Historical Studies Program and Dean of the College Present

Disfigurement, Disability, and the Dangers of Punishment in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Case of Byzantine Blinding

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 talk reexamines a case in point: the gruesome Byzantine punishment of blinding. 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.

The present talk challenges these essentializing approaches. Based on the first comprehensive study of judicial disfigurement in Byzantium, the Slavic world, and the medieval West, it shows how clustered bursts of blinding intersperse with long periods during which Byzantine authorities abandoned this practice. Such volatility reveals that the disfigured body was an unstable site of meaning: whether it revealed the injustice of the state or the iniquity of the condemned 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. By centering the disfigured body in our approach to authority and justice in the Middle Ages, this talk seeks to rescue 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 across the medieval Mediterranean.

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For more information, call 845-758-7662, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Olin 102

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