The orphans of Byzantium: child welfare in the Christian empire

V. The Byzantine Church

V THE BYZANTINE CHURCH Byzantine laws of guardianship developed from the Roman legal system of tutela and cura. Although Christian concepts of God’s special love for orphans probably inspired Constantine to legislate greater protection for such children and surely led Justinian to insist that guardians swear an oath on the Sacred Scriptures to guarantee their proper conduct, the emperors were scrupulously careful to use the terms and concepts of traditional Roman jurisprudence as they altered the institution of guardianship. Christianity, however, did have a more direct impact on the empire’s system of orphan care in cases where it was not possible to find a guardian. Classical Roman law provided only one remedy for children whose parents had failed to appoint a guardian by testament and who had no relatives willing to assume the tutela legitima. In such cases Roman magistrates could appoint any competent person to serve as a guardian for the child (the tutela Atiliana).1 But how many children won the attention of Roman magistrates or of their Byzantine successors ? In the early third century, Clement of Alexandria harshly criticized the Greco-Roman society of his day for ignoring the needy orphans on the streets of Egypt’s capital.2 We have already seen that in Byzantine times a wealthy pagan girl was left without any guardian in sixth-century Alexandria, and no magistrate, whether the provincial . Inst, .. . Clement, Paedagogus, .. (p. ).  governor or by that time the bishop of the city, intervened to appoint a guardian.3 After the sixth century the legal sources cease to mention the tutela Atiliana, and later juristic manuals emphasize that the power of magistrates to appoint guardians referred to confirming tutors who were summoned to this duty because of their blood relationship to the orphans , not to designating people from outside the family to assist children without living relatives.4 By the twelfth century the tutela Atiliana seems to have vanished, at least in Constantinople. Anna Komnena’s description of orphan care did not refer to any magisterial appointment of guardians. Instead, she stressed that the emperor Alexios entrusted orphans without relatives to monastic orphanages in Constantinople or to the Orphanotropheion—in other words, to various types of Christian philanthropic institutions that functioned as group homes for the children.5 Following the dictates of the Old Testament and the advice of James’s epistle, the Christian Church began to organize some form of group care for orphans without any family guardians as early as the second century. We examined evidence for that care in Chapter Two. After the conversion of Constantine, however, the Church was forced to expand its orphan-care system to meet the needs of many more children since the population of the fourth century was increasing, especially in urban areas of the eastern Byzantine provinces, and the number of Christian children was expanding even more rapidly because of the many conversions after the emperors publicly acknowledged the new God.6 This chapter will examine these Christian orphanages in detail to determine how they nurtured and educated the children in their care. In addition to examining the history of these orphan schools, this chapter will explore other ways the Byzantine Church affected the care of orphans, especially in encouraging laymen to build new orphanages or to provide other kinds of assistance. Finally, this chapter will study     . John Moschos, Pratum Spirituale,  (PG, .: –). See also Chapter Four, note . . See Chapter Four, p. . . Anna Komnena, Alexiad, .. (: ). . Miller, Birth, pp. –, esp. note . the role that individual bishops, priests, or monks assumed in acting as guardians for orphans. In this case the Byzantine state attempted to limit the role of clergy and ascetics in caring for orphans by trying to ban them from serving as tutors or curators for the children of relatives or friends. Ultimately, this attempt failed since many Byzantine subjects preferred to designate priests or monks, even from outside the family circle, to serve as guardians for their children in place of blood relatives who were laymen. THE BISHOPS As we saw in Chapter Two, bishops emerged as the key figures in every aspect of Christian life. When Justin described the Roman church in the mid-second century, its bishop supervised all the community ’s philanthropic activity, including the care of orphans and widows .7 After Constantine’s conversion, bishops tended to involve themselves in many new activities, especially of a political nature. They gradually began to exercise...