Beshir Agha

Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Imperial Harem

Jane Hathaway

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780741956
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

This book explores the life of el-Hajj Beshir Agha (ca. 1657-1746), the most powerful Chief Harem Eunuch in the history of the Ottoman Empire Enslaved in his native Ethiopia as a boy, then castrated in Egypt, el-Hajj Beshir became one of hundreds of East African eunuchs who inhabited the imperial palace's enormous harem. Rising through the ranks to become harem treasurer by 1707, he eventually oversaw the educations of crown princes and harem women whilst choosing and deposing a long series of grand viziers. Wielding unparallelled power and influence over the empire, the libraries that he founded throughout the region helped to shape the religious and intellectual profile of the Ottoman state.

 

PRELIMINARIES: ELITE SLAVERY AND HOUSEHOLD MEMBERSHIP

ELITE SLAVERY IN ISLAMIC SOCIETIES

In most Islamic and non-Islamic societies in which they were employed, eunuchs – that is, castrated males – were slaves. However, they belonged to a special subcategory of elite slaves: high-status slaves, often attached to a ruler’s court, who received all the privileges that accompanied their high status, including access to the finest education available and to lavish clothing, accoutrements, and accommodations. To understand the status that eunuchs enjoyed in Islamic societies in general and in the Ottoman Empire in particular, we must first become acquainted with this distinctive form of slavery of which eunuchhood was a part.

In many cases, men and women destined for elite slavery were removed from their families – and often from their native lands, as well – and enslaved for the express purpose of serving at the ruler’s court, where, it was assumed, their lack of familial and community ties, as well as their dependence on the ruler for their privileges, would breed loyalty to the very ruler who had enslaved them. To the rulers who employed such slaves – from the Roman and Byzantine emperors to the emperors of the many Chinese dynasties to the Mughal emperors of India and the Ottomans – they seemed a better security risk than free subjects, who might acquire the same levels of education and political savvy but who came with the baggage with which attachment to a particular region and community inevitably encumbered them.

Islamic societies employed male elite slaves in two principal capacities: as military officers and as palace functionaries. In both cases, the slaves were taken into service at a young age – anywhere from the prepubescent years to young manhood – and converted to Islam. The distinction between these two categories was not infrequently blurred, however: a military commander might well wield influence and even occupy high office at the ruler’s court, while a palace favorite might be preferred for high military command.

Mamluks

Military slaves, known as mamluks, from the Arabic word for “owned,” were first employed systematically on a large scale by the Abbasid caliphs, who ruled much of the present-day Middle East from their capital at Baghdad from 762 through 1258. Beginning in the early decades of the ninth century, the Abbasids employed slave-soldiers from the Turkish principalities to their east both as military commanders and as rank-and-file soldiers. The proximity of these Central Asian Turkish peoples, combined with the semi-nomadic Turks’ skills in horsemanship and archery, made them the prime source of mamluks until well after the Abbasid caliphate had been destroyed by the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century. One ninth-century Abbasid caliph founded the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad on the Tigris River, as a sort of haven for himself and his Turkish mamluks. By the end of the ninth century, however, Turkic mamluk generals had conspired to dethrone and even to murder several Abbasid caliphs.

The Mamluk sultanate

Turkish mamluks from the Central Asian steppe remained a key component of the armies of various provincial regimes under nominal Abbasid rule until the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Toward the middle of that century, in the shadow of the Mongol threat, Turkish mamluks in Syria and Egypt displaced the dynasty that employed them, which had been founded by the legendary Crusader-routing Kurdish general Salah al-Din (known in Western Europe as Saladin), himself a client of the Turkish general whom the Abbasids recognized as governor of northern Iraq and Syria. The regime founded by these mamluks is known as the Mamluk sultanate. Mamluks under the sultanate were usually manumitted after completing their initial training; they could then ascend to the ranks of the military commanders and purchase their own mamluks, whom they, in turn, trained for high office. Although most Mamluk sultans attempted to groom their sons, if they had any, to succeed them, powerful mamluk military commanders continually usurped the throne, so that the sultanate was, for most of its existence, an oligarchy of manumitted elite slaves.

Toward the end of the thirteenth century, the Mamluk sultans began to supplement their supply of Central Asian Turkish mamluks with mamluks from the Caucasus Mountains, above all from the territory known as Circassia in the northeastern Black Sea region (today a southerly region of Russia). By the time the Ottoman Empire conquered the Mamluk sultanate in 1516–17, most sultans – and most of their mamluks – were Circassians. This was a key model of elite slavery for the Ottomans, particularly following their conquest of the Arab lands that had been under Mamluk sultanate rule.

The Ottoman devshirme

Yet the Ottomans, well before their conquest of the Mamluk domains, had perfected their own distinctive mode of elite slavery, accomplished by means of a recruitment system known in Turkish as devshirme, or “collection.” Although it may have had antecedents in the recruitment of Greek and Armenian mamluks (or ghulams, as they were called) by the Turkish rulers of central Anatolia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (an offshoot of the Turkish regime to which Saladin’s patron had been attached), the devshirme appears to date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century and to have been employed systematically following the Ottomans’ conquest of the Balkans from the Byzantine Empire. By the terms of this system, recruiters would venture into the Ottomans’ eastern European provinces roughly once each year and select a certain percentage of boys from the population of the Christian villages.

The distinctive feature of the devshirme was that the recruits were technically Ottoman subjects even though, according to the template for treatment of non-Muslim monotheists under Muslim rule in place since at least the eighth century, non-Muslim subjects of a Muslim ruler were supposed to be exempt from enslavement. Various Ottoman jurists and chroniclers justified this practice in Islamic legal terms by evoking the Muslim conqueror’s right to one-fifth of all movable booty; by this logic, the Christian boys constituted the sultan’s fifth. Notwithstanding this rationalization, convenience and expediency almost certainly underlay this practice, which was far less costly and perilous than procuring mamluks from outside the sultan’s domains, often separated from those domains by hostile territory.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, devshirme recruits supplied the bulk of the Ottomans’ palace pages, as well as their elite infantry corps, the fearsome Janissaries. In an initial selection, devshirme recruits who showed special intellectual aptitude were earmarked for palace service while the majority entered the Janissary corps. From the ranks of palace pages, the rare devshirme recruit might one day rise to become grand vizier, the Ottoman equivalent of a prime minister, or perhaps chief financial officer or governor of an important Ottoman province.

HOUSEHOLD POLITICS AND PATRON–CLIENT TIES

Elite slavery, including eunuchhood, cannot be properly understood outside the framework of the household. In this context, a household was a network of reciprocal ties of patronage and clientage, centering on the founder and/or head of the household. The ruler’s court in most premodern societies was that society’s preeminent household. Just as the ruler’s household centered on his (or occasionally her) palace, so the households of lower-ranking officials centered on their own often palatial residences. The elite slave was, first and foremost, a member of such a household, bound to the household head not only by condition of servitude but also by the ties of obligation and loyalty that accompanied membership in the household.

The milieu inhabited by Ottoman eunuchs in many respects resembled a hierarchy of households. At the pinnacle of this hierarchy was the sultan’s household, situated in the imperial palace in Istanbul, but below this were the households of various government ministers (viziers) and provincial governors, as well as the local notables – localized military officers, long-distance merchants, prominent Muslim scholar-officials – of the provinces. The chief harem eunuch attained his office by successfully negotiating the tangle of patron–client ties that characterized the sultan’s household. Because of his connections to Egypt (discussed in chapters 2, 3, 5, and 9), furthermore, the chief eunuch, both before he attained that post and after he left it, formed lasting connections with the households of Egypt’s grandees.

In the Ottoman palace, eunuchs were part of the population of members of the sultan’s household, existing alongside and interacting with the pages recruited through the devshirme. Particularly during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they might serve as military commanders, as well. Eunuchs, however, did not usually come out of the devshirme but were recruited in a manner more closely resembling the purchase of mamluks. Before turning to Ottoman eunuchs specifically, however, we will find it useful to place the functions that eunuch elite slaves performed in historical perspective.

EUNUCHS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

EUNUCHS IN ANTIQUITY

The use of eunuchs at the courts of rulers and in their armed forces dates back as far as the Assyrians, who ruled much of what are now Iraq and Syria from roughly 911 through 612 B.C.E. The famous stone friezes carved by the Assyrians and now on display in various museums world-wide show hunting scenes in which beardless courtiers, almost certainly eunuchs, appear alongside more hirsute kings and hunters. The courtiers called, in the singular, saris in Hebrew in the biblical book of Esther, which is supposed to have been composed under the ancient Persian, or Achaemenid, Empire (550–330 B.C.E.), are widely conceded to have been eunuchs. Indeed, Alexander the Great, who conquered the Achaemenid Empire in 330 B.C.E., is said to have become enamored of a young Persian eunuch taken from the court of the defeated Achaemenid emperor Darius III (r. 336–330 B.C.E.); this boy had apparently been taken captive by Darius’ forces and castrated as a form of revenge against his father, who had run afoul of Darius. More conclusive among biblical references is the book of Isaiah’s mention of eunuchs (again, saris in the singular) who will be accepted as members of the community of believers despite their mutilation.

Certainly, both of the enormous empires, the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, and the Sasanian, or Persian, which ruled most of the region now known as the Middle East at the time of Islam’s appearance in the early seventh century, C.E. used eunuchs on a large scale, both in their armies and at their courts. In addition to adhering to the widespread habit of employing eunuch military commanders and placing eunuch guards at the entrances to the imperial family’s inner sanctum, the Byzantines introduced castrated male vocalists into their religious services as singers – in addition to more traditional non-eunuch singers – the better to replicate the heavenly choirs of angels. This custom prepared the way for the institution of castrati, castrated male sopranos, in European opera houses during the early modern era.

EUNUCHS IN MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC EMPIRES

So it was that the nascent Islamic polity, following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 C.E., found itself expanding into the territory of two empires in which the employment of eunuchs was habitual. Accordingly, eunuchs shortly appeared in Islamic palaces and armies. The Umayyad caliphs, who ruled from 661 to 750, must certainly have employed eunuchs, although the surviving written and material record of their court practices is so meager as to offer no conclusive proof. For the Abbasids, who overthrew the Umayyads in 750 and established a new capital at Baghdad, we are on much firmer ground. A description of Abbasid Baghdad by a Syrian geographer in the ninth century describes chambers built into the enormous walls of the original round city, constructed in 762, to house African eunuch guards, pointing to importation of eastern African eunuchs very early in the Abbasid period. This is not terribly surprising given that non-eunuch eastern African slaves were an entrenched feature of Iraqi life, as evidenced by the massive and prolonged revolt (869–83) of the wretched African slaves who toiled in the salt marshes of southern Iraq. Annalistic chronicles of the Abbasid Empire also note Persian and Turkish eunuch military commanders who served the caliph beginning in the mid-ninth century, indicating an overlap between the functions of mamluks and those of eunuchs.

Regional powers in eastern Iran during the Abbasid period also employed eunuchs as both harem guardians and military commanders. Under the Great Seljuks, a semi-nomadic Turkish population who took over Iraq and Iran in the eleventh century, eunuchs appear to have served variously as harem guardians, tutors to crown princes, and pleasure companions to the rulers; it is not difficult to see how the same eunuch could have fulfilled all three functions. Some of the Seljuks’ eunuchs are called “black” in Seljuk chronicles, although what this implies about their provenance is impossible to determine with certainty. Given the heavy use of eastern African slaves under the Abbasids, we might easily conclude that the Seljuks, coming into Abbasid territory, exploited the same African pool of manpower. Yet, in view of the commercial links that Iran and Iraq enjoyed with India, these “blacks” might also have included Indian slaves.

In the Muslim West, the Abbasids’ arch-enemies, the Ismaili Shi‘ite caliphs of the Fatimid dynasty, who ripped North Africa, Egypt, Syria, and the western Arabian peninsula from Abbasid control during the tenth century, employed slaves from the Sudan as mamluks and eunuchs alike. The Fatimids also employed eunuchs from a population known as Saqaliba, a label apparently applied to a variety of Slavic and other eastern European peoples. In one famous Mediterranean naval engagement, the commanders of both the Fatimid and the Byzantine fleet were eunuchs. In Spain, various parts of which were under Muslim rule between 711 and 1492 C.E., most eunuchs, whether military commanders or harem guardians, were likewise Saqaliba. In the post-Fatimid period, the Seljuk offshoot which ruled eastern and central Anatolia from roughly 1077 to 1307 employed Greek and Armenian eunuchs, as did the principalities of western Anatolia which preceded and/or were contemporaneous with the early Ottomans in the same region. In Anatolia, one assumes, the Byzantine prototype for court eunuchs was especially influential.

EUNUCHS UNDER THE MAMLUK SULTANATE

Arguably, however, the Muslim polity from which the Ottoman Empire drew most inspiration in its employment of eunuchs was the Mamluk sultanate, which ruled Egypt, Syria, the western Arabian peninsula, and southeastern Anatolia from 1250 until its conquest by the Ottomans in 1516–17. The Mamluk sultanate is distinctive among Islamic – and all other – polities in that it was ruled by elite slaves, known as mamluks (from the Arabic word for “owned”), who were purchased from the steppe north of the Black Sea or from the Caucasus Mountains. In a variation of earlier polities’ use of eunuchs as military commanders, the Mamluks entrusted eunuchs with supervising the education, both military and otherwise, of the raw mamluk recruits newly arrived in Cairo. As David Ayalon has noted, part of the motive for this practice must have been to prevent sexual abuse of the newcomers by older mamluks in the barracks.

Tomb eunuchs

Of greater significance, at least so far as later Ottoman tradition was concerned, was the Mamluks’ innovation in assigning eunuchs to guard the tombs of sultans in Cairo, and ultimately appointing a corps of eunuchs to guard the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. (The Turkic rulers of southern Iraq in roughly the same period, it is worth noting, employed eunuch guardians at the tomb of Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, in Najaf.) Historian Shaun Marmon has illuminated the circumstances surrounding the apparent twelfth-century origins of the practice of assigning eunuchs to the Prophet’s tomb, commonly attributed to the great Crusader-fighter Saladin and/or his patron, the autonomous governor of northern Iraq and Syria mentioned in chapter 1.

The Mamluks’ reinforcement of this practice ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 PRELIMINARIES: ELITE SLAVERY AND HOUSEHOLD MEMBERSHIP
• 2 EUNUCHS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• 3 BESHIR AGHA’S ORIGINS
• 4 EARLY YEARS IN THE PALACE
• 5 EXILE IN CYPRUS AND EGYPT
• 6 CHIEF OF THE TOMB EUNUCHS IN MEDINA
• 7 CHIEF EUNUCH OF THE TOPKAPI PALACE HAREM
• 8 BESHIR AGHA DURING THE REIGN OF MAHMUD I
• 9 BESHIR AGHA AND THE ARAB PROVINCES
• 10 BESHIR AGHA’S LIBRARIES AND PIOUS FOUNDATIONS
• 11 BESHIR AGHA’S DEATH AND BURIAL
• 12 BESHIR AGHA’S LEGACY THROUGH THE LENS OF OTTOMAN “DECLINE”
• 13 SOURCES ON BESHIR AGHA
• Works cited
• Index