Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates, writing some fifty years after Anna’s death, relates how she and her mother conspired to bring down the legitimate Emperor John II Komnenos, Anna’s brother, and install Anna and her husband on the throne. Oscillating between admiration and disapproval, Niketas asserts that Anna ‘was ardently devoted to philosophy, the queen of all the sciences, and was educated in every field of learning’. [4]

Yet he has this snippet of gossip to offer his readers about her: when her alleged conspiracy against her brother failed due to her husband’s ‘frivolous behaviour’, Anna ‘distraught in her anger, and being a shrew by nature, felt justified in strongly contracting her vagina when Bryennios’s penis entered deep inside her, thus causing him great pain.’ [5] This unusual comment reveals a great deal about how Niketas (and those who circulated this rumour – whether true or invented it is of course impossible to know) viewed a tough, energetic, and ambitious woman: as a frightening shrew who would inflict pain on her sexual partner as punishment for his shortcomings, inverting the usual roles of the sexes, in which the man inflicts pain, the woman suffers silently.

虽然历史真相不可靠，但是长公主安娜这“老娘一逼夹死你”的功夫令人佩服。