Sightless Eyes, Broken Bodies: Blinding, Punishment, and the Politics of Disability in the Byzantine World

Abstract

Byzantium is unique in the post-Roman trio of Mediterranean “sibling cultures.” Outside both Latin West and Islamic East but influenced by and influential to both, Byzantium’s marginality makes it prey to essentializing discourses. This dissertation reexamines a case in point: the gruesome Byzantine punishment of blinding. The Byzantines are “infamous” (in the words of one recent study) for blinding political criminals. From the eighth century to the fourteenth, blinding served as the penalty par excellence in Byzantium for crimes of high treason and rebellion. Yet historians have not so much explained this fact as exoticized it, presenting the punishment’s longevity as proof of Byzantium’s alien otherness. Blinding is often, incorrectly, considered a cultural borrowing from Persian Iran. Older scholarship lamented the “oriental delight in cruelty” that replaced Roman virtue; newer works appeal to foreign Byzantine sensibilities, horrid to us but reasonable to them, that cast blinding as an act of mercy. This dissertation completely reassesses the subject. Through the first full analysis of the evidence across time, it offers a new explanation of blinding’s origins as rooted in late antique attitudes toward the body, and shows that clustered bursts of this punishment intersperse with long periods during which authorities abandoned the practice. Such volatility reveals that the meaning of judicial disfigurement was more contested than scholars have allowed. Imperial propaganda appealed to Greek notions of “humanity” (philanthrōpia) to justify the sanction of the criminal body, presenting mutilation punishments as a merciful alternative to death. But this offered no guarantee that such a justification would prevail. The same act praised as humane by official propagandists became, in the hands of the disaffected, sheer inhumanity (apanthrōpia). This dissertation argue that the disfigured and blinded body was an unstable site of meaning; whether it reflected the iniquity of the condemned or the injustice of the state remained an open question. Meanwhile, visual and literary analysis, manuscript evidence, and archaeology all demonstrate that the Byzantines were not unique in their culture of blinding. In fact, judicial blinding emerged among Rome’s western European heirs before it first appears in Byzantium. A revised history of the punishment rescues Byzantium from what one expert has called “its habitual exceptionalism,” while also revealing the changing values of this medieval society. The result is a dynamic new picture of imperial legitimacy, punitive culture, and bio-politics in the Greek-speaking Middle Ages. This dissertation is divided into three parts. Part One uses late antique visual evidence, law, rhetoric, and medical treaties to reconstruct Roman attitudes toward the disfigured body between ca. 300 and 550. It argues that the later Roman empire—like its Byzantine continuation—combined a high degree of social mobility with deep-seated cultural expectations about what the body of a natural leader of society ought to look like, and what he or she should be able to physically do. Certain types of mutilation could therefore impair a political adversary’s ability (or at least perceptions of their ability) to physically fulfill the roles or duties expected of an emperor, and thereby hinder their capacity to create consensus around their candidacy for the throne. But these perceptions did not create hard and fast rules so much as frame later debates on legitimacy and bodily integrity. Building on these foundations, Part Two offers the first full analysis of the rise, development, and eventual disappearance of Byzantine blinding alongside a diachronic history of challenges to its legitimacy. Drawing on archaeological, legal, rhetorical, and narrative sources, this section argues that blinding replaced other measures such as hand- and nose-cutting around the turn of the eighth century as the main penalty for crimes against the state. Meanwhile, the ninth century witnessed a shift in venues of punishment from stadiums and circuses to prisons and monasteries—hidden away from public view. This section argue that such shifts reflect changing priorities in corporal punishment. Roman spectacles of public humiliation gave way to Byzantine imprisonment paired with targeted methods of “disabling” such as blinding, which aimed to control the physical capabilities of the condemned. However, the rise of new aristocratic families within the fabric of the Byzantine state constrained the use of political mutilation after the tenth century, leading to blinding’s virtual abandonment by around the year 1300. Changes in blinding’s frequency, venues, and victims thus serve as a kind of historical seismograph whose oscillations reveal both fast-paced shifts in the balance of political forces, as well as gradual developments in the empire’s social conditions over time. Part Three then turns to the medieval West, to orient the practice of blinding among contemporary political cultures in Latin Christendom. Scholars frequently characterize blinding as a peculiarly Byzantine form of punishment and argue that its appearance in the West serves as a proxy for the spread of Byzantine influence. Against this historiographical myth, this section demonstrate that the widespread use of blinding in the medieval West predates its emergence in Byzantium, forcing us to reassess the status of Western blinding as a gruesome “Byzantine import.” It goes on to consider the various functions of blinding in the Latin West, before evaluating how certain medieval Latin authors developed a negative discourse of Byzantine blinding to denigrate Byzantium to their Western audiences—even as Byzantine East and Latin West remained engaged in ceaseless cultural exchange. Two appendices (1) investigate different methods of punitive blinding and uses artistic and literary evidence to reconstruct the identities of “professional” mutilators on the margins of Byzantine society (e.g., Jews, Muslims, sub-Saharan Africans); and (2) offer a complete handlist of all known victims of political blinding in Byzantium.