The Orphans of Byzantium: Child Welfare in the Christian Empire

by Timothy S. Miller

Overview

Whilst the Romans had developed the idea of guardianship and the Christian chuch the concept of charity, it was not until the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity around the 4th century that child welfare was really recognised as a problem and was addressed by government, the church and private individuals. This is a detailed study of the institutions and programmes that were developed to provide food, shelter, education and care for orphans in the Byzantine Empire. Miller emphasises the long and complex history of social welfare and highlights the surprising degree of sophistication of the procedures put in place to ensure the protection of children.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813213132
Publisher:	Catholic University of America Press
Publication date:	03/28/2003
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.20(d)

Read an Excerpt

THE ORPHANS OF BYZANTIUM

Child Welfare in the Christian Empire

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By TIMOTHY S. MILLER

The Catholic University of America Press

Copyright © 2003 The Catholic University of America Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-1313-2

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Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

From among the children who had been deprived of their parents and were pierced by the evil of orphania [orphanhood], the <'emperor Alexios Komnenos> assigned some to relatives and others whom he knew to be pious to the superiors of the holy monasteries. The emperor commanded that <the monks> raise these <orphans> not as slaves, but as free persons, considering them worthy of a liberal education and instructing them in the Holy Scriptures. Some <orphans> he entrusted to the Orphanotropheion which he had constructed, handing them over to those in charge to be taught general education.

In this passage of her famous Alexiad, Anna Komnena, the daughter of the emperor Alexios I, described her father's efforts on behalf of the orphans he had rescued while on his campaign of iii6 against the Turks. During the course of this expedition in Asia Minor, refugees from Turkish raiders had sought safety under the protection of Alexios's army. The emperor decided to bring these desperate people—including many orphans—back to Constantinople and help them build new lives in Byzantine territory.

To assist the children, Alexios had to find adults who were willing to shelter, nourish, and educate them. In Anna's compact prose, she listed three groups of orphans, each of which the emperor aided in a different way. The first group he assigned to relatives, the second group he entrusted to monasteries, and the third group he committed to the Orphanotropheion, a large state-run orphanage that Alexios himself had recently reorganized and refinanced.

Anna's description contains a great deal of information in just a few sentences. Indeed, her prose is so compact yet detailed that its precise meaning has escaped her modern interpreters. To understand Anna's description the reader must have some knowledge of the Byzantine child welfare program. In a sense, the monograph that follows is an extended commentary on Anna's two-sentence passage regarding her father's actions on behalf of these refugee children.

For her learned contemporary readers, Anna provided just enough information to identify exactly what type of assistance each of the three categories of orphans received. The emperor Alexios was able to help the first group of children by enforcing the extant laws of guardianship, which required adult relatives to take in younger members of the extended family who had lost both their parents. The Byzantine state, or the East Roman Empire, had inherited most of these guardianship regulations from pre-Christian Roman society.

The emperor assisted the orphans in the second group by placing them in monastic schools. These children had no relatives in Constantinople, but they had received baptism and knew enough about the Christian faith that they could enter the capital's monasteries as students and potential members of these ascetic communities.

The third group assigned to the Orphanotropheion, on the other hand, had enjoyed no instruction in Christian doctrine and custom. Some of these were Turkish children who had fled the many clashes between Turkish tribesmen and Byzantine forces along the shifting border in western Anatolia. Others were Greek boys or girls who, in the chaos of early-twelfth-century Asia Minor, had never been taught the basic elements of their Christian faith. Anna's subsequent description of students at the Orphanotropheion leaves no doubt that by Alexios's reign this philanthropic institution received many barbarian students to instruct them in Christian doctrine and initiate them into the world of Hellenic civilization.

Clearly, by the reign of Alexios, East Roman society had evolved a complex system of caring for children who had lost both parents. From ancient Roman society, the Byzantine Empire had inherited the laws of guardianship. From the Christian Church, it had received and expanded a system of charitable group homes and schools, many of which were administered by bishops or monasteries. Finally, from the unique historical forces shaping its capital city of Constantinople, it developed the Orphanotropheion, an institution that had begun as a simple episcopal orphanage for abandoned children from the streets of the city and had then evolved into a large and complex government agency supervising a wide range of welfare services including the care of barbarian children and other young victims of warfare. Anna's account thus presents a picture of child welfare based on several different approaches to providing food, shelter, and nurture, a system inspired by ancient legal traditions, Christian charity, and the classical concept of the polis.

As we noted above, modern scholars have failed to capture the correct sense of Anna's description because they did not have enough information available to recognize the distinctions that she was making. In fact, no modern historian has examined even superficially the program that the East Roman Empire evolved over many centuries to aid homeless children. In the past fifty years, scholars have begun to recognize how extensive was the general welfare program in the Byzantine Empire, a system supported by the imperial government, the Orthodox Church, the monastic movement, and private persons. Several monographs have described the network of almshouses (xenodocheia or diakoniai), old-age homes (gerokomeia), medical hospitals (nosokomeia or xenones), and orphanages (orphanotropheia) that East Roman society maintained to aid all kinds of needy people. The aim of this present book is to focus on the institutions and programs that Byzantine society developed to assist orphans. It is my intention to provide enough information on guardianship laws, philanthropic institutions, and adoption practices so that readers will have some concept of how Byzantine society evolved the complex system that Anna briefly outlined in the Alexiad.

In 1985, I published a book on Byzantine hospitals, usually called xenones in medieval Greek. These philanthropic institutions had begun as simple almshouses in the fourth century, but rapidly evolved into centers of medical care. By the reign of the emperor Justinian (527–565), the best physicians of the empire dedicated a substantial portion of their professional efforts to curing indigent patients in these xenones. During the centuries that followed, these hospitals expanded their services and by the eleventh and twelfth centuries had become the major centers of health care in Constantinople and perhaps in other large Byzantine towns such as Thessalonike and Nicaea. By 1100, the Byzantine medical profession had reorganized its practice around these philanthropic institutions to provide in-house hospital care as well as outpatient services for the sick who remained in their own homes. Not only the poor, but people of the middle class, and under special circumstances even aristocrats and members of the imperial family, sought medical treatment in Byzantine hospitals.

After presenting evidence found in both published and unpublished sources, I reached several conclusions concerning Byzantine xenones, conclusions that challenged traditional notions of how medieval physicians practiced their profession. In place of a system based on private practitioners who charged fees to cure patients in their shops or to visit the sick in their own homes, the Byzantine health care service offered free medical care to all, but provided this treatment through the wards and outpatient clinics of the xenones.

When I turned my attention to investigating the Byzantine child care system, I expected to find the same sort of institutional centralization around orphanotropheia, located in the empire's larger cities. Indeed, the emperor Justinian, the great legal reformer of the sixth century, placed orphanotropheia in the same legal category of pious foundations as he did the hospitals. These orphanages, however, never came to dominate the child welfare system to the same extent that xenones eventually controlled the provision of medical care. Despite the attempt of the iconoclastic emperors (717–867) to place more children without parents in church-run group homes, Byzantine society preferred to leave orphans with relatives. As a result, most state activity on behalf of orphans focused on reforming guardianship laws rather than on building large institutions to house and educate homeless children.

This study will trace these changes in the laws of guardianship and try to evaluate the success or failure of well-intentioned but sometimes ill-conceived reforms. It also will examine how the Byzantine system utilized orphanages and integrated their services into a complete system of care for orphans. Finally, this study will evaluate the success of each element of the child care system. Did family guardians actually provide good foster homes for orphans? Were children who stayed with an uncle or an aunt better off than those whose guardians were adult brothers or sisters? Did women make better guardians than men? Did the alumni of orphanages do better in later life than the children who found a home with a family member or perhaps with a stranger willing to adopt them?

Because of the primary role guardianship played in finding adults to care for orphans, this book deals not only with the evolution of a child welfare system in the East Roman Empire, but also with important areas of the Byzantine legal system—that is, family law and the law of wills. So crucial was knowledge of Byzantine law in assisting orphans that many directors of the Orphanotropheion in Constantinople (the orphanotrophoi) were selected from candidates with wide experience in the law courts of the empire. Historians are just beginning to use Byzantine legal manuals and casebooks to extract valuable information concerning the details of East Roman legal history as well as concerning aspects of social history, family organization, and economic development. Thus, this study will prove useful not only for the information it provides on the care of orphans, but also for the light it sheds on the Byzantine legal system. How much did Byzantine legislation alter the rules and the spirit of ancient Roman laws? Did the laws issued by the emperors actually affect the daily lives of Byzantine subjects? Finally, what sort of information can historians expect to find in the legislative texts and legal handbooks of Byzantium?

To study the care of orphans, it is also necessary to examine the educational system of the Byzantine world. All the East Roman orphanages about which detailed information has survived emphasized education as the cornerstone of their program of child care. In the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea, one of the most influential writers of the Greek-speaking church, laid out specific rules for educating homeless children as well as those with living parents. He devoted "Question Fifteen" of his famous Long Rules for his monks to describing how monasteries should organize their schools for both boys and girls. Basil laid down regulations for discipline and recommended methods of instruction including academic contests for the children. In the centuries that followed, orphan schools, supported by both bishops and monastic communities, closely followed Basil's suggestions. By the twelfth century, the biggest orphan home in the empire, the Orphanotropheion of Constantinople, had become famous as an educational institution that employed some of the leading intellectuals of the day to teach its students. The Orphanotropheion also sponsored contests for its children, just as Basil had recommended.

Education clearly shaped the routine of daily life in Byzantine orphanages, but primary sources also show that successful guardians considered education as one of their first obligations. When the future monastic leader Plato of Sakkoudion lost both his parents in the middle of the eighth century, his uncle accepted the boy into his home and gave him excellent training in accounting and bookkeeping, training that gained Plato a lucrative government post as his uncle's assistant. In the early fourteenth century, Athanasios, the future leader of the Meteora monasteries, also received an excellent education under his uncle's tutelage. Many other sources stress the same point: a conscientious guardian secured a good education for his ward.

A careful study of orphan care in the Byzantine Empire, therefore, must examine what sort of education orphans in fact received. With regard to guardians, the sources do not reveal any clear pattern. In some cases the guardians personally tutored their wards, but in other cases they sent them away to schools. The few surviving sources we have regarding group homes, however, do describe many common elements in orphan schools. Some of these common practices derived from the guidelines that Basil of Caesarea had set down in his "Question Fifteen" while others the orphanages had inherited from the pre-Christian schools of Hellenistic and Roman times.

A monograph on how the Byzantine Empire cared for its orphans therefore must address many issues beyond those directly related to child care. It must discuss how the empire's orphan care program fit in with other social welfare programs such as the medical hospitals. With regard to guardianship, it must examine many legal issues arising from the Roman law tradition of tutores (legal guardians). Finally, it must explore the wider area of Byzantine education and instructional methods to understand how these orphan homes functioned. Moreover, in pursuing these goals, this study will focus on those elements of East Roman society that historians had ignored until the 1950s: the people beyond the circle of the imperial family and the key policymakers in church and state. The sources that we shall examine describe some children from the very poorest classes, many from the middle layers of society, and only a few, such as the nephews of Patriarch Keroularios, who came from the leading aristocratic families.

In studying Byzantine orphan care, it is also useful to address several issues beyond the scope of East Roman history proper. Since Byzantine civilization did not evolve in a vacuum but interacted on many levels with Christian society in the West, the methods the East Roman Empire used to care for homeless children both influenced Western institutions and in turn were effected by Latin developments. One cannot accurately trace the history of medieval orphan care in Western Europe nor account for the apparently sudden changes that appeared during the early Italian Renaissance without considering developments in the Byzantine Empire.

In the past fifteen years, medievalists have focused attention on a particular category of orphan children in Western Europe: abandoned infants. In 1989, John Boswell published a sweeping study of infant abandonment from pre-Christian Roman times to the Italian Renaissance. Boswell maintained that the practice of abandonment in ancient society usually did not end in the abandoned infant's death, but rather functioned as an informal adoption system. The christianizing of the Mediterranean basin made only minor changes in this ancient system, which continued until the late medieval period. At that time, many Italian towns decided to establish orphan asylums in order to prevent infant abandonment by providing a safe place to leave babies whom the natural parents were either unable or unwilling to keep. Boswell then showed that these asylums did not save the babies, but rather hastened their death. By a cruel irony, the well-intentioned establishment of infant asylums such as the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence or the Orphanage of the Holy Spirit in Rome did not save the lives of unwanted babies, but instead encouraged the abandonment of infants at an ever-increasing rate, a process that eventually led to severe overcrowding and eventually to the death of thousands in these chronically underfinanced charitable foundations.

After the appearance of Boswell's controversial book, the École Française de Rome published a massive collection of articles on abandoned children in Italy and southern Europe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. The detailed research presented in these articles was based in most cases on careful statistical evidence; these studies prove that Boswell was wrong in claiming a high death rate for abandoned babies in such orphanages during the fifteenth century but he was correct in maintaining that these institutions encouraged abandonment by offering the poor or the proud an easy and relatively guiltless way of getting rid of unwanted infants. As the number of babies kept increasing and eventually surpassed the capacity of such institutions to supervise the infants in their charge, death rates did indeed soar. By the middle of the eighteenth century, death rates at the Milan asylum and in the newer infant orphanages in Paris and Vienna were approaching 80 percent of the babies left in their care.

The studies sponsored by the École Française de Rome, as well as several articles by Volker Hunecke in other publications, have emphasized the sudden appearance of these foundling orphanages in fifteenth-century Europe. Florence began construction of the Innocenti in 1419; Venice had a full-scale foundling home called the Pietà by the mid-fifteenth century; and Pope Sixtus IV redesigned a section of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit to accept abandoned infants and orphans in the 1470s. Hunecke stressed the fact that these foundling homes opened only in Italy during the 1400s and did not spread to other countries of Europe before the sixteenth century. Both Hunecke and Boswell reject the notion that the foundling hospitals of Renaissance Italy had developed out of earlier medieval traditions.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE ORPHANS OF BYZANTIUM by TIMOTHY S. MILLER Copyright © 2003 by The Catholic University of America Press. Excerpted by permission of The Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................ix
List of Abbreviations....................xiii
I. Introduction....................1
II. The Ancient World....................22
III. The New Jerusalem....................49
IV. Byzantine Guardianship....................78
V. The Byzantine Church....................108
VI. Abandonment and Adoption....................141
VII. The Orphanotropheion: Administration....................176
VIII. The Orphanotropheion: The Orphan School....................209
IX. Did It Work?....................247
X. Epilogue: The West....................283
Appendix: Seventy-Seven Orphan Cases....................301
Bibliography....................307
Index....................327