Power Returns to Greece

The foundation of Constantinople as a new, Christian Rome did not save the Roman Empire but it did establish the roots of a different empire in the eastern half of the Roman sphere. Greece, Macedonia, and the northern Aegean became its core and, in time, it extended into Anatolia and beyond. Thus it resembled the empire configured by Philip II, expanded by Alexander III, and re-configured by the successors of Alexander. The period 1204 to 1453 witnessed restored control to the Byzantine emperors. Known as the first woman historian, Anna Comnena had good connections for writing a history of the Byzantine Empire in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Anna Comnena serves as one of the rarest representatives of the complex integration of Byzantine and former Greek cultures, on account of her gender and her position in the empire, and her work, the Alexiad.