Byzantine Culture

History · Article

Childhood in Byzantium

Byzantine children were baptised at forty days, named for a saint, weaned late and put to work early. Birth practices, infant mortality, toys, schooling, adoption and the law on children.

A Byzantine child born in, say, the tenth century had roughly a one in three chance of dying before its fifth birthday, was baptised at about forty days old, was named after the saint on whose feast it was born or a grandparent, was breastfed for two years or more, and — if it survived, and was a boy, and its family had money — might begin learning letters at six or seven.

The evidence for all of this is scattered across saints’ lives, medical texts, law codes, monastic rules, letters, wills, and the archaeology of graves, and it has only been assembled systematically in the last forty years. Byzantine childhood was for a long time assumed to be uninteresting, on the theory — since abandoned — that pre-modern parents did not form strong attachments to children who were likely to die.

Birth

Childbirth was managed by women: a midwife (maia), female relatives and neighbours. Byzantine medical writers, following Soranus of Ephesus, describe the birthing chair, the handling of difficult presentations, the cutting and binding of the cord, and the tests for judging whether a newborn is worth rearing — a chilling section inherited unchanged from the second century.

Maternal mortality was high, and the surviving material is full of it: tombstones of women who died in childbirth, prayers for safe delivery, and amulets. Byzantine birth amulets survive in quantity — bronze and lead pendants invoking the Virgin, or the mysterious figure of the hystera formula, worn to protect the womb.

Immediately after birth the infant was washed, salted, and swaddled tightly. Swaddling was universal and prolonged, on the theory that the infant’s limbs required moulding, and Byzantine images of the newborn Christ in the Nativity show him bound like a small mummy in a manger shaped like a tomb — a deliberate visual pun.

Baptism and Naming

Baptism normally took place around the fortieth day, preceded on the eighth day by a naming ceremony. Both dates follow the model of Christ’s own infancy as given in Luke, and the fortieth-day churching of the mother is still part of Orthodox practice.

Emergency baptism of a sickly newborn was permitted and frequently performed, since an unbaptised infant’s fate was theologically uncertain and parents did not want to test it.

Names were drawn from a fairly restricted pool of saints, with George, John, Michael, Basil, Constantine, Theodore, Nicholas, Maria, Anna, Theodora and Eirene dominating. Naming after a grandparent was standard and makes Byzantine genealogy difficult.

Godparents were important and created a real kinship: syntekni, spiritual kinship, was a legal impediment to marriage between the families involved and functioned as a social bond of considerable strength.

Infancy

Breastfeeding lasted around two years, and medical writers advised against earlier weaning. Wet nurses were employed in wealthy households and are mentioned in contracts and wills; a nurse could retain a lifelong position in the household.

Infant mortality is the dominant demographic fact. Cemetery excavations regularly show 30 to 50 per cent of burials being of children under five, with peaks in the first year and around weaning — the latter reflecting the introduction of contaminated food and water.

Evidence for parental grief is abundant and disposes of the old theory of emotional distance. Funerary inscriptions for young children, letters of consolation, the miracle collections at healing shrines full of desperate parents, and the sheer number of child burials made with care and grave goods all point the same way. The rites are described in death and burial in Byzantium.

Play

Byzantine children had toys, and archaeology has recovered them: clay figurines of animals and people, rattles, whistles, small wheeled carts, balls, knucklebones (astragaloi) for a game of skill that had been played in Greece for a millennium and is still played, dolls of cloth and bone.

Written sources add games of tag and ball, swings, hoops, imitation warfare, and the perennial complaint of moralists that children’s games are noisy and their pastimes idle. John Chrysostom’s sermons on child-rearing are the fullest single source and describe, among other things, using storytelling to shape a child’s character — advice that reads surprisingly modern.

Education and Work

For most children, work began early: helping with animals, gathering, fetching water, minding younger siblings, and by ten or twelve doing adult tasks in the fields or the workshop. Apprenticeship contracts survive.

Formal schooling was for a minority. The sequence — letters at six or seven, grammar, then rhetoric for those going further — is described in education in Byzantium. Girls of the propertied classes were often taught to read at home, and Byzantine women’s literacy was higher than in most contemporary societies, though far from universal.

The Law

Byzantine law treated childhood in stages inherited from Rome: infancy to seven, then a period of limited capacity, with full majority at twenty-five and the capacity to marry at twelve for girls and fourteen for boys — ages that were legal minimums rather than typical practice, though early marriage for girls was common.

Adoption was regulated and reasonably frequent, with a church blessing attached from the ninth century. Foundlings were a recognised category: abandoned infants were taken in by churches, monasteries and individuals, and the orphanotropheion of Constantinople — a large orphanage attached to the church of St Paul, described by Anna Komnene as a city within a city — cared for children, the disabled and the elderly at state expense.

Child abandonment was illegal and persistent. Legislation dealt repeatedly with the status of a foundling reared by a stranger: whether he was free or a slave, and whether the birth parents could reclaim him.

Growing Up

Adolescence as a distinct stage is recognised in the sources but not sentimentalised. A boy of fourteen could be apprenticed, married, tonsured or enrolled in the army. Aristocratic children were betrothed young, sometimes in infancy, for dynastic reasons, and imperial children were used in diplomacy from birth.

The transition was marked differently by class and sex: marriage for girls, described in Byzantine wedding traditions; work, military service or monastic profession for boys.

What comes through the sources most consistently is that Byzantine parents wanted their children to survive, invested in them when they could, mourned them when they did not, and worried about very much the same things parents worry about now.

The Amulets

The material evidence for anxiety about children is abundant, and it is one of the more affecting categories of Byzantine object.

Pregnancy and birth amulets survive in quantity: pendants of bronze, lead, haematite and rock crystal, worn round the neck or hung at the bed.

The commonest type carries the hystera formula — an invocation addressed directly to the womb, commanding it to settle “like a serpent, like a lion, like a lamb,” and frequently accompanied by an image of a radiate head with snaking rays, understood as the womb personified.

Others invoke the Virgin, the archangel Michael, Solomon, or the mysterious figure of the holy rider spearing a female demon — usually identified as Gyllou or Abyzou, a child-stealing demon whose name and nature descend from Mesopotamian antiquity through Greek tradition, and who was still being warded off in Greek villages in the twentieth century.

These objects sit alongside entirely orthodox Christian practice, in the same households, often on the same string. Byzantine religion at the domestic level did not distinguish sharply between a prayer and a charm, and the clergy’s objections — periodic and ineffective — are how we know how common they were.

Children’s Work

For the overwhelming majority, childhood ended early and the evidence is mostly indirect but consistent.

In the countryside, children from about seven herded animals, gathered fuel and wild greens, scared birds, carried water and minded infants. From twelve they did adult work at reduced expectations. The Farmer’s Law has provisions about children herding and about liability for damage they cause, which establishes that they were doing it.

In the city, apprenticeship. Contracts survive from Egypt in the early period and are attested later: a boy is placed with a master for a term of years, the master to feed, clothe and teach him a trade, the parents sometimes to pay a fee. Terms of five to eight years were common, beginning around age ten to twelve.

In wealthy households, enslaved children worked as attendants from a similar age.

In monasteries, children were received — as oblates given by their families, as orphans, and as boys placed for education. Monastic typika legislate about them, generally requiring that they be kept separate from the community, taught letters, and not professed until adulthood.

The orphanotropheion of Constantinople, which Anna Komnene describes as a city within a city after her father’s refoundation, housed orphans, the disabled and the elderly, ran a school, and is one of the largest charitable institutions documented from the medieval world.

Grief, Documented

The evidence against the old theory that pre-modern parents did not form strong attachments to children is worth assembling, because the theory is still occasionally repeated.

Funerary inscriptions for infants and small children, naming them, giving their age in months and days, and expressing loss in conventional but unmistakable terms.

Consolation letters, a rhetorical genre, written to bereaved parents by educated friends — the fact that the genre existed and was practised indicates the expectation of severe grief.

Miracle collections, which are full of parents carrying sick children to shrines, sleeping beside them, bargaining with saints, and returning to give thanks or not returning at all.

Burial practice: child graves made with care, sometimes inside churches, with personal objects, and a separate funeral rite that omits the penitential elements of the adult service on the grounds of innocence, as death and burial describes.

Letters: Byzantine correspondence includes parents writing about children’s illnesses, education and marriages in terms that require no interpretation.

The high mortality rate did not produce emotional insulation. It produced a great deal of amulets, a great deal of pilgrimage, and a literature of consolation, which is what one would expect.

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