Tag: politics

John the Orphanatrophus

Zoe asks Sgouritzes to poison John the Orphanotrophos – illustration from History of John Skylitzes, 13th century

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.

Michael Psellos, Philosopher and Instigator

In my fourth book, The Red Empress, Michael Psellos, is a viewpoint character, not least of which is because he seemed to be in so many places, have so many opinions and write on such a plethora of subjects. He is best known for his Chonographia, a history covering at least a century leading up to the time of Psellos himself, in which in his contemporary writings, he maintains those opinions for which he himself was an eyewitness.  In addition to his historical writings, he was also known for bringing Plato back into serious study in Constantinople and was a disciple of music theory and philosophy.

In my last post, I mentioned his observations on the strategos Georgios Maniakes, including his prodigious height. He was also witness to the evacuation from Constantinople of the emperor Michael V and his uncle the nobilissimus when things began to take a dangerous turn for those two gentlemen of dubious character. From what Psellos leads us to understand, he was coerced by them, but given his position as an imperial secretary, it is likely that he went along because, after all, it was part of his job. In the tumult of the riots in Constantinople following the reinstatement of the empress Zoe (the erstwhile emperor Michael’s adoptive mother), when Michael and his uncle were forced to flee to the Studikon monastery, they clung to the alter of the monastery. When this proved to be fruitless in averting their fate, Psellos witnessed their eventual blinding at the hands of the Varangian Guard (some say by Harald Sigurdsson personally, who probably also had an axe to grind with Emperor Michael). 

Psellos was actually born Constantine (arguably one of those most popular names for men at this time and place) and chose the name Michael when he entered a monastery later in life. Psellos, as a last name was probably more of a nickname and meant “stammerer”, an ironic appellation given that he was known for his copious writings, but perhaps, he was, like most writers, better at expressing himself through the pen than the voice.

When my story opens, he is a young man who has just been able to return to his studies under the venerable Ioannes Mouropous. His studies had been interrupted by the need to earn a dowry for his sister, and so at the age of ten, he was sent outside the city where he was employed as a secretary to a provincial judge. When his sister passed away, he was allowed to return to study under Mouropous. The latter was undoubtedly responsible for the social climb of the young Psellos, who, under his influence, would meet and rub elbows with many who would later be notable such as the emperor Constantine X. As John Julius Norwich says in his book Byzantium – The Apogee, “[Psellos] thus writes of events in which he not only experienced but frequently himself helped to shape and control.”

As he was a personal friend of Constantine X, it is hardly surprising that some of his writings regarding that man were rather prejudiced in his favor.  Yes he spared no gushing rhetoric on the aforementioned Stephen who fancied himself a naval commander. We see some of the true Psellos in his snide assertion that “I saw him after the metamorphosis. It was as if a pygmy wanted to play Hercules and was wanting to make himself look like the demi-god. The more such a person tries, the more his person belies him – clothed in the lion’s skin but weighed down by his club.”

I find such scathing assertions make Psellos one of the more readable biographers of his time.  He is witty and opinionated. Perhaps not the best attributes of an impartial historian, but without a doubt, he gives us a peek into politics as only politics in Constantinople could truly be.  We are given a hint of the real Michael Psellos who was known to write a taunting letter to the disgraced emperor Romanos Diogenes as he lay in exile, dying of the infection in his blinded and bleeding eyes. Here he congratulated him on his martyrdom and the loss of his eyes as God had found him worthy of a “higher light”. It should not be lost on the reader that it was Psellos himself who had engineered the emperor’s downfall.

As such, Psellos was a product of his environment and the times, equally avaricious and opportunistic, once given a taste for power, he was not likely to let it go. The term “byzantine politics” comes to mind when speaking of Psellos here. In all the chaos of the riots in Constantinople following the reinstating of the empress Zoe, Psellos’ greatest concern was that the empress Zoe see that he was not personally affiliated with Michael V and this his loyalty was instead reserved for her. Yet he did not spare her, acerbically commenting on the “transformation of a gynaeconitis [women’s quarters] into an emperor’s council chamber.”

He was even more blunt later on the Chronographia as he wrote on their political blundering (diplomatically after both the sisters had passed on of course):

“For those who did not know them it may be instructive if I give here some description of the two sisters. The elder, Zoe, was the quicker to understand ideas, but slower to give them utterance. With Theodora, on the other hand, it was just the reverse in both respects, for she did not readily show her inmost thoughts, but once she had embarked on a conversation, she would chatter away with an expert and lively tongue. Zoe was a woman of passionate interests,

prepared with equal enthusiasm for both alternatives—death or life, I mean. In that she reminded me of sea-waves, now lifting a ship on high and then again plunging it down to the depths. Such characteristics were certainly not found in Theodora: in fact, she had a calm disposition, and in one way, if I may put it so, a dull one. Zoe was open-handed, the sort of woman who could exhaust a sea teeming with gold-dust in one day; the other counted her staters when she gave away money, partly, no doubt, because her limited resources forbade any reckless spending, and partly because inherently she was more self-controlled in this matter.

 To put it quite candidly (for my present purpose is not to compose a eulogy, but to write an accurate history) neither of them was fitted by temperament to govern. They neither knew how to administer nor were they capable of serious argument on the subject of politics. For the most part they confused the trifles of the harem with important matters of state. Even the very trait in the elder sister which is commended among many folk today, namely, her ungrudging liberality, dispensed very widely over a long period of time, even this trait, although it was no doubt satisfactory to those who enjoyed it because of the benefits they received from her, was after all the sole cause, in the first place, of the universal corruption and of the reduction of Roman fortunes to their lowest ebb. The virtue of well-doing is most characteristic of those who govern, and where discrimination is made, where the particular circumstances and the fortune of the recipients and their differing personal qualities are taken into account, there the distribution of largess is to be commended. On the contrary, where no real discernment is exercised in these questions, the spending of money is wasted.”

Michael Psellos, Chonographia

Whether this was the misogynistic temperament of the times that influenced Psellos’ writing or an actual candid observation, it may be noted that many of the failings in a male ruler might have been forgiven him would be called into greater scrutiny on the part of a woman. However, as a contemporary biographer, within the confines of the imperial residence, he was certainly closer to the facts that we are today.