A very few sexually loaded incidents in the history of medieval Eastern Europe are well known: Procopius's scurrilous portrayal of Empress Theodora's earlier career as a prostitute; the Serbian king Milutin's uncanonical fifth marriage to a five-year-old Byzantine princess. Beyond these anecdotes, scholarship on this topic is sparse. There is no comprehensive monograph concerning traditional Orthodox teachings on sexuality, or on sexual practices and attitudes of nations within the Eastern Christian sphere.1 Extant studies of canon and civil law pass over legislation concerning sexuality virtually in silence. Older studies of family life frequently intermingled information from modern ethnographical sources with uncritical readings of medieval ecclesiastical texts; their conclusions do not sustain scrutiny. Only a small handful of recent books and articles have begun to explore this terra incognita.
Research on sexuality in Eastern Orthodox nations is still in its early stages, as the brevity of the bibliography attests. There are currently only two monographs on the subject: one on Byzantium in the eleventh to thirteenth century, and one surveying the Slavs in the pre-modern period. These books, as well as the few articles listed here, represent the initial exploration of the topic.
It is not the lack of sources that has limited scholarly research.2 Prescriptive sources abound: codes of canon and civil law; prelates' commentaries on religious principles and ecclesiastical regulations; penitential questionnaires; liturgies for betrothal, marriage, purification of new mothers, and adoption; saints' lives; didactic tales and sermons. Descriptive sources are also available, although in small and perhaps unrepresentative quantity: records of ecclesiastical court cases; chronicles and histories; travelers' accounts; and even on rare occasion private correspondence. Because these sources are derived so heavily from the pens of ecclesiastical authors or compilers, they shed less light than we might wish on the perspectives of secular society. A substantial body of secular literature survives from Byzantium, and it offers a somewhat different view of sexuality from ecclesiastical sources. Very few similar medieval secular texts from other Eastern European nations survive in contemporary manuscripts, although some were preserved orally into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Eastern Orthodox world encompassed a diversity of peoples, languages, and cultures exceeding even that in Western Europe. In this chapter, I will not attempt to discuss the Armenian, Syrian, or Coptic offshoots of Eastern Christianity, but rather confine myself to the Greek and Slavic Orthodox traditions. While Greeks and Slavs shared the same religious faith and a great part of the corpus of ecclesiastical writings, their religious traditions differed noticeably. The most obvious manifestation of difference is linguistic: the Byzantines used Greek; the Russians, Bulgarians, and Serbs used Church Slavonic. Few Slavs, even among the clergy, knew Greek; few Greeks, other than those prelates sent to serve in Kiev or Ohrid, had cause to learn Slavic. Furthermore, the Slavs paid little attention to Byzantine philosophical and theological writings and to the Greco-Roman classical heritage preserved in Constantinople. Greek clerics, as a rule, neglected original works composed in Slavic. In addition to the linguistic gulf, there was a huge cultural one. The Byzantine elite inhabited a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, urban milieu quite unlike the rural, culturally callow towns of the Slavic periphery. The Slavs faced the challenge of building new states and inculcating Christianity in a pagan population at a time (tenth to twelfth centuries) when Byzantium had centuries of Christian political and religious experience. Despite the great cultural differences, there were significant points of contact. The Byzantine annexation of Bulgaria in 1018 resulted in the imposition of Greek norms there until the Bulgarian kingdom was reestablished in 1185. The monastic complex at Mount Athos, and in particular the Serbian national monastery, Hilandar, provided a setting for the transfer of ideas and texts. Slavic Orthodox Christians admired Greek spiritual achievements and emulated the artistic styles of their parent civilization. At the same time, they were wary of Byzantine political and religious hegemony, and strove to defend their own locally created traditions.
The structure of the Eastern Orthodox church contributed to the development of divergent national traditions in Christian practice. The patriarch of Constantinople claimed only the loosest authority over the national churches born of Byzantine missionary efforts. Instead each nation received an autocephalous metropolitan or patriarch who was fully empowered to decide any questions of Christian observance or morality. Slavic ecclesiastical leaders could, and did, seek the patriarch's advice or invoke the moral authority of his opinion; however, the patriarch had little practical control over non-Greek hierarchs. The Eastern Orthodox church did not have an equivalent of the Decretist movement in the West; canon law remained largely uncodified and unindexed, the compilations of the Nomocanon and the syntagma of Matthew Blastares notwithstanding. Neither did the Eastern church attempt to standardize and centralize the activities of ecclesiastical courts, as the Roman Catholic church did in the later Middle Ages. The patriarch, possessing less power within the church than his counterpart in Rome, also made fewer claims to temporal power vis-à-vis the emperor. The Slavic metropolitans followed in this pattern, usually cooperating with local princes rather than attempting to supplant them. Although acrimonious conflicts between prelates and secular rulers marred the ideal of symphonia (harmony), cooperation between church and state was the rule, and in a number of areas, including the regulation of sexual conduct, ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions overlapped.
Sexuality was an important topic of discussion in the early Byzantine church.3 The depictions of sexuality, the body, and virginity expressed not only early Christian thinkers' understanding of human nature and human behavior, but also their conceptions of the universe, the transformational power of Christ, and the proper ordering of society. Nearly all these religious leaders regarded sexual activity warily and preferred continence even to marriage. However, they disagreed in their understanding of the origin of sexual urges and of the purposes of marriage.
The early Byzantine debates on sexuality grew out of the sometimes radical stances of Christian leaders in the eastern Mediterranean in the second and third centuries. They inherited the problematical pronouncements by St. Paul that depicted sexuality as a dangerous manifestation of the corruptible body standing in opposition to the perfectable spirit. To some early Christians sexuality and its concomitant childbearing represented the continuing cycle of birth and death from which Christ's resurrection promised deliverance. Others saw sexuality as a symptom of humanity's fall from purity and immortality. Manichaeans decried sexual activity and procreation as the perpetuation of the powers of Darkness that captured the true Light of God's creation. To such thinkers, all sex, whether marital or promiscuous, procreative or not, represented human separation from God. Other teachers, such as Clement of Alexandria, were more sanguine about sexuality, seeing it as an appropriate stage of human development that the mature Christian would eventually leave behind. Procreation, and specifically the perpetuation of the Christian community, was part of God's plan.
These ideas manifested themselves in a variety of systems of sexual behavior. A few groups, known only through scurrilous rumors, seem to have expressed Christian fraternity and love with physical promiscuity. At the other extreme, movements such as the Encratites required complete abstinence from sexual activity as a condition for full admission into the church. Manichaeans demanded of their Elect the strictest asceticism, but for their ordinary followers condoned marriage and even non-marital, non-reproductive sex. Even within the Christian mainstream, persons who observed continence, both men and women, earned particular respect and often leadership positions in the community. Men (and, less often, women) who practiced exceptional asceticism withdrew to desert hermitages to battle against the temptations of the world, including both illicit sex and the homey comfort of marriage. Sexual abstinence could be socially revolutionary. It provided justification for overturning the traditional hierarchies of the household: husbands over wives, parents over children, masters over slaves. Furthermore it blurred the still-forming distinction between clergy and laity, as continent lay people claimed a spiritual excellence unmatched by married clerics.
Other leaders, more in the mainstream, encouraged sexual abstinence within the structures of family and community, and this pattern came to dominate in the Orthodox church. Early churchmen promoted strict codes of sexual behavior, including conspicuous displays of abstinence, as a means of distinguishing the Christian community from pagans and Jews. At the same time, these regulations of marital sex served to defend the institution against the calls by radical Christians for complete abstinence. Clement of Alexandria endorsed sober and moderate marital intercourse in the context of a regulated Christian household and community. Older married couples might take up continence after raising their children; Christian widows became important patrons of the church. Parents might choose to dedicate some—but not all—of their children to God: virgin daughters residing in the households of bishops or bringing spiritual purity to the paternal home; sons becoming celibate priests or monks. Religious communities backed off from individualistic and idiosyncratic asceticism, and developed rigorous rules of conduct, in particular requiring young recruits to yield to the will of their spiritual guides and separating women and men. But in the early Byzantine period, adherents of the “angelic life” did not rail against the life of the laity “in the world,” marrying, bearing children, and pursuing secular matters. Celibate monastics, through their prayers and bodily purity, interceded for the entire community; married lay people provided the human and material resources for the continuity of the church. In this context sexual renunciation reinforced, rather than threatened, the authority of Christian heads of families, the clergy, and ultimately the Christian state. While the Orthodox church had both celibate and non-celibate adherents, it never developed the same sort of strict dichotomy between continent clergy and sexually-active laity that came to characterize the Roman Catholic church. Instead the Eastern Church retained a strong tradition of married priests.
The most influential early Byzantine theologians, Basil of Caesaria, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom, inherited the legacy of diverse and often contradictory teachings of their progenitors. Basil, the proponent of organized, socially responsible monasteries, also sought to inculcate among the laity a similar sense of order and ascetic restraint. He formulated detailed rules of conduct for both monks and lay people. Gregory regarded sexuality as an anomaly that was not part of God's original creation. Instead God had granted sexuality to Adam and Eve in order to permit humanity to continue to exist in the face of death. While marriage reflected God's mercy, virginity more closely approximated the purity of the original creation. John's vision of sexuality was much less benign. He agreed with Gregory that sexuality arose only after the Fall; however, to him, it represented not God's gift, but rather human sin. Nearly irresistible sexual urges afflicted fallen humanity, and marriage existed for the purpose of containing them. To avoid debauchery, Christian lay people needed well-structured households, where wives deferred to their husbands and children obeyed their fathers, as a bulwark against the temptations of the sinful world around them. But for all his hostility to sexuality, even John condoned marital sex and the pleasure it gave to spouses.
Later Byzantine writings about sexuality combined the viewpoints of these most prominent Eastern church fathers. They presented sexual desire as something ubiquitous in human beings, at least after the Fall, and combating it was difficult. Monastic writers often characterized concupiscence as the work of demons, who attempted to lead men and women astray into sin. Excessive lust, especially among women, was regarded as a sign of temporary insanity. To some monastic authors sex was a particularly heinous sin that led directly to the death of the soul.
Despite this continuing suspicion of sexuality, Byzantine ecclesiastical and secular authorities regarded marriage as legitimate and even necessary. It provided the means for the continuity of the race and for the channeling of sexual passions. Furthermore, later Byzantine ecclesiastical thinkers looked favorably on sexual pleasure in marriage and the emotional bonding it brought, although not as an end in itself. Ideal aristocratic marriages were marked by mutual respect, emotional fulfillment, and appreciation of the physical beauty and noble ancestry of one's spouse. By the twelfth century the ideal life for a woman was not perpetual virginity but a respectable and fecund marriage.
Romances of the late Byzantine period promoted the ideal of marital sexual love. Although they were based on ancient or Western European models, the plot lines were adapted to reflect the Byzantine respect for premarital chastity and marital fidelity for both men and women. Even in these fictional relationships, eroticism and romantic love took place within a relationship that culminated in a lifelong, socially recognized marriage. Thus, in late Byzantine society, eros (sexual love) could have either a positive or a negative connotation. While some authors, especially within the ranks of the clergy, remained very suspicious of sexuality, a substantial tradition grew up sympathetic to physical love within marriage.
The Orthodox Slavs lost much of the diversity and nuance of the earlier Christian dicta and did not adopt the positive understanding of sexual love found in later Byzantine sources. Slavic churchmen regarded sexuality as a dangerous force of Satanic origin that distracted men and particularly women from righteousness. Virginity became the ideal, even for husbands and wives, because marital sex was tainted with sin. Procreation arose not from sexual intercourse, but in accordance with God's will; the vitae of Slavic saints are filled with tales of miraculous conceptions and chaste, but fruitful, marriages. The word liubov' (love) was used almost exclusively to mean spiritualized, and therefore non-sexual, devotion; the pejorative noun blud (“lust, fornication”) and verb khocheti (“want”) were used to describe sexual emotions. Slavic clerics defended marriage and its concomitant sexual activity most strongly by anathematizing Manichaean heretics, such as the Bogomils, who condemned marriage and procreation. In the absence of an elaborated theoretical defense of marital sex, Slavic churchmen cited scriptural precedent: Jesus' blessing of the marriage at Cana.
The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches developed differences in their approaches to sexuality even in late antiquity, before the final collapse of urban, public institutions in the West. The great Catholic theologians of the third and fourth centuries—Ambrose, Jerome, and especially Augustine—elaborated the concepts that became the cornerstone of the Western approach to sexuality. They wrote of the original sin of Adam transmitted through sexual intercourse, the inherent unchastity of sexual pleasure, and the initial and irrevocable distinctions between men and women. Augustine in particular diverged from Eastern Christianity by attributing to Adam and Eve marriage and sexual intercourse, albeit pure and passionless, even in Paradise. Their ideas remained virtually unknown in the Orthodox East. But despite the differences in emphasis in the understandings of sexuality in the Orthodox East and the Catholic West, the expectations for Christian behavior at the functional level retained a great similarity. Augustine believed human sexuality in the current age to be corrupted by disobedient willfulness, and consequently preferred celibacy to marriage, much as his fellow clerics did in the Orthodox East. Although Augustine's concept of the “conjugal debt” whereby spouses owed each other a licit outlet for sexual urges did not gain currency in the East, most married Orthodox Christians expected to yield to their spouses' sexual needs. The philosophical understanding of sexuality in both the Catholic West and the Orthodox East inculcated a sense of anxiety and guilt in sexually active believers, and generated elaborate rules of sexual propriety.
The Orthodox Churches shared the same basic understanding of what constituted licit and illicit sex. However, because of the lack of a centralized ecclesiastical structure and a single, authoritative codification, canon laws differed considerably on details. The large compendia of laws (called nomokanon in Greek, and kormchaia in Slavic) interspersed the decisions of early church councils with the rulings of local prelates and secular rulers. The more stringent punishments in the code of Basil the Great coexisted in texts with the milder penalizations of John the Penitent. This diversity in the legal tradition allowed confessors and ecclesiastical judges to pick and choose among texts in determining their decisions. They chose to treat male and female offenders alike in the case of most violations, adultery and homosexuality excepted.
Numerous laws concerned the formation and dissolution of marriages. In Byzantine and Slavic societies alike, marriages, especially for the elite, carried political and economic significance because they brought families into alliance and pooled their resources. Because of the secular significance of marriage, Byzantine emperors issued laws regulating the institution, in addition to church canons. Slavic secular law did not address marriage per se, although certain provisions of inheritance law alluded to it. The economic arrangements pertinent to marriage fell under secular law, while the church regulated behavior. Court records from twelfth-century Byzantium (including occupied Bulgaria) indicate that ecclesiastical courts resolved disputes relating to marital property.4 It is not clear whether the same held true in Russia and Serbia in this period; court records survive only from a much later period.
The Roman tradition of marriage by consent continued in the early Byzantine Empire. However, church marriage developed earlier in Byzantium than in the West. Although the Byzantine secular law code of the eighth century, the Ecloga, recognized common-law marriage, a decree of Emperor Leo VI in the ninth century required the ecclesiastical ceremony for a union to be considered valid.5 The Slavic churches officially required the church ceremony, but recognized common-law unions. This was particularly true in Russia, where penitential questionnaires from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries routinely included inquiries concerning whether penitents had married in church. In the Byzantine tradition, it was important that both the young couple and their parents consent to the marriage. Among Slavs parental consent was required for a first marriage, but the agreement of the bride and groom was less necessary. The church upheld their right to refuse an unwanted marriage only obliquely: if a young person committed suicide rather than enter into an unwanted marriage, the parents bore the burden of the sin. Serbian texts baldly condemned a girl who refused her parents' choice of husband. Orthodox betrothal and marriage services of the medieval period did not contain any ritual in which the fiancés stated their consent.
The Byzantine ecclesiastical wedding ceremony contained two parts: a betrothal and the marriage proper. The two were originally separate ceremonies that could be held months or even years apart. But even in the ninth century it was common to combine the betrothal and marriage into a single ceremony. At the betrothal the bride and groom were pledged to each other and exchanged rings. The marriage ceremony, when the bride and groom donned crowns as a sign of honor, united them as husband and wife. An ecclesiastical betrothal was binding; the couple had to seek a formal dissolution if they wished to marry others. Even so, the betrothal did not bestow the right to engage in licit sex. Both in Byzantium and in the Slavic world, families often preferred to conclude secular pre-marital agreements, which were easier to abrogate than ecclesiastical betrothals.
Under the law the legal age of marriage was twelve for girls and fifteen for boys. Surviving sources, although incomplete, suggest that marriages were indeed contracted at young ages, sometimes even in violation of the canonical norms. Although canon law required parental consent for a first marriage, older men and women, usually seeking a second union, did not need anyone's permission to marry. There were restrictions for certain classes, however. Early Byzantine law made no provision for slaves to marry legally, although that changed later. Russian slaves needed their masters' consent to marry, but masters were admonished not to withold consent and also to help find suitable spouses for their slaves. A Byzantine imperial edict of the twelfth century forbade noble women to marry men of lower rank, but Slavic sources record no similar pronouncements.
Orthodox churchmen granted the legitimacy of a first marriage but frowned on subsequent ones. According to the often-quoted formula of Gregory Nazianzus, “The first marriage is law; the second, dispensation; the third, transgression; the fourth, dishonor: this is a swinish life.” Ecclesiastical authors disdainfully referred to such serial monogamy as “polygamy.” This disapproval held sway whether a previous union was dissolved by death or by divorce for cause. Persons who sought a second marriage had to accept a period of penance to atone for yielding to fleshly desires. Certain canons restricted access to a third marriage to “young” persons (the age varies) who did not have children from previous unions. Others prohibited third marriages altogether, or did not restrict them at all. Although fourth marriages were condemned, not all texts actually prohibited them, opening the door for their legitimation.
Despite the restrictions, the mortality rates, particularly for child-bearing women, guaranteed that there would be many young widows and widowers to seek remarriage. In practice clerics preferred licit marriage to concubinage or illicit fornication, and seem to have authorized remarriages readily. Powerful rulers, such as Milutin of Serbia and Ivan IV (the Terrible) of Muscovy, could find hierarchs, albeit with some searching, to bless uncanonical fifth marriages and more. However, the clerics who blessed remarriage also enforced secular law concerning the disposition of the property of the deceased. The remarried survivor lost all claim to the first spouse's property, which was held in trust for the children of the union or was returned to the deceased's natal family.
Byzantine civil law granted recognition of a sort to concubinage. A woman in a long-term, monogamous relationship with an unmarried man could claim a small share of his estate for herself and her children by him. Although ecclesiastical texts denigrated concubinage as little better than fornication, Byzantine prelates did recognize the institution, and ruled in favor of concubines' claims in court cases. However, they found it difficult to distinguish between informal marriages, concubinal relationships, and fornication.6 Slavic law did not include the category of concubine at all, perhaps because it recognized the validity of common-law marriage.
Orthodox canon law contained extensive prohibitions of incestuous unions. There is considerable diversity in the exact degrees of relationship that fell under the ban, and both in Byzantium and among the Slavs the prohibitions were gradually extended. Most texts forbade marriage between blood relatives closer than the sixth or even the eighth degree (second and third cousins). Marriage by in-laws was restricted also: at first, widows and widowers were forbidden to marry their deceased spouses' siblings; later, new rules forbade unions between two sets of siblings or cousins. Persons related by the ties of baptism were forbidden to marry: a godfather could not marry his goddaughter or her mother (in a second marriage). Some churchmen extended the restriction on marriage between spiritual relatives to the same degrees of kinship as for blood. Among Slavs, particularly in Serbia, the witness at a wedding also became a spiritual relative who could then not marry into either spouse's family. The canons against incest did not prevent politically useful marriages among aristocratic or royal relatives, because ecclesiastical authorities rarely protested such unions gratuitously. In Byzantium aristocratic families used incest laws to prevent or dissolve politically damaging alliances, particularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Orthodox churchmen, citing the precedent of the Gospels, recognized the inviolability of marriage, “except for reason of adultery” (Matthew 19:8). However, codes of canon and civil law both in Byzantium and in Slavic lands considerably extended the grounds for divorce. A husband could divorce his wife if she committed adultery or if she engaged in suspicious conduct, such as leaving the marital home overnight or (in Byzantium) attending a hunt, horserace, or bathhouse. The aggrieved husband could remarry; the offending wife was to be confined to a convent. In surviving cases, however, adulterous women usually did not end up in monasteries. In the reciprocal case of a husband's adultery, the wife did not, officially, have recourse to a divorce. However, when the husband's infidelity was frequent and blatant, and especially when it was accompanied by abuse, the wife was, in fact, awarded a divorce. A wife could seek a divorce if her husband falsely accused her of infidelity, or, under Russian law, if he raped her. Russian law also permitted a wife a divorce if her husband built up massive debts, sold the family into slavery, or drank excessively. Under Byzantine and Slavic law either spouse could seek a divorce for attempted murder or treason by their partner. Certain laws permitted divorce if husbands or wives committed thefts, from each other or elsewhere; others directly forbade separation in these circumstances. Byzantine law permitted the dissolution of a marriage for reasons of nonconsummation, barrenness, or impotence. Slavic codes did not adopt this provision, in keeping with the ideal of the non-consummated marriage, but at least in a later period courts found other reasons to end marriages in these circumstances. In Byzantium, a man could break off a betrothal if his fiancee's family could not pay the promised dowry. Both Byzantine and Slavic writers debated the propriety of terminating a marriage because of a spouse's disappearance, or to allow a spouse to take monastic vows. Surviving records indicate that in fact clerics authorized remarriage in these circumstances. With these broad justifications for divorce, it is possible that unhappy couples could fabricate a cause for legal separation.7 In practice hierarchs found reasons to dissolve unions marked by persistent and extreme violence; in the absence of ecclesiastical permission, couples separated informally, often with the tacit recognition of the church.
Under the precepts of canon law, much sexual activity, even within marriage, was illicit. Canons prohibited spouses from engaging in intercourse at many times dictated by the wife's hormonal cycle and by the church calendar. Husbands and wives were forbidden sexual contact during her menstrual period and after parturition. To the Slavs the former prohibition was much more binding than the latter. The Slavs also abandonned early Church restrictions on sex during pregnancy and lactation. Spouses were supposed to remain continent on days of particular religious observance: always before and after communion, and sometimes before other rituals as well; always Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and sometimes Wednesday; always on Easter, and sometimes for the whole of Lent, as well as other periods of fasting. Among Slavs the requirements of marital abstinence increased towards the end of the medieval period to nearly three hundred days out of the year. Because procreation was the primary justification for sexual activity, canons proscribed the use of contraceptives and abortifacients, which Slavic codes equated with infanticide.
Many types of sexual intercourse were prohibited, even between spouses. The only proper sexual contact involved vaginal penetration in the “missionary” position, with the woman supine and the man on top. Anything else could be categorized, rather inexactly, as “unnatural” or “sodomical.” However, the degree to which violations were penalized varied considerably. For example, coitus from behind (either vaginal or anal) could be punished by as small a penance as six hundred prostrations or as great a penance as thirty years' exclusion from the church. Canons did not distinguish in their penalties between inappropriate types of intercourse between spouses or between unmarried individuals.
All sexual contact outside marriage was sinful, but the severity of the sin varied with the choice of partner. Here again the laws displayed a great range of penalties for the same offense, but in general extra-marital sex was treated more harshly than simple fornication. Under both canon and Byzantine secular law, a wife's adultery was a more serious offense than a husband's. An erring wife could suffer mutilation, divorce, confinement in a convent, or a long period of exclusion from communion. Indeed, because canons defined adultery as sex with a married woman, a husband's extramarital affair technically constituted only simple fornication. However, applications of laws in practice partially corrected this inequity by imposing heavy penances for a husband's “fornication.” Most churchmen—and secular authorities as well—tacitly accepted that unmarried men would be apt to engage in sexual relations, and encouraged them to select appropriate partners: prostitutes, slaves, divorcees, or widows. They were less sanguine about young women's premarital sex. The woman suffered the penalties for illicit fornication; the man who deflowered her could be subject to special penalties for rape, even if she consented.
Orthodox canon law acknowledged a specific crime of rape. However, in the case of an underaged girl or a virgin, provisions against forcible rape overlapped with prohibitions on deflowering maidens. In the case of a married woman, the crime of adultery took precedence over the crime of rape in determining the punishment. Under Byzantine civil and canon law, a rapist could be punished with large fines and mutilation; or he could be forced to marry his victim, if she were single and her family agreed. Serbian law included these provisions, and added other options: the family could seek revenge or collect monetary compensation. Russian law, unlike Byzantine, regarded rape primarily as a crime of violence and insult. It omitted any provision for the perpetrator to marry his victim, and instead required that he compensate her for the dishonor she suffered. While the level of compensation varied with the social status of the victim, even slaves and prostitutes were entitled to some small recompense if they could prove that they had been forced.
Early Byzantine laws equated the sins of adultery, bestiality, and homosexuality, but later codes distinguished between them in penalties. Byzantine ecclesiastical and secular codes devoted considerable attention to male homosexual acts, defining them as “against nature,” unknown even among animals. They frequently mandated severe penalties: death, castration, imprisonment, or exceptionally long penances. However, there is little evidence of the actual infliction of such penalties in the later Byzantine period. Canons distinguished between anal intercourse, a more serious violation, and intercrural intercourse or mutual masturbation. Some churchmen considered the passive partner to be less culpable. Among Slavs homosexuality attracted much less negative attention. When native Slavic codes mentioned homosexuality at all, they treated it as a sin no more serious—at worst—than adultery. Western European visitors to Russia in the sixteenth century commented derisively on the toleration of homosexual activity. In Slavic lands, unlike Western Europe, homosexuality remained an ecclesiastical offense not subject to civil sanctions. Homosexual activity by women attracted little attention in canon law and was not heavily penalized.
In a similar way the Slavs mitigated the harsh penalties of Byzantine canon law for another form of “unnatural” sex, bestiality. The penalties under Byzantine law, at their most mild, placed bestiality in the category of adultery or homosexual anal intercourse. Canon law imposed up to fifty-five years of penance, with a reduction to twenty years if the offender was a youth. The penalties in native Slavic codes placed bestiality among simple fornication, uncanonical divorce, and marital sex after mass.
Unlike the Roman Catholic church, the Eastern Orthodox church did not require celibacy of all its clergy. Instead the church developed a two-tiered system of clergy: the celibate monks and nuns (termed in Slavic “black” clergy), and the married parish priests and deacons (the “white” clergy). The path to a higher ecclesiastical career lay through the monastery; “white” clergy, while still married, could hope to advance only to the position of archpriest.
The monastic clergy in theory was completely celibate, but Orthodox monasteries encountered the same problems of discipline as their Western counterparts. The numerous economic and devotional functions of monasteries guaranteed that their inhabitants would interact with lay people. Many men and women entered the monastery as mature adults, some with a true religious vocation and some out of economic or political desperation. Monasteries also played a social service role, providing refuge for the poor and incarcerating certain sexual offenders. Generations of hierarchs complained about illicit contact between the sexes and profane social gatherings in monasteries.
The Eastern church generated a wide range of regulations for the sexual conduct of married clergy and their wives. Priests were charged not only with teaching their parishioners about proper behavior, but also with providing them with a model of a Christian marriage. The Orthodox church's policy on clerical marriage was first established at the Council of Constantinople in 692. Married men were eligible for ordination and could continue to live with their wives. If widowed, priests were forbidden to remarry and continue in their vocation. Men who were bachelors at the time of ordination had to remain celibate. Men who had been remarried or had engaged in non-marital sex were ineligible to become priests. Their wives had to adhere to the same strict standard. Clerical couples were obliged to abstain from sexual intercourse on days when the priest served in the liturgy. Beyond these basic strictures, Orthodox writers debated the details: should a priest divorce his wife on the mere suspicion of misconduct; could a widowed priest continue to minister to a lay parish; could a widowed priest or a priest's widow legitimately remarry, even renouncing the previous vocation?
The vigorous promotion of continence in ecclesiastical literature and the manifold regulations in canon law and penitential writings present high, virtually unattainable, ideals of sexual conduct. Although the clergy tried, through example, education and penalization, to alter behavior, they did not realistically expect most people to achieve the ideal. Instead they hoped to limit the destructiveness of sexual sin and convince sinners to see the error of their ways. They recognized that not all sexual sins were equally damaging to the individual and to the society.
It is not clear how widely the laity accepted ecclesiastical teachings on sexual behavior. On the one hand, people seem to have violated the ecclesiastical standards of conduct frequently. Adultery, fornication, and even incest often went unpunished, even when discovered. Byzantine secular culture promoted the ideal of sexual and emotional bonding between men and women. On the other hand, the vision of sexuality, in ecclesiastical and secular sources alike, reinforced the idea that sexual desire was potentially dangerous and disruptive to society and that chaste marriage was the only legitimate alternative. The Church, the State, and the family had legitimate rights to control sexual behavior. The primary means of enforcing standards lay in familial discipline and penitential confession, which required the laity to cooperate in the regulation of sexual activity.
These tentative conclusions await further refinement and correction in the light of further research.
1. William Basil Zion's Eros and Transformation: Sexuality and Marriage, An Eastern Orthodox Perspective (New York: University Press of America, 1992), is currently the closest approximation. Although the author accurately presents considerable material from traditional sources, his purpose is to guide modern Orthodox pastors and believers in their own sexual conduct.
2. Although sources are numerous, publication—in particular of Slavic texts—is spotty. Very few have been translated into English or other modern Western languages. The primary Byzantine texts available in English include the following: S.P. Scott, The Civil Law (Cincinnati, Central Trust Company, 1932) [Corpus Juris Civilis]; E.H. Freshfield, A Revised Manual of Eastern Roman Law: The Ecloga (Cambridge: University Press, 1927); E.H. Freshfield, A Manual of Eastern Roman Law: The Procheiros Nomos (Cambridge: University Press, 1928); P. Schaff and H. Wace, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1905–1917). Publications of Slavic materials in English include Serge A. Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (New York: Dutton, 1974); Basil Dmytryshyn, Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 850–1700 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967); Thomas Butler, Monumenta Serbocroatica (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1980); Mateja Matejic and Dragan Milivojevic, An Anthology of Medieval Serbian Literature in English (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1978); H.W. Dewey and A.M. Kleimola, Zakon Sudnyj Ljudem (Court Law for the People), Michigan Slavic Materials No. 14 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1978); George Vernadsky, Medieval Russian Laws (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). The best reference volume for editions and studies of the pertinent Byzantine texts is The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). This volume contains some citations to Slavic materials as well; there is no analogous reference volume for the Orthodox Slavs.
3. The most complete study is Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Much of the following summary is based on his pathbreaking work.
4. Angeliki E. Laiou, “Contribution a l'étude de l'institution familiale en Epire au XlIIeme siècle,” in Laiou, Mariage, amour, et parenté à Byzance au XIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris: De Boccard, 1992).
5. Angeliki E. Laiou, “Consensus Facit Nuptias—Et Non: Pope Nicholas l's Responsa to the Bulgarians as a Source for Byzantine Marriage Customs,” in Laiou, Gender, Society and Economic Life in Byzantium (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1992), 194–97.
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