Black eunuchs / White eunuchs

[JesusA]

About two years ago, I wrote a piece for EAv.2 when I finally, after a couple years of effort, managed to acquire a copy of Nadia Maria el-Cheikh’s “Servants at the Gate: Eunuchs at the Court of al-Muqtadir” (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2005, 48 (pt.2), pp. 234-252). The article examines the role of eunuchs in the court of a single Abbasid caliph, who reigned from 909 to 932 (295 to 320 in the Moslem calendar).

Early in the article el-Cheikh quotes a Moslem scholar who wrote about the Caliphate. Hilal al-Sabi states that: It is generally believed that in the days of al-Muqtadir bi-allah…the residence contained 11,000 eunuchs (khadim) – 7,000 blacks and 4,000 white Slavs – 7,000 free and slave girls and thousands of chamber servants.

The division into black and white eunuchs is not quite what most would expect. In the Moslem world of the time, “white” referred to European and Central Asian and “black” referred to the darker skinned slaves from both Africa and the Indian subcontinent. What is now Bangladesh and southern India were major sources of slaves, definitely including many eunuchs. The Sylhet region of Bengal was a major source of eunuchs as late as the 1840s, when the British colonialists tried to put an end to the practice.

John Davenport (1875, pp. 135-136) quotes the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier as stating that “when he was in the kingdom of Golconda, in the year 1675, not less than twenty-two thousand individuals were castrated”. The 22,000 number for Golkonda (near the modern city of Hyderabad in southeast India) is also cited by Millant (1908) and Erlich (1991), though neither of them give a source. Davenport also notes that about 2,000 eunuchs per year were exported from the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan to the Moslem world. Generally, Bengal and Java are considered to have been the largest sources of eunuchs for the eastern end of the Moslem realm with many of the eunuchs also sold far to the west.

The Slavic eunuchs were most likely castrated in what is today France or in Venice for sale into the Moslem world. There were so many Slavic slaves in Moslem lands in the 9th through the 11th centuries that the Arabic name for the Slavs, saqāliba, became the common word meaning “slave.” So many of the Slavic slaves were eunuchs that one Arab author had to point out that not all Slavs were castrated and not all eunuchs were Slavic. It has been frequently noted that Verdun was a castration center for European slaves. Venice was also important, although it is less frequently mentioned.

St. Naum of Ohrid (830-910), a Christian missionary to the Slavs in Moravia, noted in one of his missives that he observed a shipment of 200 boys being sent to Venice for castration and sale to the Caliphate. He was upset, not because they were being sold as slaves, nor that they were all destined for castration, but because some of them had been converted to Christianity and he thought that Christians should not be sold as slaves to Moslem masters.

From Bohemia, a bit to the west of Moravia, we have not only evidence of ecclesiastical disapproval for the sale of Christians to non-Christians, but also the attempt to prevent castration of boys for sale in a penitential, the Někotoraja Zapověd, which likely targeted Moslem demand for Slavic slaves. This penitential, composed sometime between the ninth and eleventh centuries, does not impose any direct restrictions on slave trading itself, only on the treatment of children by parents who wished to sell them directly into slavery. While the canon does not prohibit the direct sale of oneself or one’s children, it does seek to prevent certain practices. Eunuchs were in high demand in the Islamic world; rather than simply selling a child to alleviate a family’s poverty or ensure a child was provided for, castrating a child before selling him indicates that parents sought to obtain the highest price. The sale of children for monetary gain and their sale to non-Christians must have been particularly disturbing to Czech ecclesiastics, who turned to the threat of penance in an attempt to regulate these sales. It was acceptable to sell a boy into slavery, it was not acceptable for his father to castrate him before sale, even though knowing that the boy was likely to be castrated by his purchaser. This method certainly would have had a limited effect; merchants could easily castrate the boys themselves, and penance was restricted to those fathers who were Christian and who accepted their behavior as sinful and confessed.

Even much later, eastern European slaves were quite common in the Moslem world. Ehud Toledano, in a study of slavery in the Ottoman empire, notes that between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries over three-quarters of the slaves sold in the empire were of European origin. Slaves from Africa were quite scarce. Only toward the end of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century did African slaves begin to outnumber those of European origin.

A bit further east, an 1890s photograph of fifty-three young eunuchs (the oldest possibly in his late teens) in the palace of the shah of Persia had only four of the fifty-three as possibly of African origin. The rest were clearly European or central Asian in origin. African eunuchs were highly prized in Persia, but were far more expensive than those of more local origin.

[NaturalEunuch]

A fascinating read, thank you. Here is the above-mentioned photo, which is assuredly in the public domain.