Byzantine Culture

History · Guide

Women in Byzantium

Byzantine women held property, ran businesses, sued in court and occasionally ruled the empire — within a legal and social system that also confined them. What the evidence actually shows.

Two pictures of the Byzantine woman circulate, and both are partly right. In the first, she is confined to the gynaikonitis, the women’s quarters, veiled in the street, silent in church, married at thirteen to a man chosen by her father, and legally a perpetual minor. In the second, she owns land in her own name, sues her husband’s relatives over a dowry, runs a workshop, buys and sells property, endows a monastery, and — in a dozen documented cases — governs the Roman Empire.

The reconciliation is that Byzantine law was relatively favourable to women and Byzantine social ideology was not, and the gap between them was filled by practice that varied enormously by class, period and place. A peasant woman working alongside her husband in the fields lived nothing like an aristocratic woman in a Constantinopolitan townhouse, and neither lived like an abbess.

Roman law, inherited and revised by the Byzantines, gave women substantial property rights, and Byzantine legislation extended them.

Dowry. The dowry remained the woman’s property throughout the marriage. Her husband administered it but could not alienate it, and Justinian’s legislation tightened the protection considerably, making the wife’s claim on her husband’s estate for the recovery of her dowry rank ahead of other creditors. On his death or a divorce not caused by her fault, it came back to her.

Inheritance. Sons and daughters inherited equally on intestacy. This is a substantial difference from many medieval legal systems and meant that property flowed steadily through women.

Guardianship. A widowed mother could be the guardian of her own children, administering their property — a right Justinian confirmed, on condition she did not remarry.

Contracts and litigation. Women appear in the documentary record buying, selling, leasing, lending, endowing and going to law on their own account. Monastic and Athonite archives preserve hundreds of such transactions.

Divorce. Grounds were restricted over time, and the restriction fell more heavily on women. Justinian abolished divorce by mutual consent; it was restored, restricted again, and the whole area remained contested between civil and canon law. Adultery was punished asymmetrically: a wife’s adultery was grounds for divorce and could carry confinement in a convent, a husband’s was actionable only in more limited circumstances.

The Ideology

Against this stood an ideal of female seclusion inherited from classical Greek and Roman moralising and reinforced by Christian writers.

The respectable woman stayed at home, appeared in public veiled and accompanied, spoke little, spun wool, obeyed her husband and raised her children. Byzantine authors repeat this constantly, and the frequency with which they repeat it is itself evidence that it was not universally observed.

The ideal applied most strongly to the wealthy, because only the wealthy could afford it. Seclusion requires servants, an enclosed house and no need for the woman’s labour outside it. Evidence for women in the streets, markets, workshops, taverns, baths and fields is abundant.

Work

The occupations documented for Byzantine women include:

  • Textiles at every level, from household spinning to the regulated silk workshops, where women’s labour was central
  • Retail: market stalls, bakeries, taverns, inns
  • Midwifery and medicine: the Pantokrator typikon specifies a woman physician (iatraina) for the women’s ward, alongside female attendants, as [Byzantine medicine](byzantine-medicine.md records
  • Domestic service, free and enslaved
  • Agriculture: harvesting, animal husbandry, and all the labour of a peasant household
  • Prostitution, legal but disreputable, regulated and taxed; Theodora’s early career is the famous instance
  • Entertainment: actresses, dancers and mimes, a category the law treated as disreputable and from which Justinian had to legislate specially to permit his own marriage

Empresses

Byzantium is unusual among medieval states for the number of women who exercised real political power.

Pulcheria (399–453), sister of Theodosius II, took a vow of virginity, effectively governed for her brother, and was instrumental in summoning the Council of Chalcedon.

Theodora (c. 500–548), Justinian’s wife, whose intervention during the Nika riots probably saved his throne, and who ran a protective policy toward Miaphysite clergy that cut across her husband’s official line.

Irene (regent from 780, sole ruler 797–802), who restored the icons at the Second Council of Nicaea, deposed and blinded her own son, and ruled in her own name using the masculine title basileus. Her reign is one of the reasons Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 could be justified in the west on the grounds that the imperial throne was vacant.

Theodora (regent from 842), who ended iconoclasm definitively in 843.

Zoe and Theodora (eleventh century), the Macedonian heiresses through whom the throne passed to a succession of husbands and adoptees, and who ruled jointly in 1042 after a popular uprising in their favour.

Anna Komnene (1083–1153), denied the throne, who wrote the Alexiad — the only substantial history by a woman in the medieval world and one of the best Byzantine works of any kind.

The pattern is instructive: women exercised power through the imperial family, usually as regents or heiresses, and their legitimacy came from the dynastic principle. That principle was strong enough in Byzantium to override the objection to female rule, which is not something that could be said of the contemporary west.

Religion

Monastic life offered the most substantial alternative to marriage. Convents existed throughout the empire, some founded and governed by aristocratic women, and abbesses administered significant properties. Widows frequently retired to monasteries, and a number of the typika of female houses survive, written by their founders — including one by Irene Doukaina, wife of Alexios I.

Women could not be ordained to the priesthood. The order of deaconesses, however, was real, substantial and long-lived: deaconesses assisted at the baptism of adult women, ministered to women in their homes, and held a recognised liturgical position. Hagia Sophia’s establishment under Justinian included forty deaconesses. The order declined from the eleventh century and died out, and its possible restoration has been discussed in Orthodox circles in modern times.

Women were also hymnographers — Kassia is the outstanding case — and donors on a large scale.

What the Sources Do and Do Not Tell Us

Almost every Byzantine text was written by a man, most of them clerics or courtiers, and the ideological picture they present has to be read against the documentary record: wills, sale contracts, dowry agreements, court judgements, monastic archives, tax registers and seals.

Those documents show women acting economically and legally on their own behalf in numbers that the literary sources would not lead one to expect. They also show the limits: women in litigation are frequently represented by male relatives; the seclusion ideal shapes how their appearances are described; and the record thins sharply for anyone below the propertied classes.

The honest summary is that the Byzantine woman’s position was better than her western contemporary’s in law, comparable in ideology, and — for the great majority who were peasants — determined far more by the economics of the household than by either.

The Documents

The gap between the ideology and the practice is visible mainly in documents rather than in literature, and it is worth naming the kinds of evidence involved.

Monastic archives. The archives of the Athonite monasteries preserve thousands of deeds from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries — sales, donations, leases, wills, boundary settlements. Women appear throughout as sellers, buyers, donors and litigants in their own names.

The patriarchal register for 1315–1402 records the synod’s judicial business, and marriage cases dominate it: contested betrothals, petitions for divorce on grounds of desertion or violence, disputes over dowry recovery, women seeking permission to remarry after a husband disappeared. These are ordinary women using an institution to get something they wanted.

Wills. Byzantine testaments survive in reasonable numbers and show women disposing of substantial property, freeing slaves, endowing foundations and naming executors.

Seals. Tens of thousands of lead seals survive, and those of women — abbesses, aristocratic landowners, imperial relatives — establish that women held positions requiring the authentication of documents.

Tax registers. The praktika of the late period list households, and female-headed households appear regularly.

None of this material was written to make a point about women’s status, which is exactly why it is useful. The literary sources tell us what Byzantine men thought women should do; the documents show what some women did.

Dressing, Seclusion and the Street

The practical realities of women’s public life can be reconstructed with some confidence, and they varied enormously by class.

Respectable women covered their hair in public and wore a maphorion, a veil draping head and shoulders — the garment the Virgin wears in every icon. Wealthy women went out attended.

The seclusion ideal has to be set against the evidence for where women actually were. They are attested at the public baths on the days reserved for them, at church at every service, at the great civic festivals, at funerals, in the markets buying and selling, in the fields at harvest, at the Hippodrome in the reserved sections, and in taverns, which moralists mention precisely because they objected.

Legislation regulating mixed bathing, and its repeated reissue, is evidence that it happened. Sermons attacking women who dressed to be noticed at church are evidence that they did.

The rule of thumb, applied by most current scholarship, is that seclusion was a class marker rather than a general practice. A household that needed its women’s labour could not seclude them, and most households did.

Reading Anna Komnene

The one Byzantine woman who left a substantial book deserves a closer look, because her position illustrates both the possibilities and the limits.

Anna Komnene (1083–1153) was the eldest child of Alexios I, born in the purple chamber, betrothed as an infant to a co-emperor, and raised expecting to rule. Her brother John’s birth in 1087 displaced her, and her attempt to secure the throne for her husband on Alexios’s death in 1118 failed. She spent her remaining decades in a convent her mother had founded.

There she wrote the Alexiad: fifteen books on her father’s reign, in deliberately classicising Greek, with a command of Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle that she displays constantly.

She is explicit about her education — grammar, rhetoric, the quadrivium, Aristotelian philosophy — and about the fact that she had to pursue some of it discreetly, since a taste for pagan poetry was not thought suitable. She also presided over a circle of scholars who produced commentaries on Aristotle, effectively acting as a patron of philosophy from a monastery.

Her position is the paradox of Byzantine women’s history in one life: an education equal to any man’s in the empire, a book no other medieval woman matched, real intellectual patronage — and no route to the power she had been raised to expect, and open bitterness about it in the book’s opening pages.

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