle of Byzantine history, but she completed it when she was 55; I think she may have had plenty of years as an adult to educate herself in history and philosophy, and to cement this education with her keen observation of Byzantine politics.
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