Imperial Women in Byzantium 1025-1204

Power, Patronage and Ideology

Barbara Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138153875
• eBook ISBN: 9781317884651
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book will be essential reading for anyone studying Byzantine history in this period. It ranges in time from the death of the emperor Basil II in 1025 to the sacking of the city of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders in 1204, spanning the rise and fall of the successful Komnenos dynasty. Eleventh-century Byzantine history is unusual in that imperial women were able to wield immense power and in this ground-breaking book Dr Hill explores why this was possible and, equally, why they lost their position of influence a century later.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The study of women is currently fashionable during this second women’s movement of the twentieth century. Byzantine women have not been neglected in the upsurge of interest in the lives of women in general. And yet, despite increased interest over the last twenty years, the investigation and knowledge of women still have a long way to go before they are on a level with many other areas of Byzantine culture and history. The relatively recent Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium does not have an entry on ‘empress’. For information on this person, readers are directed to the entry on ‘emperor’.¹ Even primary evidence can be misrepresented, and perhaps therefore misread; this fact is demonstrated by the usual characterisation of the mosaic in the south gallery of Hagia Sophia as ‘the Constantine panel’, despite the fact that Constantine was clearly not the original donor of the panel and was only emperor in any case by his marriage to the reigning empress, Zoe the Macedonian, who is also represented in the panel. This should be described as the Zoe panel.² The error is further compounded by the inclusion of the panel in the very accessible Byzantium by R. Loverance. On page 44 the photograph of the panel excludes Zoe altogether, only showing Christ and Constantine. Loverance does have the grace to include Zoe in the caption, but the photograph is more likely to be remembered and few casual readers will read the caption. The bitter extreme of exclusion of women is that scholarly attempts are made to remove their visibility in cases where they have been visible. For example, J. Howard-Johnston would like to turn the Alexiad of Anna Komnene into the Alexiad of Nikephoros Bryennios, edited by Anna Komnene, on the ludicrous, not to say unproved and chauvinistic, grounds that women cannot write about battles.³ Howard-Johnston is not doing anything new: denying authorship to women is a time-honoured tradition the absurdity and bias of which have been convincingly laid bare by Joanna Russ.⁴

It is no longer necessary to make excuses for or to justify studying women: most scholars accept that such work is axiomatic for the full understanding of social life, and that ignoring over half the human race results in a distorted picture of human life. Even histories of the most male-dominated areas of Byzantine life like military usurpations are no longer complete without the consideration of the role of women within them.⁵ Women appear as actors on every stage.

Before it is assumed that men and women are now equally represented as subjects in history-writing, a historiographical note of caution should be sounded. There are more articles written every year about women in Byzantium, and a chronological survey shows immediately the vast difference between this decade and the 1940s for example, but the authors have also changed. In the 1940s three very eminent men wrote about Byzantine women: in the 1980s male writers were heavily outnumbered by women. Has the study of Byzantine women become a specialised subject, only undertaken by women, ignored by Byzantinists as a whole? Has it been marginalised? The good general histories of the decade, like Angold’s The Byzantine Empire 1025–1204 and the works deliberately engaging with culture, like Kazhdan and Constable’s People and Power in Byzantium, and Kazhdan and Epstein’s Change in Byzantine Culture, do mention women, usually in the context of the family, but there are few specific articles written by men. In the 1980s the only man interested in women was one of those who was writing in the 1940s, namely Steven Runciman. Of course, there is an alternative view of the preponderance of women writers over men writers, which is that women have taken charge in this area of research. The fact that much women’s history is written by female historians has not been lost on feminists, some of whom are now keen to include interested men in their discussions, and see such combinations as the way forward.⁶

The women in this study can be divided into two groups. The first group consists of two sovereign empresses, Zoe and Theodora, the last heirs of the long-standing Macedonian dynasty. The second group is composed of the women who were powerful because they were related to emperors. Most of them belong to the Komnenian dynasty which seized power in 1081, establishing an unbroken rule until the capture of the city in 1204 by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade. These women were all imperial in the context of the Komnenoi, but not all were empresses. They were mothers, wives, sisters, sisters-in-law and daughters of emperors. Such a definition of their status is not a concession to traditional history which always defines women in relation to men. In any autocracy men and women are defined in relation to the autocrat, and Byzantium was no different. Since all the men around the emperor were defined in terms of their relation to him, it is permissible in the historical context of the Komnenian era to do the same with the women. This is not a gender difference; it is a political system. The women’s relation with the emperor was one of the most important things about them and about their society at this particular time. Some were wives and some were widows. The effect of differing marital status in Byzantine society and ideology will likewise become clear.

Secondary sources

Studies on women vary widely, from attempts to elucidate the role of women in society, through studies on one aspect of women’s life, to detailed work on one woman. Paul Adams was the first to feel the fascination of Byzantine women, writing in 1893 a book on Princesses byzantines, which included Eirene Doukaina and Anna Komnene. However, modern scholarship can be said to have started with Charles Diehl, whose charming but uncritical biographies of Byzantine women, Figures byzantines, performed the function of pulling together all that the sources had to say about each into one place. They are still a good place to start learning the ‘facts’ about the women he chose. The tradition was carried on by Bernard Leib, who after translating the Alexiad found so much material that he proceeded to write many articles about Alexios’s reign, incorporating the women around him: indeed, given such source material he could hardly have done otherwise. His ‘La role des femmes dans la révolution des Comnènes à Byzance’ is the most relevant to the present study. He too gathers the source material into one place, but there is no attempt to criticise the source or to analyse Byzantine society. Steven Runciman is the last great follower of this tradition. His work is very gallant, but in the course of five articles specifically on Byzantine women he does not go far beyond narration. His interest is consistent: in a book on the emperor Romanos Lekapenos he includes a chapter on his empress Zoe Karbonopsina, which is the only detailed treatment of this crucial and much maligned character. His article on the fall of Anna Dalassene is an attempt to penetrate the silence of the sources and analyse the events on other grounds: it is not his fault that the state of our knowledge has progressed, leaving his work out of date. A slightly different approach is taken by Grosdidier de Matons in ‘La femme dans l’empire byzantin’. Although he has only the same source material at his disposal, he avoids a narrative account, and attempts to present a thematic description of the life of women. He includes the highly interesting and generally neglected subjects of dangers of childbirth and the superstitious rites in which women took part in order to ensure either conception or contraception, the birth of a son, or an abortion.

Thematic studies of single aspects of women’s life do exist. The first treatment of women and law was that of Georgina Buckler: her work on Anna Komnene still stands as the only full-scale study of this woman in English. The best and most exhaustive study of the law as it applies to women is by Beaucamp, which has so far not been bettered. Bensammar’s study of the titles of the empress and their significance is the only such study relating to women, in strong contrast to the numerous articles on the titulature of the emperor. In 1985 Women and Monasticism was published, addressing such aspects of Byzantine women’s monastic experience as choices in becoming a nun, the ideology and the reality contrasted, and the values that nuns were supposed to hold. A second volume, on Women and Byzantine Monasticism, was published in 1991, including articles on founders of monasteries, imperial women and the monastic life, and equality in monasticism. Patlagean’s work on transvestite nuns, including an essay in this volume, has illuminated the monastic choices open to women in the middle period, and the consequences of choosing them. This study is invaluable not only for its subject matter, but for its pointers towards the type of further research which needs to be done. Alice-Mary Talbot has explored the education available in monasteries of the later period.⁷

Much of the evidence for women in monastic life relates to imperial or aristocratic women, who had both the money or property to endow monasteries and the education to write about their aims. On a smaller scale, these same women paid for artistic decoration in churches or for icons even if they still lived in the secular world. The question of Byzantine devotion to icons was a contested point then and still merits discussions today. Women’s devotion to certain images above others and their relationship to the Virgin Mary have been discussed by Robin Cormack and Judith Herrin.

Other important articles on the lives of Byzantine women cannot be categorised into strict themes, but each add information which is crucial. Speeches or artefacts can be used to explore the role of women: Robert Browning’s article on the funeral oration of Anna Komnene is one example,⁸ Ioli Kalavrezou-Maxeiner’s discussion of the place of the empress Eudokia from an ivory from the mid-eleventh century is another.⁹ Some work has been done on the question of women and power. For instance, Averil Cameron has shown that the fifth-century empress Sophia was the power behind her sick husband, and Margaret Mullett has revealed the changing political role of the ex-empress Maria of Alania. Steven Runciman has chronicled the career of the famous empress Eirene the Athenian in the eighth century and has also written more widespread articles attempting to define the role of aristocratic women in general and the empress in particular. For the later period, Alice-Mary Talbot has examined the role of the empress regent Theodora Palaeologina in all areas of her life.¹⁰

Recent scholarship

Since the 1980s analytical overview studies have been published by Laiou¹¹ and Herrin,¹² which are arguably the most accessible and useful secondary sources for women in Byzantium. These two are contiguous with the great explosion of interest in ancient and medieval women at the beginning of the 1980s. They take different approaches: Laiou analyses clearly demarcated areas while Herrin chooses three avenues which are less clear-cut. They concur in the usefulness of law as evidence and in the importance they attach to property and its management, as well as in the explicit aim of differentiating reality and ideals. Laiou ignores the church but explores attitudes to women. Herrin investigates Christian beliefs and their effect, but is concerned to illuminate practical reality rather than an ideal. Laiou is interested in aristocratic and imperial women because of their importance for property management and transference and sees the emergence of aristocratic women as a class into society and politics. Herrin would prefer to concentrate on women other than imperial or aristocratic, but eventually has to come to terms with their role since the property evidence leads that way. Herrin in particular notices the increased freedom and privileged position of widows. Despite their differing approaches, both Laiou and Herrin conclude that in Byzantium women were subordinate to men, being subject to limitations which affected all women from the aristocrat to the peasant, despite some loosening of attitudes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Most recently, Laiou has published a detailed treatment of marriage, love and relationship in Byzantium in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.¹³ This book not only explores the development of civil and canon law in relation to impediments to marriage, and the economic consequences of marriage alliances for the succession and management of property, but also discusses the emotional side of marriage, love and desire. From a thorough examination of all cases of disputed marriages, Laiou shows that the aristocracy and the emperor were highly concerned to control the organisation of marriage, an activity which placed them in direct conflict with the church, which was equally determined to exercise ultimate jurisdiction. A certain gap between law and practice is exposed, spawning the numerous court cases dealing with the dissolution of unions as the aristocracy sought to manipulate marriage alliances for their own social, political and economic advancement. Laiou demonstrates the circular nature of the problem: the aristocracy found their matrimonial strategies influenced by legal impediments to marriage, but in their attempts to carry out their plans through the legal process they contributed to the development of these impediments.

Keith Holum’s Theodosian Empresses was also published in the 1980s, and deals with the mother, wives and sister of the fourth-century emperor Theodosios II. Despite Holum’s stated aim that he is writing about female *basileia, the imperial dominion of women, the title ties these women down firmly in their place around a man. The book proceeds on a narrative basis from the beginning of the period to the end. Although it does make available the evidence on the women of the fourth century with some critical analysis of sources, it does not start from the point of view of the women, nor are they the focus of investigation throughout.

The most interesting discussion of attitudes to women in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is found in an article by Catia Galatariotou on the ideas of a twelfth-century Byzantine monk, Neophytos the Recluse, titled ‘Holy women and witches: aspects of Byzantine concepts of gender’.¹⁴ As the title suggests, this article uses feminist and anthropological theory explicitly. Neophytos was a monk on the island of Cyprus and his individual concepts cannot be taken as a general comment on the attitudes of all Byzantine males or even all monks, but they do demonstrate one extreme view of the evil in women. To Neophytos, all women were created in the image of Eve, a temptress by nature who would lead men away from God and from righteousness. Woman was universally bad. Galatariotou’s discussion is convincing and points to the richness of the material on women. Other males in other parts of the empire, notably the court, had different views, or at least did not express themselves as stridently as Neophytos.

Lastly, the work of Lynda Garland on imperial women and sexual morality in the eleventh and twelfth centuries explores the difference between ideology and reality for women in Byzantium. Her ‘Life and ideology of Byzantine women’ attempts to illuminate the reality of women’s lives behind the ideology in Byzantium, using the ideology to highlight the reality by contrasting what the sources claim is correct and what we see happening in them. Garland sees ideology contributing to the freedom of women by covering them with a protective veil which allowed them to do very much what they wanted. She concludes that imperial women in Byzantium could be ‘in their own right the obvious and unchallenged embodiment of Byzantine imperialism’,¹⁵ with a range of power options which included ruling from behind the scenes and motherhood. I disagree with this conclusion on grounds which will appear throughout this book. Briefly, Garland conflates sovereign empresses with consorts in her judge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps, figures and family trees
• List of abbreviations
• Glossary
• Author’s acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The role of women in eleventh-century politics
• 3. Creating the ideal Komnenian woman
• 4. Titles for imperial women
• 5. The method of marriage
• 6. Power through patronage
• 7. A woman’s ideology
• 8. The collapse of the Komnenian system
• 9. Conclusion
• Chronology
• Appendix: Family trees
• Bibliography
• Index