descends to quite everyday words, with which students of such medieval Greek works as the Chronicles of the Morea' and of the ordinary language of to-day are familiar. Thus, she describes an army, just as the Chronicler described it, as pooσárov; the French forms 'liege' and 'sergeants' are scarcely disguised under her Greek renderings λίζιος and σεργέντιοι. The classic word for 'plains' (πɛdía) becomes, in her prose, káμwaι; the poetic rμ assume (as in Attaleiates) the guise of κλεισούραι, while κουλα thrice displaces the classic ακρόπολις ; páμovoa, the vulgar word for 'libels,' has crept into her pages; and TLYKÉρvns has supplanted oivoxóoc as the term for the Court butler. She remarks that those who led a nomadic life were called in the common dialect, "Vláchoi'"; she quotes the popular Byzantine mot, that the Scythians (i.e. Cumans) missed seeing May by a single day,' because they were defeated on April 29, and makes her father, when Bohemund at first rejected his presents, apply to himself the current saying, 'Let a bad thing return to its own master' (av0évrηv).

One of the most interesting features of Anna Comnena's history is the aspect which the First Crusade assumes in her pages. To Western historians the Crusades appeared as, on the whole, a great material benefit to Europe, quite apart from their religious and moral motives and results. But we learn from this Byzantine princess, herself an eyewitness of the Crusaders' arrival in her father's capital, how this religious movement struck the Eastern Christians. The incursion of vast masses of more or less undisciplined soldiers into the Byzantine Empire naturally inspired alarm in the mind of its ruler, who feared-and the diversion of the Fourth Crusade from the redemption of the Holy Land to the capture of Constantinople three generations later justified his fears-that the pilgrims might be tempted to occupy his territories on the way. East and West rarely thoroughly understand one another; and the mutual reproaches of bad faith, which Greek historians have flung at the Crusaders and Latin historians at Alexios, were probably largely due, as is usually the case when two different nationalities quarrel, to a misunderstanding of one another's mentality.

Alexios could scarcely feel reassured, when he heard

that one of the Crusading chiefs was that same Bohemund who had fought against him in Thessaly, and whose father had sought a shadowy pretext to invade his Empire and capture Durazzo, 'the Metropolis of Illyricum.' Anna tells us what were the Emperor's feelings when he first heard the news of the forthcoming Crusade and the approaching advent of vast Frankish armies. He feared,' she writes, 'their attack, knowing their unrestrainable dash, their changeable and easily influenced minds, and all the other qualities, or concomitant attributes, of the French character. . . For the French race is extremely hot-blooded and keen, and whenever it has once started on any course, impossible to check.' She accuses the Crusaders of treating treaties like 'scraps of paper' and of inordinate love of lucre ; 'for the Latin race,' she writes, 'is in other respects most devoted to money. In her eyes these barbarians,' as she calls them in the contemptuous language of a highly cultivated Greek, were actuated by motives very different from the ostensible aim of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidels. In appearance,' she remarks, 'they were on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but in truth they wanted to oust the Emperor from his throne and seize the capital.' She notices the sudden ups and downs of the French character, rapidly going from one extreme to the other, and finds one cause of her father's rheumatism in the constant exertion to which the Franks subjected that patient monarch, by worrying him with their requests all day and all night, so that he could not even find time to take his meals!

In these circumstances, it was perhaps hardly to be expected that Alexios should be enthusiastic about taking an active part in the Crusade, although he more than once ransomed captured Crusaders. Nor was his enthusiasm increased by such acts of spoliation as the erection into a Latin county and a Latin principality respectively of Edessa, still governed at the time of the Latin conquest by a Greek governor, and of Antioch, which only fourteen years earlier had been nominally a part of the Greek Empire. Again, no sovereign, and not least the ceremonious Emperor of Byzantium, could have been expected to put up with such an affront as that described by Sir Walter Scott after Anna Comnena,

when a boorish Crusading noble seated himself on the Emperor's seat. Yet Alexios took this unwarranted act of rudeness with great tact and dignity, even though it had been accompanied by an insulting remark about ‘a yokel remaining alone seated while so many nobles were standing in his presence.' Indeed, he not only deigned to ask who this unmannerly churl might be, but gave him some excellent advice, derived from long personal experience, of the safest way to wage war against the Turks. The arrogant Frank paid with his life at the battle of Dorylæum for his neglect of the Emperor's wellmeant warning.

The literary princess was not, however, so far led away by her national prejudices as to see no good in the Crusaders. She said of a very good Greek horseman, that one would have thought him to be not a Greek, but of Norman origin,' so well did he ride. Indeed, the incapacity of the French to fight on foot struck her so forcibly that she remarked: A Frenchman on horseback is unrestrainable and would ride through the walls of Babylon, but once dismounted he is at the mercy of the first comer.' For that reason her father bade his archers kill the horses of the Western cavaliers, for then the riders would be helpless. She specially eulogises the honesty of the Comte de St Gilles-Isangeles, as she calls him-who 'differed in all things from all the Latins, as much as the sun differs from the stars.' While she expresses the horror felt by her fellow-countrymen at the Church militant as represented by the fighting Latin clergy, armed with shield and spear, and in her character of Guiscard, who did so much harm to her father, she praises his courage and strategic ability; and her description of Bohemund's personal appearance is so detailed and so flattering that it may have been prompted by a very feminine motive. No such man, whether barbarian or Greek,' she wrote of him, 'was ever seen in the land of the Greeks, for he was a marvel to behold and a wonder to be narrated.' Of the warlike wife of Guiscard, Gaita, she says with mixed admiration and alarm, that she was a Pallas, but not an Athene,' skilled in battle but not in arts, and terrible when armed with her lance and piercing voice.

Students of Balkan geography are no less indebted

to Anna Comnena than are historians of the First Crusade. Her pages are full of the names of places, rendered household words to us by the events of the last seven years. On this subject she had access to a very high authority, her father, who possessed a minute knowledge of both coasts of the Adriatic with their harbours (a list of which he sent to his admiral) and with the prevailing winds. No writer on the historical geography of Durazzo could afford to neglect our author, who minutely describes the origin, topography, and contemporary condition of that famous town. She tells us that at that time most of the inhabitants were colonists from Amalfi and Venice; and she describes the walls of that now squalid little Albanian town as at that time so broad that more than four horsemen could safely ride abreast along them, while there stood a bronze equestrian statue over the eastern gate. She talks of the old Bulgarian capitals of Pliskova' and 'Great Pristhlava' (Pliska and Prêslav); she narrates the origin of Philippopolis, where she herself had lived for some time; and she makes one interesting allusion to the comparatively recent Norman Conquest of England in the passage in which she says that Bohemund was aided in his second invasion of Albania by men from 'Thule' (Britain), which she also mentions as furnishing the Varangian guard. We know from a contemporary British historian how glad the English exiles were to fight in Greece against the Normans, and how Alexios built a town for them at Civetot, the modern Geumlek, on the Asiatic coast near Constantinople. We hear, too, how 300 of them defended Castoria.

6

She uses the correct word jupan (or Count') for the Serbian chieftains, but designates both King Michael (who was the first ruler of Dioklitija to bear the royal title and whose dominions included Skutari, Montenegro, the Herzegovina and the coast), and his son and co-regent, Bodin, as Exarchs of the Dalmatians. She mentions also the contemporary 'great' jupan of the other and inland Serbian state of Rascia (the modern sandjak of Novibazar), Vukan, describing him as wielding the entire authority over the Dalmatians,' of whom she says that, although they were Dalmatians, still they were Christians.' It is interesting to find in this passage

that one of his nephews already bore the name of Urosh, so famous in the later Serbian dynasty of Nemanja, which etymologists derive from the Magyar word úr, meaning 'lord.' The identification of Serbians with 'Dalmatians' would tend to prove the predominantly Serbian character of Southern Dalmatia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. She was acquainted, too, with the pirates who infested the mouth of the river Narenta, and twice mentions them under the name of 'Vetones.'

The name of the Albanians was known to Anna Comnena, as to her predecessors, Attaleiates and Skylitzes, the first Byzantine authors who applied it to that mysterious race. She notices the exclusive admiration felt by the Albanians, as by the modern British schoolboy, for physical prowess, and remarks that in that country bodily strength and size were the principal requirements that made a man a suitable candidate for the purple and the diadem. In the case, however, of that tall but inane guardsman, Prince William of Wied, gigantic size was not sufficient to ensure the loyalty of the Albanians. Anna Comnena is also the first writer who mentions the existence of the Wallachs in Thessaly, soon to be called 'Great Wallachia' by her successor Niketas, and Wallachia' by Benjamin of Tudela, at a place called Ezeva near Mount Ossa. Notices of this kind are what make her history valuable to us rather than the classical reminiscences, which to her and her contemporaries were doubtless its chief merit. She complained of having to insert barbarous names' which befouled' her historical style in her polished narrative, just as some modern imitators of Cicero objected to employing words for recent inventions unknown to the Roman orator. She cited as an excuse the example of Homer, who disdained not to mention the Boeotians and certain barbarous islands for the sake of historical accuracy. Fortunately, the more plastic Greek language is usually quite equal to this difficulty; and even the uncouth names of French Crusaders and Serbian jupans are admitted to the honours of the Greek declensions by this skilled writer, of whom a contemporary said that, if the ancients had known her, 'they would have added a fourth Grace and a tenth Muse.'

The time has come when it is no longer the fashion