ABSTRACT
The Byzantine Empire (330–1453), the Christian prolongation of the Roman Empire with its capital at Constantinople, produced a civilization based on the Greek language, Roman law, and Christianity. As a result, Greco-Roman attitudes toward children were combined with the Christian teachings of the Bible, and in particular the New Testament. This chapter focuses on babies, toddlers, and prepubertal children, that is roughly up to the ages of twelve to fourteen, a common age of marriage for Byzantine girls. It emphasizes the middle Byzantine centuries (ninth to twelfth), which have been less studied than late antiquity, and the later Byzantine period of the Comnenian and Palaiologan dynasties, usually omitted in previous treatments of this subject. Further research is necessary in the abundant but not fully exploited sources of the Palaiologan period to investigate attitudes toward children in late Byzantium.
