Anyone who has read the series A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R. R. Martin is acquainted with the fictional character Lord Varys, a prominent eunuch. Without a doubt, John the Orphantrophus must have been the inspiration for this devious and avaricious character. If there was ever a man made for the corruption of politics and the greed of empire, it had to be the eunuch, John the Orphanatrophus, the parakoimomenos (imperial chamberlain). He served in some capacity to at least three emperors in the middle period.
He began his career under Basil II as a protonotarios which is a clerk of the court. Under Basil’s successor, Romanos, he served as praepositus sacri cubiculi. While serving under Romanos, he brought his attractive brother Michael to the attention of Romanos’ wife, Zoe, who was possessed of a wandering eye. It might or might not be too much to say that he almost pushed Zoe into Michael’s arms. Considering the couple seemed to be behind the disturbing and suspicious death if Romanos (they were married one day later, which is not suspicious at all) and many were of the opinion that Zoe had been poisoning Romanos for some time before he succumbed to drowning in the imperial bath. It was certainly advantageous for John to have his brother become the emperor through his wife Zoe. Once Michael IV ascended, John’s own star rose.
John did not come from money or power, but he certainly was able to readily lay his hands on both. His family was from Paphaloginia (in Anatrolia on the Black Sea coast) was said to in the business of money lending, considered to be disreputable, not withstanding the rumor that the family also dealt in counterfeiting. We have no record how he first came into Basil II’s service, but he quickly managed to garnish power for himself. After his brother was crowned he wasted no time in securing positions for his brothers and other family members. Position was guaranteed based on who you were not how qualified you were for the job. As head of the imperial navy, he appointed his brother-in-law Stephen the Caulker, whose only qualification for commanding a navy was caulking ships and to which he should have preferably left his expertise. He filled the Senate with men bought by himself and every position in government with men who were in some way dependent on the Paphlagonian dynasty. While holding these offices, he also maintained his position as orphantrophus which basically meant he oversaw the managing of all the orphanages of the city, in particular the imperial orphanage of Constantinople.
John’s brother was afflicted with epilepsy and often during imperial audiences, curtains had to be quickly drawn around the throne to shield him from public view in the event of a seizure. Michael was also prone to dropsy and towards the end, he became so ill and infirm, much of the ruling was left to his parakoimemnos. It was clear to many that the empire was in reality in the hands of a despot. John the Eunuch had neither feeling nor a head for the power to which he had become accustomed. Even his own sister, Maria (who was married to the shameless excuse of a naval commander, Stephen) begged him to look upon the suffering of the Roman people. On a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint John the Evangelist, she was struck with pity at the suffering of the beggars she saw alongside the road and the great need of the people. When she approached her brother, imploring him to have compassion, he replied, (and here we can almost hear the sneering mockery in his voice) “You reason like a woman, ignorant of the necessities of the imperial treasury.”
John even went to far as to attempt to place himself as patriarch over the church, claiming that the appointment of Alexios the current patriarch was uncanonical. Alexios, countered this by pointing out that he had overseen the marriage of Michael IV to Zoe and to de-legitimize his position, would also make the current emperor’s position null and void and so by association, that of John the Eunuch. This seemed to hush up the wily old eunuch pretty quickly.
The complexities of a personality like John’s must have been great, as Michael Psellos was able to write about him with both loathing and admiration, perhaps exciting in the historian a sense of displacement in his feelings towards chronicling the eunuch.
There was surely no love lost between the empress and the oily eunuch as in The Red Empress, as always, he negotiated imperial policy with little regard for the empress’ own feelings, all the while manipulating his often ill brother, Michael IV. Perhaps no stranger to the art of poison, as the title picture illustates, Zoe attempted to have the eunuch poisoned as he was a thorn in her side. John very likely employed a considerable multitude of food tasters and likely took no chances with a woman of Zoe’s reputation.
Michael didn’t seem to be listening to either his wife or the Orphanotrophus. He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “This man, Bourtzes, is he not related to the Macedonian line?”
He is in fact, a cousin to your wife,” John replied.
“Then would not there be an issue with charging him as you so speak? His father is from a powerful noble family. We would be bringing dishonor on them and in fact making enemies with them.”
“If he seek to kill you or your wife, it is because he seeks recompense for his father and he hopes to ingratiate himself to the line of succession.”
But as the child of a woman not born in the purple, he is not even in line for the succession,” Michael scoffed. “What have we to worry about him.”
“You do not understand, imperator,” John patiently explained. “He is a danger to you, regardless if his claims carry any weight or not. He must be arrested.”
“On what charges?”
“Conspiring assassination.”
“Has he, in fact, attempted to assassinate me or anyone in my family?”
“It doesn’t matter. You must take him out before he does. And as you do not have an heir to the throne, it makes you and your succession vulnerable. There will be those who say, as you have no children, the succession is there for the taking.”
“Oh do go away with all your talk of money and politics,” Zoe moaned from the couch, “I have such an awful headache. How am I ever to bring about a successor if you will never visit my bed?”
“You might consider, kyria, that your time for giving the emperor an heir has expired,” put in the Orphanotrophus. “ You are not,” he searched for the right word. “Youthful any longer.”
“You have a lot of cheek!” she blazed at him. “If I wanted your opinion on the matter, I would have asked for it!”
The Red Empress by G.S. Brown
The Orphantrophus forced Zoe to adopt his nephew Michael V as her son, thus ensuring that power (so he hoped) would remain within his grasp, once his brother Michael IV breathed his last. Ironically and perhaps also karmically, this feat proved to be his undoing. Once the young man assumed power, he proceeded to reduce the status in one way or another of those around him. Zoe he tonsured and exiled to the Princes Islands. But for his uncle John, he reserved most of his vitriol, even thought it was to him he owed his new status. He was deceived and brought on board a ship and exiled to the very islands to which he had condemned Zoe. Later, he was also blinded. While he was in office, he maintained an iron authority and exacted power that rivaled that of even the emperor. Ultimately, his overreach brought him low, ending his days in exile as so many powerful people did before and after him from Cicero to Napoleon. However, he never achieved such fame and few have read of the machinations of John the Orphantrophus.