The Black Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire

Networks of Power in the Court of the Sultan

George H. Junne

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857728937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Chief Black Eunuch, appointed personally by the Sultan, had both the ear of the leader of a vast Islamic Empire and held power over a network of spies and informers, including eunuchs and slaves throughout Constantinople and beyond. The story of these remarkable individuals, who rose from difficult beginnings to become amongst the most powerful people in the Ottoman Empire, is rarely told. George Junne places their stories in the context of the wider history of African slavery, and places them at the centre of Ottoman history. The Black Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire marks a new direction in the study of courtly politics and power in Constantinople.

CHAPTER 1

ENSLAVED AFRICANS AS EUNUCHS IN AFRICA AND EUROPE

Africa began to use slaves several thousand years ago and slavery peaked between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, affecting almost all territories. One of the consequences was the shifting of populations; some areas were almost uninhabited through slavery while in other areas, the population increased.¹ Opportunities for trade expanded, beginning with local networks trading for food. Those networks developed into larger ones, evolving into chiefdoms and kingdoms. Slavery became one way to obtain workers, for they ‘could be captured, traded for, or obtained as payment from families needing to pay off debts or seeking courtly favours’. Women were important to that system for reproduction as well as production.² Eunuchs had their own niche in the slave trade.

There were also luxury slaves, such as dwarfs; and the very large numbers of concubines possessed by some notables must be regarded as supernumerary. Slave women were not judged exclusively as concubines: those of Musgo, southeast of Mandara, for instance, were especially disagreeable in appearance, but valued for their trustworthiness and their great capacity for labour. But concubines were one of the major single categories of slaves, both for domestic use and for trans-Saharan export; it has been estimated that a majority of the slaves crossing the Sahara were women and children, in contrast to the Atlantic pattern, and this may in turn partly explain the different subsequent assimilation of the slave population, in North America and North Africa.³

There are accounts that refer to West African slavery dating back to the seventh century. Al-Yakubi noted that the kings of Sudan sold slaves when there were no wars and ‘for no reason’. Another chronicler, Hudud al-Alam, noted in 982–983 that most eunuchs came from the Sudan. He reported that merchants came from Egypt and stole children, castrated them and sent them to Europe for sale. He also reported that some Sudanese stole other people's children and sold them to the merchants. Those reports confirm the fact that military systems and organized merchant networks preyed on Black Africans to cater to foreign markets and demands.⁴

Records from the Sudan dating back to AD 1421 show the trade in eunuchs. One leader, the legendary Hausa Queen Amina, received 40 eunuchs and 10,000 kola nuts in tribute from Sudanese rulers. The Sarki (king) of the Kano Kingdom, Abdulahi Burja (r. 1437–1452) received 1,000 slaves a month. He went to what was then the southern area of the empire and, according to the chronicles, built a town about every two or three miles along the route he traveled. At each stop, he left 1,000 slaves – 500 men and 500 women to populate the communities. Yakubu (r. 1452–1462), the son of the previous ruler, traded horses for eunuchs, receiving 12 eunuchs for ten horses. Abubakar Kado (r. 1565–1572) was a very religious man who spent a lot of time in prayer. A manuscript from that time noted that eunuchs were ‘very numerous’. The next ruler, Mohamma Shashere (r. 1572–1582), became known for his generosity and was the first to give a eunuch, Damu, the prestigious title of Wombai. He gave two other eunuchs high titles as well. Kutumbi (r. 1622–1648), was a warrior ruler who, when he went to war, had a hundred spare horses of his own plus musicians. Following him were also ‘a hundred eunuchs who were handsomely dressed and had gold and silver ornaments’. It is clear that Kano rulers were not only participants in slave trading, but were also familiar with acquiring and making use of eunuchs before the establishment of the Ottoman Empire.⁵

It appeared to be customary in the Sudan to ‘geld the most robust of the boys and youths captured in slave raids’. The Mossi punished criminals by castration and thereby supported a profitable trade in them. They were very skilled in the operation and kept their techniques a secret. A largely Sunni Muslim people of the Volta River Basin the Mossi, now living in the Burkina Faso region, plus the Sunni Muslim Bornuese (Kanuri) people currently living in Niger and Nigeria, were very famous for the trade in eunuchs, chiefly selling them to Egypt, the Barbary States and Turkey. Bornu was one of West Africa's oldest empires, stretching east and west of Lake Chad. There was strong competition because of local demand in the Sudan and Bornu as well. While Turkish merchants might pay $250 to $300 for a eunuch, the Sultan of Bornu had 200 in his own harem.⁶

Long before the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the rise and spread of Islam helped to expand slavery throughout northern Africa. Beginning approximately AD 900, people as far away as West Africa were enslaved and transported to Europe and Asia, including Muslim lands. The Prophet Muhammad (the Praised One) lived in a slave-owning society that saw conquerors kill defeated men and enslave the women and children.

The Arab armies, as they spread out across the Middle East and North Africa, quickly learned to reward themselves with the wives and children of the conquered, and as the Caliphate developed its palace cities at Damascus and Baghdad, and its great garrison towns from which the provinces were governed, so a huge international market grew up for slaves of all races and colours.⁷

Ironically, the Muslim world practised formal manumission as well. The Qur'an applauded it and slave soldiers north of the Sahara, at the completion of their training, were sometimes freed. Muslim communities south of the Sahara did not seem to practise formal manumission to the degree of their northern counterparts. However, those slaves could expect to share in the spoils of war and could aspire to own slaves.⁸ By the seventeenth century, the slave trade dominated western Africa. Although steady demand in the Arab world kept the trans-Saharan routes active, the rapidly growing demand for slaves in the Americas eventually exerted even greater demands.⁹

The trans-Saharan slave trade, on the other hand, favoured young women in a 2:1 ratio over men. Males served as labourers and soldiers to such an extent that by the nineteenth century, slaves became important in the maintenance and reproduction of social and political order.¹⁰ In several regions, eunuchs held that responsibility. The trade in eunuchs continued throughout the nineteenth century in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of the slaves from that area did not end up in the Americas but were taken across the Sahara. Those costly slaves were favoured in civil service and in harems throughout the Muslim world.¹¹ Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, Mecca, Medina, Jeddah and Smyrna were the centres of demand from eunuchs supplied from the western Sudan from the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries.¹²

Meanwhile, some European countries were capitalizing on the production of eunuchs. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the French town of Verdun took pride in its production of them, selling eunuchs to Moors in Spain.¹³ Moors were principally Sunni Muslims.

Moors (from the Latin maurus, which is derived from the Greek mauros, ‘dark-complexioned’), the classical name in Europe of the people of North Africa, who, since the Arab invasion, have been made up of a mixture of Arabs (approx. 40 percent) and Berbers (approx. 60 percent). Morocco and Algeria, and, to a lesser degree, Tunisia and Mauritania, correspond to the lands of the Moors.¹⁴

According to historian Hugh Thomas, the Muslims in Spain bought many slaves. One major source of supply was the territory of the Slavs, whose name ‘later became a synonym in Arabic for “eunuch”’.

Merchants in the eastern marches of Germany would drive captives to markets in the Mediterranean – sometimes via Walenstad in Austria – or Venice – sometimes via Koblenz, on the Rhine, or Verdun. These prisoners might also travel south, down the Saône and the Rhône, and be embarked at Arles. Thence, crossing the Mediterranean in a middle passage as disagreeable as, if shorter than, that of the Atlantic in later days, they would be landed at Almeria, the main port of Muslim Spain. They might be shipped thence to any Muslim port, even to Baghdad or Trebizond, Cairo or Algiers.¹⁵

The slave markets of North Africa, in the late Middle Ages, held Christian captives from Spanish and Italian ports and villages. However, for hundreds of years, Arab merchants traded in African slaves, particularly girls and young men ‘for use in Muslim courts, from Côrdoba to Baghdad, as servants, concubines, or warriors’. Egypt in the tenth century desired eunuchs, as did Baghdad, which bragged that they had 7,000. There was fervent desire for African slaves as far east as Java and China and Muslim slavers satisfied that need, sometimes with women from East Africa. Several trade routes supported the trade in eunuchs.

Many Ethiopians (Ethiopia was the best-known early source in Africa) and Nubians came up the Nile or via ports such as Massawa [now in Eritrea] and Suakin [Sawakin] on the Red Sea; other east coast Africans (some from as far away as the modern southern Kenya and eastern Tanzania) traveled through Somalia and the southeastern end of the Red Sea at or near Aden, Yemen, and the Island of Socotra [Suqutrá]; others came across the Sahara eastward from Bagirmi, Dongola, Darfur, Kordofan, and Sennar in present-day Chad and Sudan and then up the Nile; yet others made the northward journey across the Sahara especially to Tunis and Tripoli (and also Morocco) from source areas such as Mossi territory (present Mali), a wide band of Tuareg country (present southern Algeria and northern Niger Republic and Mali), Damagaram (present Niger Republic), the Ningi region (Nigeria) and other source areas in the central and western Sudan. A Mediterranean sea voyage ended the journey for many of these exports from Africa.¹⁶

One of the most famous eunuchs ruled in tenth century Ikhshid Egypt. The Nubian Abu al-Misq Kafur (Musky Camphor) became the regent from AD 965–968 and from all reports, he was very competent in that position in spite of the opposition he received from certain quarters. The status of most African slaves did not approach that level.¹⁷ Yet, African slaves were essential to an important economic system.

The slave girls of Awdaghost, on the Upper Niger, were prized as cooks, particularly skilled, reported the traveler al-Bakri, at making exquisite pastries out of a mixture of nuts and honey. In the fourteenth century, another traveler, al-Umari, described the empire of Mali, the largest West African monarchy of the time, also on the Upper Niger, as deriving great profit from ‘its merchandise and its seizures by razzias in the land of the infidel.’ The successors of the Mali, the emperors of the Songhai, would customarily give the presents of slaves to their guests. In Fez, in the early sixteenth century, the emperor gave Leo the African, a Moor born in Granada who later lived at the brilliant court of Pope Leo X in Rome, ‘fifty male slaves and fifty female slaves brought out of the land of the blacks, ten eunuchs, twelve camels, one giraffe, twenty civet-cats [...] Twenty of the slaves,’ he added, ‘cost twenty ducats apiece, and so did fifteen of the female slaves.’ The eunuchs were worth forty ducats, the camels fifty, and the civet-cats two hundred – the high cost of the last item being due to their use in making scent.¹⁸

There were two areas in Africa known as primary sources of eunuchs for the Muslim world – the Ethiopian Empire and the Nupe Kingdom (now Nigeria). Some from the latter locale may have reached the Mediterranean. During the fourteenth century, the making of eunuchs took place primarily in the town of Washlu. The Arab world was familiar with Ethiopian eunuchs because some were guards and servants at the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina and the mosque of the Ka‘ba in Mecca.

The Sultan who first placed the eunuchs in the haram [sacred zone surrounding the city, not to be confused with ‘harem’] of Medina was imposing the structure of a royal household on the tomb of the Messenger of god. On a political level, the introduction of the eunuchs into the harem was a kind of Sultanization of the Prophet. Just as a corps of eunuchs, themselves symbols of royal authority, controlled access to the private chambers of the Sultan, these eunuchs would guard the hujra [chambers or dwelling that enclosed the graves of the Prophet and Abu Bakr and Umar] which was both the tomb and, in his lifetime, the most intimate area of the Prophet's own household – the chamber of his favourite wife.¹⁹

The overseers of the Harams, or, the sacred zones that extended for miles around Mecca and Medina and in which non-Muslims were forbidden, sought eunuch slaves. Many of those eunuchs were removed from Istanbul because of age or for political reasons, the latter essentially serving in exile. During the 1850s, there were 80 eunuchs at the Mosque of the Ka'ba in Mecca and 120 at the Prophet's Mosque in Medina. Some were purchased from Africa as late as 1895 to serve at Medina.²⁰ In a curious 1883 incident, a eunuch working at the Haram at Mecca and who had formerly served Sultan Murad V went to the British Consul to receive manumission. The Consul sent him back to the Haram because he was unsure whether eunuchs who worked there were free men or slaves.²¹

Songhay conquered the Malian Empire in 1468 and dominated West Africa for 300 years, establishing a famous university system. It stretched from Burkina Faso to the south and north to the Moroccan border, west to the Atlantic Ocean and east to the middle of Niger. When the empire of Songhai ruled, the king had 700 eunuchs about him. One of their duties as objects of prestige was to hold out a sleeve so that the askia (king) could spit into it.²² In Zanzibar, one served in the customs bureaucracy as the administrator. Even in Ethiopia they served as servants of the king and sometimes supervised the women.

Nupe as well as Kano participated in the slave trade, including the trade in eunuchs. During the late fifteenth century, one Kano ruler, Muhammad Rumfa (r. 1462–1498), appointed a eunuch to an important state position. In the sixteenth century under Abubakr Kado (r. 1565–1572), eunuchs became common in Kano as that city adopted Islam. According to one record, some believed that Wombai Giwa, a seventeenth century eunuch, was plotting a revolt and he received a dismissal from his office. In the latter seventeenth century, over 100 eunuchs with clothing decorated with gold and silver ministered to Kano ruler Kutumbi (r. 1622–1648). Eunuchs also held important positions in the Songhai Empire under its famous leader, Askia Muhammad (r. 1493–1528), according to explorer Leo Africanus (Giovanni Leoni), a Spaniard educated in Morocco.

He also said that Askia Muhammad I attacked and killed the Hausa king of Gobir, and made eunuchs of his grandsons. A eunuch was in charge of the askia's extensive wardrobe. The chief of the palace eunuchs, Ali Folon, played almost the part of regent towards the end of Askia Muhammad I's reign. Askia Ishaq II [r. 1588–1591], defeated by the Moroccans [1591], attempted to slip away with gold and silver, royal emblems, thirty of the best horses in the royal stables, and forty eunuchs. A little ironically, many of the early leaders of the Moroccan expeditionary and occupation forces were themselves Andalusian eunuchs.²³

The rulers of the Hausa, primarily a Muslim people residing in present day northern Nigeria and southern Niger, received support through the slave trade and trade raiding enterprises. They levied taxes and acquired other monetary benefits, including the profits from their agricultural slaves. From the fourteenth century, the Hausa also had eunuchs, some of whom were from their permanent slave class, the cucanawa. They made eunuchs of both boys and older men for markets in Egypt and Turkey. Alth...