The orphans of Byzantium: child welfare in the Christian empire

I. Introduction

I INTRODUCTION From among the children who had been deprived of their parents and were pierced by the evil of orphania [orphanhood], the assigned some to relatives and others whom he knew to be pious to the superiors of the holy monasteries. The emperor commanded that raise these not as slaves, but as free persons, considering them worthy of a liberal education and instructing them in the Holy Scriptures. Some he entrusted to the Orphanotropheion which he had constructed, handing them over to those in charge to be taught general education.1 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  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.2 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 Komnena, Alexiad, .. (: ). . Treadgold, p. . 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.3 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   . Cf. the translation by Sewter, p. : “All children who had lost their parents and were afflicted by the grievous ills of orphanhood were committed to the care of relatives and to others who, he knew, were respectable people, as well as to abbots of the holy monasteries ,l.l.l.” Sewter takes the accusative oJpovsou" to be an indirect object parallel with toi'" te suggenevsi. In fact, it must be the direct object of the participle dJianeivma" (“assigning others to the monasteries”). In his French translation, Leib, the editor of the Greek text, understands oJpovsou" as modifying toi'" suggenevsi: “Tous les enfants qui avaient perdu leurs parents et qui, orphelins, étaient meurtris par cette cruelle épreuve, furent répartis par ses soins entre leurs proches, quand il les savait d’une honorabilité notoire, et les higoumènes des saints monastères,l.l.l.” (Anna Komnena, Alexiad, .. [: ]). Leib’s translation thus has an accusative relative pronoun modifying a dative plural noun. The recent German translation of this passage by Dieter Reinseh () agrees with the interpretation presented here. 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...