ABSTRACT
Byzantine narrative and iconographical sources offer rich and varied material for investigating the history of disabled people in the period from the fourth to the fifteenth century, i.e. the 1,100 years that span the existence of the eastern Roman Empire (330-1453). No doubt as a result of the influence that Christianity exerted on mores, mentalities and institutions, Byzantine authors and artists were less neglectful of this category of vulnerable people than their Greek and Roman predecessors had been. In the first place, suffering people seeking a cure figure prominently in collections of miracles, accounts of miracles included in saints’ biographies and, to a lesser extent, in edifying stories, all subgenres of the overarching category of hagiography (Efthymiadis 2014: 1-15, 105-6). In narrative sources of a secular orientation such as historiography and chronicles disability is presented in more matter of fact and less emotional terms, that is, as reports of events involving people who were either born with some serious impairment or disfigurement or who have fallen victim to serious accidents which caused them infirmity or led to their deaths.
