Byzantine Parades of Infamy through an Animal Lens

In this article, I discuss humiliation parades as described by eleventh-century Byzantine historians, focusing on the role of mules and donkeys in them. More specifically, I examine how the presence of these equids could change the meaning of a scene in the works of Michael Attaleiates, John Skylitzes, and Michael Psellos. I argue that, as the social and religious connotations of mules and donkeys interacted with the social and religious status of their riders, humiliation could turn to humility and emasculation to masculinity, transforming the animals themselves into carriers of political rhetoric. When reading these scenes we need to consider whether our rider is a man or a woman, a cleric or a layman, a general or scholar, but also what kind of equid they are riding and how that might be juxtaposed with other animals in the text. In addition to emphasizing the role of animals in Byzantine political life, I consider the animals’ own experience of these parades, attempting to reconstruct something of their sense of the world with the help of modern veterinary science.