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 1116 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....

Classical Greco-Roman civilization underlay many facets of East Roman society. Ancient Greece and Rome inspired Byzantine political concepts, literary tastes, ideas about the material universe, and philosophical systems, as well as the more mundane aspects of life such as games, foods, festivals, and superstitions. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Greco-Roman world also helped to shape the ideas the Byzantines held about orphans and the methods they adopted to assist these children.

We have already noted that the Byzantine Empire as the later phase of the Roman state continued to uphold the Roman law in the eastern Mediterranean and...

Toward the end of his reign, the emperor John II Komnenos (†1143) appointed Alexios Aristenos head of Constantinople’s great orphanage for the second time in Aristenos’s public career. The famous twelfth-century poet and rhetorician Theodore Prodromos dedicated an encomium to celebrate Aristenos’s appointment and praise his past virtue as an administrator. In the course of his speech Prodromos referred to the Orphanotropheion as “Sion” and to the needy people including the orphans as “the assembly of the first-born, enrolled in heaven.”¹

In describing the Orphanotropheion as Sion, Prodromos may well have known about 2 Maccabees 3:10–11, the passage describing...

During the eleven hundred years of its existence, the Byzantine state preserved many of the rules and definitions of Roman guardianship, but, as we have seen, the Christian emperors began to alter substantially certain aspects of the Roman system as early as the reign of Constantine. This chapter will examine Late Roman and Byzantine guardianship to determine which principles of the Roman tutela Byzantine rulers and their legal advisors chose to retain and which aspects they changed or discarded completely. At the same time that we are pursuing these two questions, it will be valuable to consider evidence for the...

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...

Regarding abandonment and adoption in the Byzantine Empire, one can formulate the key issues with two simple questions: Did the people of East Rome abandon as many babies as their pre-Christian ancestors had? And, second, were devout Christians willing to adopt the exposed infants they happened to find? Answering these two questions would provide valuable information not only about the society of the Byzantine Empire but also about the efficacy of Christianity in reshaping deep-rooted customs and instilling respect for human life in its most helpless form. In sum, answering these two questions would help us gage how much success...

At the center of the Byzantine program to assist orphans stood the great Orphanotropheion of Constantinople, founded by Saint Zotikos probably during the reign of the emperor Constantius and still functioning nine hundred years later at the beginning of the fourteenth century. As the orphanage of the imperial city in a society that the capital dominated politically, economically, and culturally, it is not surprising that this philanthropic institution eclipsed all other orphan schools, whether those controlled by bishops or those attached to monasteries. It is surprising, however, that it also eclipsed all the other charitable institutions of the empire, including...

According to Anna Komnena, her father, Alexios, placed a grammar school for the children of the Orphanotropheion to the right of the ancient church of Saint Paul.¹ The historian Zonaras also credited Alexios with having first established this orphan school.² In support of these two accounts, many other sources from Theodore Prodromos’s oratory to the writings of Constantine Stilbes described this grammar school for orphans as having functioned continually throughout the twelfth century.³ But did Alexios really found this school ex nihilo, as Anna and Zonaras claimed, or did the emperor simply reestablish an ancient institution, just as he re-founded...

Despite the Judeo-Christian belief that the God of the universe especially loved orphans and protected them with a father’s care, the Byzantines recognized that from a worldly point of view orphania was the greatest disaster that could befall a child. Archbishop Demetrios Chomatianos described how it caught children when they were too young and too inexperienced to manage their own affairs. As a result, it often scattered their possessions both to relatives and to outsiders. According to Chomatianos, Byzantine law was unable to protect such children from all the evils of orphanhood, but it did provide the help of guardians....

During the fifteenth century, the silk merchants of Florence hired the renowned Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi to build a beautiful orphanage for their city. The silk merchants decided to name this new institution the Ospedale degli Innocenti.¹ A millennium earlier in Constantinople the wealthy woman whom Patriarch Proklos had praised for her charity and civic devotion had dedicated her church and orphan home to the same Innocents, the infants whom Herod had murdered according to Matthew’s Gospel (2:1–12).² Did these two institutions share more than a name? Although separated by one thousand years of history and sustained by two...