The orphans of Byzantium: child welfare in the Christian empire

Preface

PREFACE When I began research for The Orphans of Byzantium in , I planned it as a sequel to my first book, The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire (published in ). Just as the East Roman Empire of Byzantium supported charitable medical hospitals to offer health care to people from all classes in society, so too did it maintain a series of orphanages to nurture boys and girls who had lost their parents. But as I examined more closely the primary sources describing orphan care, I discovered that the East Roman method of aiding homeless children had evolved along different lines than had its system of providing free access to physicians. The Byzantine method of assisting orphans relied primarily on the laws of guardianship, which required that members of the extended family assume responsibility for protecting the children of their deceased relatives. My initial purpose in preparing this study was thus to describe how Byzantine society cared for orphaned and abandoned children and to examine how this child welfare program differed from the East Roman hospital system. As I pursued the project, however, I realized that many of the problems that Byzantine emperors, church leaders, and directors of orphanages faced did not differ from those confronting today ’s social workers, psychologists, and educators. The more I read studies of modern orphanages and child welfare issues, the more I saw that societies have been addressing the same problems in assisting homeless children for centuries. Every grade school student has heard the saying that history repeats itself, and all of us have learned the necessity of experience in solving problems. Nevertheless, many modern experts in the field of child welfare know almost nothing about the history of how earlier societies ix have tried to assist abandoned and orphaned children. Is it unreasonable to believe that earlier generations might have found solutions to problems that we are facing today, solutions that have somehow slipped from our collective memory? In researching my topic, I became increasingly aware of how little interest government agencies, politicians, and even child advocacy groups in the United States, and to some extent also in Europe, have shown in examining the successes and failures of ancient and medieval societies in their efforts to assist the poor and needy in general and to provide care for orphans and abandoned children in particular. Can this lack of historical perspective help to explain the unsatisfactory results of the current foster-care system for children, and perhaps the failure of other social welfare systems of the capitalist West? As a result of these considerations, perhaps a more fundamental goal of this book is to awaken a greater awareness of the long and complex history of social welfare, a history which in fact began with the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity during the fourth century. Thus, a thorough understanding of how child welfare programs developed through the centuries requires that one begin with a detailed study of Byzantine efforts to assist orphans and abandoned children. Rather than list the people who have contributed to this book, I would like to present a short description of how the project unfolded and who came to rescue me at crucial moments. After eight years of study, I had found in the surviving sources references to only six provincial orphanages in the Byzantine Empire. This was, nevertheless, a considerable achievement because a number of scholars, after combing medieval sources, had maintained that Byzantium knew only one orphanage, the Orphanotropheion (The Orphanage), located in Constantinople . Despite this limited success, I failed to find information on how many children lived in any of these institutions. The only information on the size of orphanages came from a twelfth-century monastery for women; the founder of this institution required that the nuns always maintain two orphan girls in the community. From the evidence I had assembled it seemed likely that Byzantine x  orphanages could shelter only a few children at a time. Such a conclusion would have confirmed the views regarding East Roman hospitals that scholars such as Ewald Kisslinger and Michael Dols had expressed —namely, that most Byzantine philanthropic institutions had been small and could afford to provide only limited care to a few patients and poverty-stricken guests. At this point Professor George Dennis, S. J., who directed my dissertation at The Catholic University of America, sent me one of his entertaining notes together with a...