The bishop in the Latin West 600–1100

At first sight, there might seem little in common between medieval bishops and the eunuchs who played such prominent roles in Arab, Indian, Chinese and Ottoman courts. Church law was cautious about admitting castrated men to ordination: From the Council of Nicaea (325) onwards, those who had had themselves castrated in order to live lives of greater asceticism were rejected for ordination, and while those who had been castrated against their will were not prevented from being ordained, in practice it was relatively unusual for castrated men to be ordained in either the Western or the Eastern church.² Furthermore, unlike many of the court eunuchs featuring in other chapters in this volume, very few bishops spent any time as slaves. Instead, they were almost always freeborn and, indeed, were often of noble birth;³ furthermore, they were usually not exiles, though some had left their homelands as a form of voluntary asceticism (peregrinatio).⁴