ИСТИНА

The paper focuses on the fate of captive barbarians (Arabs, Anatolian and Balkan Turks, Slavs etc.) in Byzantium. The Byzantines continued the old Roman practice of capturing civilians during the hostilities against their immediate neighbours. Barbarian women and children were a legitimate objective of military operation. Some of the captured civilians, predominantly (or exclusively?) children, went through Byzantine philanthropic system being taught the Greek language and the principles of the Christian religion. The most important institution in this sense (but not the only one) was the system of orphanages (orphanotropheia) in which barbarian heathen children were prepared to baptism and their new life in Byzantine society. Sources directly indicate that the Byzantine authorities were concerned with the task of acculturation and Christianization of the foreign children, who were taken captive in war or bought in the slave market, through philanthropic institutions. Those barbarian children who found themselves as domestic slaves in Imperial palace and aristocratic and wealthy mansions normally went through standard training in the Greek language, catechization and final baptism. These efforts of the masters to provide barbarian child slaves with “Roman upbringing” can also be explained by the specific Byzantine understanding of “philanthropia.” The Byzantine practice of taking foreign captives and their subsequent acculturation by means of diverse kinds of philanthropic activity finds its theoretical substantiation and explanation in the religious and cultural ideologemes postulated a specific historiosophic mission of the Christian Roman empire to disseminate the universal truth of Christianity among the entire mankind. In order to explain and interpret this ideologeme, the author puts forward the term Byzantine Missianism (do not confuse with “messianism”). The focal motif underlying the Byzantine Missianism was the event of Pentecost which indicated the future spread of the universal Christian truth throughout all the gentiles. The strategy of taking foreign captives in warfare and their subsequent acculturation was an important tool used for the implementation of the Byzantine missianistic ideas.