The Imperial Eunuchs of Istanbul: from Africa to the heart of Islam

Abstract

Slavery in its various forms has long fascinated the minds of the moderns, both scholars and non-scholars. This fascination becomes even more intense when we cross the cultural lines of East and West: the many travel accounts of Europeans and Americans who visited the lands of Islam rarely failed to comment on the phenomenon of slavery, with special reference to haremslavery. In most of these accounts, the need of both writer and reader to satisfy their curiosity defied the inaccessibility of harems to foreigners and produced descriptions which often belonged to the realm of sheer fancy. To complicate the picture further, scholarly works have not always paid sufficient attention to the problem of terminology. Thus, non-Western slavery was depicted in terms loaded with meaning frequently too negative derived from Western experience with the practice, mostly that of the American South and the West Indies.' However, in recent years there have been a number of attempts to treat Islamic harem-slavery in its own cultural context, a task made possible also by the availability of archival material, especially in the Turkish state archives, and the existence of some insightful travel accounts.2 Perhaps the most curious and intriguing aspect of harem-slavery has always been its use of eunuchs. Eunuchs were not an Islamic innovation, but as with slavery itself and other borrowed institutions, Islam endowed the employment of castrated men with its own special character. While medieval Islamic military slavery and the role of the eunuchs in it received proper attention in modern scholarship,3 the same can hardly be said about harem-slavery in the Ottoman Empire. This vast and long-enduring Muslim state dominated the history of the Middle East and Eastern Europe for five centuries and greatly influenced the social, economic, and political institutions in these regions. By the nineteenth century, military slavery was no longer practised by the Ottomans, and as agricultural slavery was never common in the Empire, the only form of servitude extant was household slavery. In its royal and upper-class manifestation, the institution was termed harem-slavery. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, a traffic of varying levels, but averaging about 10,000 slaves annually, was required to meet the demand of the Ottoman market.4 The great majority of slaves imported into the Ottoman Empire during those years were African women, although African men in small numbers were still being acquired until the 1890s. Black and brown, that is, Ethiopian, slaves reached the urban centres of the Empire via Egypt, present-day Libya, the Red Sea, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. They served mostly in menial jobs, with the exception of some Ethiopian women who joined