International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Tristan Schmidt
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany;
[e-mail]
Criticism of Venationes and Ecclesiastical Attitudes 
towards Hunting in the 12
th
Century Byzantium
“The canon calls fighting with wild beasts ’spectacles of hunt’; these, however, are forbidden.” 
With these words the twelfth-century canonist Theodore Balsamon comments on canon no. 51 
of the Quinisext Council from the year 691/92. The canon, forbidding clerics as well as laymen to 
visit or participate in theater performances and animal fights, is part of a tradition of ecclesiastical 
criticism of public spectacles originating in Late Antiquity. This criticism also included hunting 
activities, especially the publicly shown hunts for animals called “venationes.”
From the twelfth century there are two rather detailed comments on this canon, one of them 
written by John Zonaras, the other by Theodore Balsamon cited above. They repeat the ban of public 
spectacles, yet clearly excluding the case of hunting for food. However, reading their comments one 
gets the impression that the criticism of the hunting spectacles refers to conditions belonging to the 
remote past in the eyes of their authors. This leads to the question how far these comments were 
meant to match the current situation of the twelfth century.
The presentation will discuss several sources with regard to the question whether public 
hunts and animal fights still took place in the 12
th
century or not. Especially the traveler’s account 
of Benjamin de Tudela provides evidence for the existence of these activities in the hippodrome of 
Constantinople at the time of the two canonists. The fact that the commentaries avoid mentioning 
these events could be a hint that, despite de Tudela’s report, animal fights were not really important 
anymore at that time. However, it is also possible that the commentaries deliberately remained silent 
about these events. A similar approach can be discovered in the commentary by Balsamon on canon 
no. 24 of the Quinisextum banning public horse races, where he explicitly excludes contemporary 
races from the prohibition. Most obviously, in some cases the canonists did not have a strictly rigorous 
attitude towards the regulations formulated by old canons and rather tended to spare certain practices 
from severe criticism in favor of fitting in with social realities. The fact that in these cases practices 
organized by the emperor are concerned could be a further reason for this treatment.
While the two canonists comment on venationes and hunting for food, they do not mention 
hunting activities as sports of the aristocracy. In twelfth century court society these activities had 

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developed into events with public appeal, being important elements of aristocratic representation 
and rather popular within the entire Byzantine élite. Contemporary sources show that ecclesiastical 
members of this élite express this positive attitude just as their “colleagues” from the secular 
aristocracy do. This can be confirmed, amongst other things, by the literary works on hunting at 
that time, one of which was written by the metropolitan bishop of Philippoupolis, Constantine 
Pantechnes. Furthermore, an analysis of the court poetry shows that ecclesiastical authors like 
Eustathius of Thessalonike and Theophylact of Ochrid included the topic of imperial hunting with 
all its representative aspects into their panegyrics and praised the hunting exploits of their imperial 
clients without hesitation. As a whole, élite society apparently did not leave much space for criticism 
of hunting activities. The same situation can as well be found in the European west at that time.