International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Michal Pawlak 
Łodź, Poland, 
[e-mail]
Infertility and Statesmanship: The Case of John VIII Palaiologos (1392‒1448)
This paper aims to analyse how John VIII’s Palaiologos health problems affected the way he 
ruled. His infertility is of special interest because of the importance of having a child by an emperor 
and the impact being childless may have had on his state and ruling. John VIII Palaiologos (b.1392) 
was the eldest son of Manuel Palaiologos and his wife Helena Dragas, a Serbian princess. John VIII 
who died childlessly in 1448, ultimately succeeded to the Byzantine throne as a sole ruler after his 
father’s death in 1425. His life could be seen from two transcending perspectives. The binding agent 
of these two perspectives would be the illness John VIII greatly suffered from and which influenced 
the emperor’s private and political activities. The first perspective concerns his diplomatic actions 
and decision to establish the union between the Greek East and Latin West churches. The second 
perspective involves his marriage alliances. Despite being married three times, firstly to Anna of 
Moscow, then to Sophia of Montferrat and finally to Maria of Trebizond, he was not able to father 
any children. It is suggested here that the reason for this seems to lie in John VIII’s illness and its 
treatment. John VIII suffered from gout. The author suggests that his childlessness was a result of the 
implemented medical treatment of gout. John VIII’s illness was treated according to prescriptions of 
the Byzantine medicine, which advised using colchicine – a toxic substance obtained from the plant 
called colchicum autumnale that was a strong and fast painkiller for joint inflammation. Demetrios 
Pepagomenos, the physician at the court of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, John 
VIII’s father, wrote a medical treatise devoted to the treatment of gout. He was also responsible for 
the treatment that John VIII underwent. The author of the paper claims that John VIII received 
regularly throughout his lifetime significant amounts of colchicine, which nowadays is known 
to have the potential of causing reversible infertility. His lack of offsprings can be then seen as a 
temporal fertility disorder.