Mutilating Imperial Relatives in the Byzantine Empire

East Roman (or Byzantine) emperors often relied on physical mutilation to manage real or perceived threats posed by their imperial relatives. Emperors could exclude their relatives from political life through blinding, nasal or lingual mutilation, and exile. On the other hand, emperors could also preemptively castrate their kinsmen—disqualifying them from the imperial office while still allowing them, as eunuchs, to fill important court and ecclesiastical positions. This longstanding system of mutilation, in place from ca. 650 CE, broke down in the political turbulence of the eleventh century. Faced with external invasion and internal dissent, Byzantine emperors invested their relatives with semi-imperial powers, and abandoned mutilation as a strategy of punishment and control. When later emperors attempted to curb the power of the imperial family and revive the mutilation of relatives, overwhelming opposition from both imperial kinsmen and the Church forced Byzantine rulers to develop new and, ultimately, less effective strategies for coping with threats posed by their relatives, contributing to the territorial fragmentation of the later Byzantine state.