“Dishonorable” Women: Concubines (παλλακαί) in Middle and Late Byzantium

By the tenth or eleventh century, the term pallakeia (“concubinage”) could denote a wide range of practices and arrangements in Byzantium. The same term, pallake (παλλακή), was used to denote any kind of female partner who did not qualify as a legal wife, including sexually available enslaved women, freeborn monogamous partners, and a variety of statuses in between. Still, this coincidence of terminology carried with it assumptions and stereotypes that had accrued from centuries of association with unfree, and therefore dishonorable status. This paper argues that label “concubine” immediately associated a woman with all of the stereotypes and fears surrounding sexually available women’s bodies, including deeply engrained fears and literary tropes typically associated with enslaved women in particular, even if the “concubine” in question was not enslaved. By examining specific cases of “concubinage” in Byzantium between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, it analyzes both the impact that this had on the households involved and the attitudes and prejudices displayed by our sources.