Slavery, Gender, and Divine Justice in Byzantium: Re-Assessing an Anecdote in Nikephoros Gregoras’ Roman History

Abstract

In his Roman History, Nikephoros Gregoras (c. 1295–1360) includes a curious aside about a “Scythian” woman who purchases an enslaved Byzantine man, marries him, and moves to Constantinople. The story’s “curiosity” stems from a series of unexpected elements and inverted expectations from a Byzantine perspective. This article argues that reading the anecdote within the context of Byzantine approaches to gender, ethnography, and, especially, slavery, reveals the many ways in which Gregoras upends cultural and literary expectations and creates meaning precisely through this subversion of expectations and topoi. The short narrative, it contends, is a microcosm of the traditional pastoralist-sedentary paradigm but also demonstrates the power of right belief and the ability of an enslaved Roman to convert his master, further heightened by the subversion of gender norms. Gregoras thus presents an argument for the spiritual strength of Byzantium, even in a time of social, political, and military weakness.