Download PDF | The Orphans Of Byzantium Child Welfare In The Christian Empire, de Timothy S. Miller (Author), the catholic university of america press (february 12, 2003)
359 Pages
For my wife, Vicki, and our two sons, Justin and Matthew. Many times they have rescued The Orphans of Byzantium.
Interest in the ancient civilization of Greece and Rome and in the Christian world of the Middle Ages has declined in recent years. Most of my students find the names Demosthenes and John Chrysostom more difficult to remember than Lao Tzu and Montezuma. In such an atmosphere, I was especially delighted to discover that a group of physicians and independent scholars had organized the Hellenic Society Paideia of Virginia, a branch of a national organization founded in 1974, to encourage the study of Greek civilization from its beginnings in the Bronze Age to the present. This organization helped to support my research for this book and has also assisted many other scholars and students in reaching their academic goals. It is especially appropriate that the Hellenic Society Paideia put down strong roots in Virginia where more than two hundred years ago serious study of classical civilization gave birth to the ideals of a new nation.
4 July 2002
Salisbury, Maryland
PREFACE
When I began research for The Orphans of Byzantium in 1990, I planned it as a sequel to my first book, The Birth of the Hospital bod in the Byzantine Empire (published in 1985). 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 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 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 photocopy of a letter by Theodore of Stoudios (early ninth century). Father Dennis had been reading the letters of Theodore in preparation for a study of Michael Psellos’s letters when he noticed that Letter 211 of the Theodore collection described a privately funded orphanage just outside the Bithynian town of Prousa. Moreover, Theodore’s letter specifically stated that this institution took care of forty boys and forty girls. Dennis’s discovery altered the whole picture of Byzantine orphanages. If a private orphanage outside Prousa served eighty children, how many did the great Orphanotropheion of Constantinople care for?
In listing the men who served as orphanotrophoi (directors) of the Orphanotropheion of Constantinople, I noticed that in a few cases these officials had been monks or clerics. Dr. John Nesbitt, a research associate specializing in sigilography at the Byzantine Center, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., suggested that this particular office could have been part of both an ecclesiastical and a secular cursus honorum. He decided to examine carefully lead seals of orphanotrophoi to determine how many directors came from clerical or monastic backgrounds. The results of his research will appear shortly in two articles: “St. Zotikos and the Early History of the Office of Orphanotrophos,” to appear in a memorial volume for Nicholas Oikonomides, published by the Center for Byzantine Studies, Athens, Greece; and “The Orphanotrophos: Some Observations on the History of the Office in Light of the Seals,” to appear in Studies in Sigillography, vol. 8. These articles will augment the information presented in Chapter Seven concerning the orphanage directors of Constantinople.
Throughout the years I spent in preparing this book, I had been thinking about a suitable illustration for the cover, an icon or manu-script illustration that would capture the theme of Christian care for children. As late as May 2002, I still had found nothing that I could use. I discussed my dilemma with Dr. John Cotsonis, director of the Archbishop Jakovos Library, Hellenic College/Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, and he immediately suggested a manuscript illustration depicting Christ blessing a little child, from Codex 587 in the Monastery of Dionysiou on Mount Athos. With the kind permission of Archimandrite Petros, kathegoumenos of the Dionysiou Monastery, this beautiful miniature appears on the cover of this volume.
Besides these colleagues, I want to thank Mr. Mark Zapatka for frequent assistance at the Dumbarton Oaks Library, and Mr. Joseph Mills for preparing the cover illustration. I would have been unable even to have begun this project without the hospitality of Dr. David Johnson, S.J., and Rev. Raymond Studzinski, O.S.B., who often offered me a room at Curley Hall when I needed to spend several days either at Dumbarton Oaks or at the Mullen Library of The Catholic University of America. At my home institution, Salisbury University, I would like to thank Susan Wheatley, Audrey Schadt, and Diane Abresch at Blackwell Library for their help with the bibliography. Finally, I should mention the excellent work of Philip Holthaus, Susan Needham, and Beth Benevides, all of The Catholic University of America Press, for their help and advice in preparing this manuscript for publication.
I extend special thanks to Dr. Aristides Sismanis of Richmond, Virginia, for his support of this project. His encouragement helped me through some difficult periods in completing this book. He also invited me to address the Hellenic Society Paideia of Virginia. The financial support from the members of this organization have made this book possible.
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