Byzantine Culture

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Byzantine Eunuchs

Eunuchs ran the Byzantine palace, commanded armies and held the patriarchate. Who they were, why emperors trusted them, the offices reserved for them, and how attitudes changed.

The man who reconquered Italy for Justinian was a eunuch. So was the general who ended the Bulgarian threat under Nikephoros II, the admiral who recovered Crete, several patriarchs of Constantinople, and the chamberlains who effectively ran the government for much of the empire’s history.

Byzantine eunuchs were not marginal figures, and the western caricature — decorative, servile, confined to harems — describes something that never existed in Constantinople. They were an institutional solution to a specific political problem, and they worked well enough that the empire used them for a thousand years.

The Political Logic

The problem was dynastic. Any capable, ambitious, well-connected man at court was a potential usurper or the founder of a rival line, and Byzantine history is full of generals who took the throne.

A eunuch could not found a dynasty. He could not marry, could not have legitimate heirs, could not be crowned emperor — it was an unwritten but effective rule that a eunuch could not hold the imperial office, on the grounds that the emperor’s body should be unmutilated. His power was therefore entirely derivative of the emperor’s favour, and it ended with his life.

That made him the ideal holder of positions requiring proximity and trust: control of access to the emperor, custody of the treasury, command of the guard, care of the imperial wardrobe and bedchamber. Access to the Great Palace was the currency of Byzantine politics, and eunuchs controlled the doors.

Who They Were

Sources of recruitment varied over time:

  • Foreign slaves, especially from the Caucasus — Armenians, Georgians, Abkhazians — and from the Slavic lands. Castration of Byzantine subjects was repeatedly prohibited by law, which pushed the trade to the frontiers and beyond.
  • Sons of Byzantine families. Despite the prohibitions, aristocratic families castrated younger sons deliberately, as a career strategy. A eunuch son could rise to the highest offices, would not divide the inheritance, and would not bring the family into dynastic danger. The emperor Romanos I had his own son Theophylact castrated and made him patriarch.
  • Castration as a political measure. Deposed emperors’ sons were castrated to disqualify them, as an alternative to killing them.

The procedure was performed on boys, usually before puberty, and the mortality rate was high. Byzantine medical writers, including Paul of Aegina, describe the techniques clinically, while noting that the operation was forbidden.

The Offices

The tenth-century Kletorologion of Philotheos, a court precedence manual, lists eight dignities reserved exclusively for eunuchs and a set of offices they alone could hold. The most important were:

  • Parakoimomenos — “the one who sleeps beside,” the grand chamberlain who slept at the emperor’s door. Repeatedly the most powerful man in the empire. Basil Lekapenos held the position for decades in the tenth century and made and unmade emperors.
  • Praipositos sacri cubiculi — head of the imperial bedchamber and household.
  • Protovestiarios — keeper of the wardrobe, and in practice of a large part of the treasury.
  • Sakellarios — chief financial officer.

The separate ladder of eunuch titles is discussed in Byzantine court titles.

Eunuch Generals

The most striking Byzantine departure from other societies is the use of eunuchs as military commanders.

Narses (c. 478–573), chamberlain to Justinian, was given command in Italy in his mid-seventies and destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom at Taginae in 552 and at Mons Lactarius the following year. He governed Italy for over a decade.

Solomon commanded in North Africa in the 530s.

Nikephoros Ouranos was a general and a writer on tactics under Basil II.

Peter and John the Orphanotrophos in the eleventh century, Joseph Bringas in the tenth, and a succession of others held major commands.

Emperors preferred them precisely because a victorious eunuch general could not be proclaimed emperor by his troops — which is what happened to non-eunuch commanders with some regularity.

The Church

Eunuchs were barred from the priesthood by the canons if they had been castrated voluntarily, but permitted if the castration had been performed on them without their consent or for medical reasons — a distinction that in practice admitted almost everyone.

Several patriarchs of Constantinople were eunuchs, including Germanos I, Methodios, Ignatios (son of an emperor, castrated after his father’s deposition) and Theophylact. Eunuch clergy were common in the great churches and in monasteries, where some houses admitted them and others, notably on Mount Athos, forbade their entry along with that of women and beardless youths.

Attitudes

Byzantine writing about eunuchs is contradictory, and that contradiction is itself the historical fact.

Hostile stereotypes are abundant: eunuchs are described as greedy, treacherous, cowardly, unnaturally cunning, physically repellent and neither male nor female. Some of this is inherited classical prejudice; some reflects genuine resentment of the power they held.

Alongside this runs a body of positive and even theological writing. Theophylact of Ohrid wrote a Defence of Eunuchs in the eleventh century arguing that they were closer to the angelic condition and better suited to serve at the altar and in the palace. Court ceremonial treated them as an ordered part of the imperial household, and the angels themselves were sometimes depicted in the beardless, ambiguous manner associated with eunuchs — a point modern scholarship has made much of.

Recent work, particularly by Kathryn Ringrose and Shaun Tougher, has argued that Byzantines understood eunuchs as a distinct gender category rather than as defective men, and that this framing explains both the hostility and the trust. The argument has been influential.

Decline

The institution declined after the eleventh century. The Komnenian settlement, which staffed the government with the emperor’s own relatives, removed the need for a class defined by its inability to found dynasties: a brother or nephew was now the trusted man. Eunuchs continue to appear in the later sources but in reduced numbers and with less power.

The Ottomans, inheriting the palace culture of Constantinople along with the city, reinstituted a eunuch establishment in a different form, and the black and white eunuch corps of the Topkapı palace descended, functionally if not institutionally, from the Byzantine arrangement described in Constantinople to Istanbul.

Basil Lekapenos

One career shows what the office could deliver, and it is the most spectacular in Byzantine administrative history.

Basil was the illegitimate son of the emperor Romanos I Lekapenos by a Bulgarian or Scythian slave woman, castrated as a child — a standard measure for an emperor’s bastard, removing him from the succession while leaving him usable.

He became parakoimomenos, grand chamberlain, and held real power under five emperors across roughly four decades. He helped bring Nikephoros II Phokas to the throne in 963 and was involved in the conspiracy that removed him in 969; he governed for the young Basil II and Constantine VIII; and he was finally dismissed and exiled by Basil II in 985, when the emperor came into his own.

He was also a considerable patron: a collector of manuscripts and antiquities, and the commissioner of the remaking of the Limburg Staurotheke, whose inscription names him as proedros — a title created for him.

His fall is instructive. Basil II stripped him of office, confiscated his property and annulled his acts, and the eunuch died shortly afterwards. Power that derived entirely from the emperor’s favour ended entirely when the favour did, which was the point of the institution.

The Gender Argument

Recent scholarship has reframed how eunuchs are understood, and the argument is worth setting out because it changes the reading of a great deal of Byzantine material.

The older approach treated eunuchs as mutilated men — defective males, pitied or despised, and analysed in terms of what they lacked.

The reframing, argued most fully by Kathryn Ringrose and developed by Shaun Tougher, is that Byzantines understood eunuchs as a distinct gender category with its own characteristics, its own appropriate roles and its own dress, rather than as damaged men.

The evidence cited: eunuchs had their own ladder of court titles, inaccessible to other men; they had distinct ceremonial dress and position; Byzantine texts describe them with a vocabulary of physical and behavioural characteristics treated as natural to the category; they occupied spaces — the women’s quarters, the imperial bedchamber — closed to other men; and they were repeatedly compared to angels, who are likewise unmarried, sexless and intermediary.

Theophylact of Ohrid’s Defence of Eunuchs makes the angelic comparison explicitly and argues that they are better suited to serve at the altar for exactly that reason.

The argument has been influential and has been criticised for reading modern gender theory into the sources. What is not disputed is that Byzantine attitudes were more complicated than simple contempt, and that the category did real conceptual work.

Angels, Icons and Beardlessness

A small art-historical observation follows from the above and is worth making because it changes how one looks at Byzantine images.

Byzantine angels are depicted as youthful, beardless figures with long hair, often in court dress — specifically the dress of imperial officials, with the loros and the staff of a chamberlain. They are shown attending Christ as courtiers attend an emperor.

Given that the imperial chamberlains who performed exactly those functions were eunuchs, and that eunuchs were beardless and long-haired, the visual identification is hard to avoid, and several scholars have argued it is deliberate: the heavenly court is depicted on the model of the earthly one, staffed accordingly.

This does not mean Byzantine viewers thought angels were eunuchs in any literal sense. It means the pictorial vocabulary for a being that is neither male nor female in the ordinary way, that serves in a ruler’s intimate presence, and that mediates between the sovereign and everyone else, was already available — because such people worked in the palace across the square.

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