"The rulers of Byzantium were accustomed to blinding their rivals"

A miniature showing the Bulgar leader Alausonius receiving Deleanos in his palace and gouging out the eyes of his rival. Culture: Byzantine. Date/Period: 11th c.

The rulers of Byzantium were accustomed to blinding their rivals. With ornamental eye scoops, with daggers, with candelabras, kitchen knives, and tent pegs, with burning coals and boiling vinegar, with red-hot bowls held near the face and with bandages that left the eyes unharmed but were forbidden to be removed; sometimes it was sufficient merely to singe the eyelashes, for the victim to bellow and sigh like a lion as a trained executioner pantomimed the act.

Sometimes cruelty was intended beyond the enucleation itself, as when the emperor Diogenes Romanus was deposed and “they permitted some unpracticed Jew to proceed in blinding the eyes” and “he lived several days in pain and exuding a bad odor.”

In 797 the empress regnant Irene blinded her son Constantine VI and caused an eclipse that lasted seventeen days.

Basil II blinded fifteen thousand Bulgarian soldiers, and every hundredth man he left with one eye to lead another ninety-nine, and when these men returned home to their king Samuel he looked upon them and died. Michael V blinded his uncle John the Master of Orphans. The iconoclasts blinded the eyes of the icons.

From an interesting essay about Byzantium in this month's Harper's Magazine.   Image from the Werner Forman Archive.