Gender in the Medieval Roman Empire has been rarely examined as such, which is odd given the prominent role played by ideas of gender in creating common images of “Byzantine” society. Since the early ninth century, when Pope Leo and Charlemagne deemed the office of Roman Emperor to be vacant because the Eastern Emperor was a woman, Byzantium has been a foil for Western European cultural self-understanding, and distinctions between east and west were often drawn in terms of gender. Eastern Romans have been seen as less masculine than the Franks and their successors. Western Europeans have perceived Byzantium in various and changing ways, yet two themes are dominant and consistent: the Byzantine Empire was filled with effeminate men and powerful women. Odd gender, by western European standards, lies at the heart of what makes the Eastern Empire seem queer.

Eighteenth through early twentieth-century western European scholars routinely denigrated Byzantine culture as Oriental, despotic, superstitious, decadent, and culturally stagnant. While these criticisms are well known, we have not appreciated how they all contributed to an implicit gendered critique of Byzantine men as insufficiently masculine. Superstition and extreme religiosity were considered female traits, and so the overly pious Byzantine men were womanish. Faith in crazy miracle stories, magical rituals, or demons marked the believer as devoid of rationality, which was characteristic of men. Byzantines who believed this stuff must have been more like children and women than men. Oriental despotism was denigrated for instilling slavish behaviour in the servile Byzantines. Again, this is partially a complaint about gender since the problem with servile men is that they take the submissive and docile role that is appropriate to women rather than standing up for themselves like real men. The construction of Byzantium as an Oriental state activated ancient associations of the east with excessive luxury, sexual indulgence, and softness. Going east could cause even a great Roman like Mark Antony to lose his virile strength amidst the temptations of the flesh. Byzantine men were soft simply because they were Oriental. The attack on the supposedly imitative and derivative Byzantine art and culture—the complaint that they mindlessly repeated fossilized forms of ancient culture—rests on an implicit valorization of innovation as real creativity. Whether from painters or poets, originality and invention marked proper masculine creativity, while the aesthetic and decorative crafts of women employed skill but not generative Art.