Anna Komnena

Byzantine sources place the Orphanotropheion on the eastern-most hiU of Constantinople, where as Anna Komnena says the access to the sea opens up. The tenth-century historian Joseph Genesios stated that the orphanage stood on the city s acropolis, and, as we have seen, Theodore Prodromos referred to its location as Sion. Although the ridge that Constantine selected for his Church of the Holy Apostles was higher, the Orphanotropheion occupied the citadel of ancient Byzantium, the hill that travelers by sea would first see as they approached Constantinople. ... 

Anna Komnena s description of the twelfth-century Orphanotropheion, an institution we will study in detail in Chapters Seven and Eight, also includes the only explicit reference to wet nurses in a Byzantine asylum for abandoned children. As an example of the mutual aid given and received by the residents of the great Orphanage, she mentioned not only the crippled led by the healthy and the old served by the young, but also babies nursed by other mothers. By iioo, therefore, the Orphanotropheion of the capital included a section that provided wet nurses for abandoned babies. 

As Anna Komnena stated and as the Lavra documents confirm, the emperor was ultimately responsible for the material resources of the Orphanotropheion. He and the officials he appointed including the or-phanotrophos managed the estates on behalf of the orphans and other needy persons. As we noted above, however, the patriarch was also involved in the Orphanotropheion, but not directly in managing its resources. 

According to Anna Komnena, her father, Alexios, placed a grammar school for the children of the Orphanotropheion I to the right of the ancient church of Saint Paul. The histori-... 

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