Portal:Byzantine Empire/DYK/5

• ... that Anna Komnene was a Byzantine princess and scholar who wrote the Alexiad, making her the first female historian of the Western world?

• ... that the Bureau of Barbarians, or Skrinion Barbaron, was a ministry of the government in the Byzantine Empire which begun as an Office of Protocol and became what is generally considered to be the first centralized foreign intelligence gathering agency (somewhat comparable to the modern Russian SVR or the British MI6) in world history?