Olympias, a wealthy heiress who supported a nunnery in Constantinople late in the 4th century, which remained in existence for more than two centuries, possibly longer, and in the early 7th century the abbess Sergia wrote an account of the miraculous recovery of its relics. Amalasuntha, daughter of the Ostrogoth and late western Roman ruler Theoderic, who on his death in 526 became regent for her 10-year-old son, Athalaric. Olga, widow of the Rus (Russian) leader Igor, who in the mid 10th century made a visit to Constantinople with an entourage of merchants, interpreters and a Christian priest. She left converted, having taken the historic name of Helena, from the wife of Constantine VII’s. This is seen as the start of the conversion of the Rus. (The Byzantines, unlike Islam, and until the Reformation, encouraged the use of the vernacular in worship.) Maria Argyropoulaina, who introduced in the fork to the west, despite initial claims that they were pretentious. She had been married to Giovanni, son of Pietro II (doge 991-1008) after Venice helped Byzantium thwart an Arab siege at Bari. Sadly, although after they were married in Constantinople in 1004, returned to Venice to much acclamation and had a son, all three then perished in an epidemic. Kale Pakourianos, widow of a Georgian military commander for Byzantium, who supported the Georgian monastery of Viron on Mount Athos. And of course there’s the celebrated historian Anna Komnene, who has a whole chapter to herself, as a writer of a work that Herrin considers “bold, novel and surprising”. Herrin adds: “No other medieval woman, East or West, had the vision, confidence and the capacity to realize an equally ambitious project”.
Also attractive is the frequent humanism (by medieval standards at least) of the Byzantine judiciary, as Herrin charts it. The West looked on it horror at the mutilation punishments inflicted by its courts, and on deposed emperors and such-like, but the West would have put all of these people to death – so arguably blinding or removal of a hand was a preferable fate.
And there were the creative 13th-century judgements such as those of the Archbishops Demetrios Chomatenos of Ohrid and John Apokaukos of Naupaktos. Herrin writes: “Even now we can admire their judgements, for instance in the granting of a divorce on the grounds of intense hatred, which prevented the consummation of the marriage even after the couple had been shut up together for a week; or where a slave convicted of theft was spared the loss of her one surviving hand, as demanded by her owner, on the grounds that to lose both hands would make it impossible for an individual to survive.”
This was also always a multicultural society: people from pretty well all of the known world mingled on its streets, although one of the oddest encounters must have been in 1034, when Harald Hadrada arrived with 500 Vikings, complete with traditional double axes. The success of his decade of service attracted other soldiers of fortune from Iceland and Anglo-Saxon England, after the battle of Hastings. And the Byzantines also travelled: the emperor Manuel II (crowned 1391) slipped through a Muslim blockade in December 1399 for a tour of western capitals seeking military support. He was in Paris in the summer of 1400 and celebrated the following Christmas in London with Henry IV, although he must have thought his hosts poor barbarians (while being well aware of their military capacities.
