What crime did you have to do to get your eyes gouged out in medieval times?

Answer 1

I spent a good deal of time researching medieval crime and punishment for a related question. There is a link to it below. In all that research, I did not find a single law prescribing blinding as a punishment for a crime in medieval Europe. Of course, I might have missed somethng. There were many countries and codes of laws were changing almost constantly.

Even so, there were criminals who had their eyes gouged out as punishment. This happened, however, at the behest of a monarch who had absolute authority, and it was done because that was what he wanted to do. It was done in some cases for treason, but if that happened, it was considered a more kind thing to do than execute the criminal. It was sometimes done to people who had not committed any crime but were considered a threat, such as alternate claimants to a throne; there is a story to the effect that the Byzantine Emperor Justinian had this done to his most successful general, Belisarius, to prevent him from taking the throne, but this is probably a myth. In one case, it was done to all the prisoners taken in a war, with every 100th man allowed to keep one eye so the rest could be lead back to their homeland, as an example (the Byzantines did this to attacking Bulgarians).

There was a brief time in England when a victim of rape was allowed to mutilate the rapist in whatever way she chose, and this could include blinding, among other things.