Ottoman History Podcast - The Sultan's Eunuch

Episode Date: August 5, 2018

Episode 369 with Jane Hathaway hosted by Sanja Kadrić and Emily Neumeier Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud For more than three centuries, a cadre of African eunuchs were responsible for guarding the Ottoman harem at the imperial palace in Istanbul. The head of this group, the Chief Harem Eunuch, emerged as an extremely influential individual at the court. This was especially true during the crisis years of the long seventeenth century, when the palace became divided along ever-shifting lines of political factions. In this episode, we trace the long trajectory of the office of Chief Harem Eunuch, from its establishment—coinciding with the sultan’s decision to begin residing full-time in the harem—until the ultimate demise of the empire. In particular, we highlight the high degree of mobility for these eunuchs, beginning with their initial journey from Ethiopia to the shores of the Bosphorus, and later on using their position to maintain strong ties to Cairo as well as the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. A liminal figure in every sense of the word—in terms of gender, race, and his duties at the court—the Chief Harem Eunuch offers unique insights into the nature of political life at the Ottoman palace. « Click for More »

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Emily Neumeier. I'm Sonia Kadric. History Podcast. I'm Emily Neumeier. I'm Sonia Kadric. And today we're speaking with Dr. Jane Hathaway, a professor at the History Department at The Ohio State University. Her work probably does not need much introduction for quite a few of our listeners. That being said, she has previously worked primarily on the Arab provinces in the Ottoman Empire, especially Egypt and Yemen. But today we'll be talking about her new book project, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem, which is out this year from Cambridge University Press. So Dr. Hathaway, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Can you give us an introduction to who the Chief Harem Eunuch is? Why did you, and why were you attracted to this particular figure in

the Ottoman court to write about for your new project? I'll start with who he was and then get to why I decided to write about him, which is kind of a convoluted story. He was the head of the several hundred eunuchs, mainly from Ethiopia, who guarded the entrance to the imperial harem in Topkapi Palace. The office was officially created in the late 16th century and existed really until the Young Turk Revolution in 1909. Now, how I decided to do this topic is an interesting story, at least I think so, because it really happened by accident. As far back as my dissertation research, nearly 30 years ago, on Egypt under the Ottomans, I was reading mihimmes, that is, orders mainly from the sultan to the governor

of Egypt and associated grandees and administrators. And it seemed to me that every other muhimeh started out, the Agha Darussadeh has sent a petition to my imperial threshold. And I had no idea who this person was. Since it was an Agha, I thought maybe it was the Janissary Agha. So I did a little secondary research and realized it was the chief eunuch. And I thought, why and how does the chief eunuch know exactly what is going on in Egypt? Right down to the names of individual grandees, what tax farms they hold, how much they owe in taxes, et cetera. And then I learned that he was the superintendent of the Imperial Pius Foundations

for Mecca and Medina. These were properties all over the empire that were endowed to the holy cities, and the grain in particular came from villages in Egypt. And that's why he knew exactly what was going on, because the local notables or the provincial notables held the tax farms of these grain-producing villages. I had a chapter on the chief eunuch and his ties to Egypt in my first book, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt. And in the back of my mind was, one of these days I'll write an entire book just on the office of chief harem eunuch, but other things got in the way, and only now am I finally publishing the result. Having looked through the book, it struck me how this individual is so important,

especially in the politics of the palace in the late 16th and 17th and 18th centuries. How is it that we really haven't had a close look at this particular individual? That's a very good question. I think the main reason is that this official's influence went way beyond the palace. And so part of the difficulty of approaching the topic is that it's not just a palace topic or a court topic. On the other hand, it's not just a palace topic or a court topic. On the other hand, it's not just a provincial topic or a topic limited to Egypt or the holy cities. It required me to expand my scope from Egypt in the first instance to the palace and to keep apprised of the linkages between the palace and the provinces to all the various grandees, not only in Egypt, but also in Damascus,

in Bulgaria, and Romania. And it's just a huge topic. It really does encompass the entire empire over several centuries. And I think that's the difficulty. You certainly find treatments of the office in various subjects, various studies, notably the late I.H. Usain Charshal's classic Ottoman palace institutions. But to the best of my knowledge, and there are treatments of harem eunuchs from a more or less popular standpoint, but focused entirely on the palace and the harem, not on his broader empire-wide role. In that vein, I was wondering if you could also say a few words about to what extent this is, the book itself is almost a world history project as well, because one of the things that I was really struck by is that you mentioned that this is a deeply rooted

institution, and that it's not just an Ottoman institution either. So could you say a few words about eunuchs throughout the world and throughout world history? Right, yeah, I wouldn't call it a world history work, but the introductory chapter, and maybe chapter two, which is mainly about Africa, certainly have a quasi-global scope. To put the institution of Ottoman harem eunuchs in some kind of context, I had to look at the use of unix elsewhere in the world throughout history and in other islamic empires and what's amazing is that uh unix were a really essential part of court life in virtually all old world civilizations from at least the neo-syrians so we're talking 10th century BCE approximately, right up through the end of the Ottoman Empire and the end of Imperial China. And there seems to have been virtually no

question that eunuchs were necessary, as brutal as the operation, as castration was, and as enslavement was, because virtually all of them were slaves being wrenched away from their families and homelands. It was seen as absolutely necessary to the secure operation of the court, at least outside of Western Europe and Russia, I suppose. One theory is that it's a byproduct of absolutist empires, that because the ruler is in constant danger of facing a rebellion, you can't let anyone close to him who is not an immediate family member and who has any kind of ties in the surrounding society, whether it's offspring or ties to landed nobility or anything like that.

And so castration, in a certain certain sense is a kind of security clearance. It might sound rather brutal, and people today, because we have not had eunuchs in, well, to be quite honest, the end of castration does not go back all that far, the 1950s in Saudi Arabia approximately. But today it really is an unknown institution, and so people are very weirded out when they hear about this and are certain it has to be some kind of horrific punishment and that no one could live any kind of sane or normal life after having been castrated.

And of course they did not have a choice about it, and yet it was an accepted institution. Could you tell us a little bit more about the emergence of the chief harem eunuch? When do we really see this position really take its shape and really becomes a notable figure within court life at the Topkapi? It really goes back to the reign of Murad III in the late 16th century, and the watershed moment seems to be around 1588, when he makes the head of the harem eunuchs the supervisor of the imperial pious foundations for Mecca and Medina, the Avcaf ul-Haramayn. So right from the beginning, the office of chief eunuch was attached to these pious endowments, and that means that right from the beginning, it really was an imperial office. It

was not just limited to the palace. And in chapter four of the book, which is about the first official chief harem eunuch, Habeshi Mehmed A, I speculate on why Murad may have done this. Murad is the first sultan actually to move into the harem, that is to spend most of his waking hours when he's in the palace inside the harem, as opposed to in his privy chamber, the Hasoda, in the third court. So what that means is that he's surrounded in a way that previous sultans had not been by harem eunuchs and, of course, by women. The third court pages cannot come into the harem to see him. And it's sort of a complex of those issues, his movement into the harem, the superintendency of the pious foundations.

And, of course, it's the beginning of the crisis period, which really takes off after Murad's death. When you start to see very young sultans, children, teenagers, 20-somethings, who die very early, who leave heirs who are children themselves or mentally unstable in some way. And so this is the beginning of what used to be called the Sultanate of Women, where the power vacuum is filled by these politically astute women, the Sultan's favorite concubine and mother, often in alliance with the chief eunuch. So that's the beginning of the harem as a locus of political authority and the inevitable formation of harem-based factions within the palace. And this move of the sultan into this other architectural space within the palace also creates a source of conflict or competition with the other,

because the chief harem eunuch is not the only eunuch in the palace. There's this chief threshold eunuch as well, who's in charge of the third court. So could you talk a little bit more about that? I mean, the chief threshold eunuch was already an important position before. Yes. That is an interesting subject. Probably one of the most famous chief threshold eunuchs, or Babusade Asa, Kappa Asa, more customarily, was Ghazan Feraga, the Venetian renegade captive who has the dubious distinction of being one of the few palace eunuchs who voluntarily had himself castrated as an adult, he and his brother. So he could remain close to Selim II when Selim became sultan. And so Ghazan Fer was actually the superintendent of the Avqaf

al-Haramayn until Murad took the superintendency away from him and gave it to Habashi Mehmed A. So it set up an interesting rivalry that's kind of an undercurrent for a couple of centuries between the harem eunuchs, most of whom are African on the one hand, and the eunuchs of the third court, including the Hasoda, the privy chamber, who are mostly white, either from the Balkans or especially later on as we get into the late 17th century from the Caucasus. And I have a lengthy discussion of that black-white dichotomy, and it's definitely a form, there is definitely a form of color prejudice or even racism. I call it a form of indigenous racism. It draws on these Ottoman attitudes toward color, race, ethnic group

that are not exactly the same as what we're distressingly familiar with in the U.S. today. that are not exactly the same as what we're distressingly familiar with in the U.S. today. But it's one layer of a multi-layered kind of palace factionalism. So you have different factions within the harem, led by, for example, the sultan's mother and the sultan's favorite concubine. Just for one example, Norbanu Sultan, Murad's mother, versus Safiye Sultan, his favorite concubine, or of course, the most infamous example, Qasim Sultan, the favorite concubine of Ahmed I, versus Turhan Sultan, the favorite concubine of Ibrahim. And that was really just deadly, poisonous rivalry. So that's one layer. And then on the other hand, you have harem versus third court eunuchs. lair and then on the other hand you have harem versus third court eunuchs and then as if that weren't enough you have a militarization of the palace factions because the imperial soldiery

the janissaries and the sepahis or cavalry take sides in this harem factionalism so suddenly you have the addition of deadly force to the equation so So in terms of factionalism, when I was looking through the book, it really struck me just how complex these rivalries are. And honestly, it was even hard for me to just keep track of it, this sort of, you know, this guy doesn't like that guy, but then he's friends with that guy, and then he got exiled, and then this guy got killed, and then this guy backstabbed this other guy. Yeah, I'm wondering to what extent that sort of level of really complex social and political networks and sort of mapping all that out is really an inherent part of the project. What are your reflections on trying to approach that

as a researcher and as a writer? How do you explain that level of complexity in a book to a reading audience? That strikes me as a real challenge. That's a very good question. It was a challenge in researching and writing the book. And in fact, chapter 5, about the crisis years of the 17th century, was the hardest chapter to write and to revise.

I was revising it in a major way, almost right up until I sent the manuscript to press. That's the chapter in which I outlined these four layers of rivalry between different harem factions, between the harem eunuchs and the third court eunuchs, between the Janissaries and the Sepahis, and also between this East-West ethno-regional factionalism, which is also in the mix. And it took me a while to conceive of it as four different layers of factionalism that don't always line up convincingly. That was one of the last revisions I did, mainly under the influence of the chronicler Mustafa Naima, who was writing in the early 18th century and had a certain agenda, I really wanted to see it as a binary harem versus Hasoda factionalism, because that's the way he

portrays it. And of course, since about 14 years ago, I published a book on bilateral factionalism in Egypt and Yemen. I was very excited when I saw this. And then I realized, in part thanks to one of the reader's reports from Cambridge, that this didn't really work out. It didn't divide that neatly. And in addition, for clarity, my retired colleague Stephen Dale, who I have to give a shout out to him because he read the whole manuscript last summer, shout out to him because he read the whole manuscript last summer. And he pointed out that the narrative about the factions is very complicated. At the time, it was much more complicated than it is now. And he said, he suggested I have a chart or a table showing the factions. And I thought, well, how am I going to do this? So I tried constructing one huge chart

that would carry it through the whole book. And then I realized that's not going to work because the factions change particularly where the third court is concerned in the late 17th century the Silahtar becomes much more important relative to the chief threshold unit than he was in the 16th century. So there's a series of chapters mainly focusing on palace politics, each of which starts with a table showing the different parts of the palace, the harem, the third court, all the subdivisions, and then giving the titles of the positions, and in italics, the individuals who held those positions who are mentioned in the chapter, and that was the solution I came up with. So I'm hoping it gives the hypothetical reader some kind of hook into this material. And on the other hand, I think it really helps to, as you do, to just emphasize

that this is something that is fluid and is constantly changing. And if anything, I just got this sense of this deluge of data and just how in some periods, I guess during the 17th century, it seemed like every other year things were changing. People were in, some people were out. were out yes well it was a period of crisis and kind of a shaking down of social and political and economic institutions and so once you get into the 18th century there's much more stability and regularization but the 17th century is a real challenge to deal with as a writer for that reason the cast of characters keeps changing. The relationship among them keeps changing. It's often hard to tell who's on first, so to speak. But there is real excitement.

Some of the most intriguing and weirdest anecdotes occur in the 17th century, and they're recounted by the chroniclers uh one of them of course is the death of chris m which is legendary um and there are various versions of it you know she's 62 years old she has the janissaries on her side and tur Turhan wants to get rid of her because she's completely dominating the court of the extremely young, only seven years old, Mehmed IV, Turhan's son. And so at the climactic moment, the harem eunuchs chase Qasem through the harem.

And there's one version of the story in which the chief eunuch, Suleiman A, actually strangles her with her own braids. Whether this actually happened or not, who knows, but he was definitely complicit in her death. And just what Stephen Dale pointed out is that the threat of violence is always there and in this case it invaded the harem itself. A less violent but equally poignant moment in the 17th century is when Mehmed IV is deposed in 1687 and before he's actually overthrown by these rebels, his chief eunuch, the long-serving Yusuf A,

is deposed. And this wasn't all that unusual an occurrence for chief eunuchs. They'd be taken out of office and sent to Egypt to live a comfortable retirement. And Yusuf thought that's what was going to happen to him. So he starts out making his slow, scenic way to Egypt. He goes to Anatolia first, and he's stopped outside Iznik by this group of rebels, and they tell him the sultan has been overthrown, and you have to go back to Istanbul so we can inventory and confiscate your property. So they take him prisoner. They put him in the kuzkulisi, the maiden's tower in the middle of the Bosphorus, and they tally up all his property in the imperial capital. And then the new sultan,

Suleiman II, contacts the governor of Egypt, the new governor of Egypt, whom he has appointed, and says, confiscate all Yusuf Aga's property in Cairo and sell it off, including his slaves, his Mamluks. So Yusuf Aga has this poignant scene where he tells the rebels, I was the chief harem eunuch, now I'm just a Tancarush African slave. I have this soft spot for Yusuf because he was chief eunuch for 16 years. There's no image of him. There's no painting of him that survives, to the best of my knowledge. And he tends to be overshadowed by Haji Bashir Agha, by Habeasheh Mehmed, by Haji Mustafa.

And yet he was one of the longest serving and most economically and politically active chief eunuchs. one of the longest serving and most economically and politically active chief eunuchs. And when he gets to Cairo, because he's broke, he has nothing, he kind of has to reinvent himself as a local grandee. So he's actually competing with these Janissary commanders and Sanjak Bez in Egypt, four positions connected to the pious foundations for Mecca and Medina. And when he first gets to Egypt, he's not that old. He's maybe in his early 60s, which, you know, usually the chief eunuch, when he was deposed, was quite old, you know, 80s, even 90s. And so going to Cairo was like going to a nursing home, I suppose. But Yusuf was still pretty young and vigorous. And nobody knew when he died

until I came up with a date that's mentioned in one of the Arabic chronicles, a local chronicle by Ahmed Chalabi, who lived in Cairo. And he gives the date 1717. So he was in exile for 30 years. And Ahmed Chalabi puts it in his chronicle Yusuf dies and then the next thing he puts down is Hajj Abishur becomes chief haramunic that's like out with the old and with the new well in some ways I think it's good that you're uh at least somehow in this book, maybe Yusuf is finally getting some kind of retribution. So anyway, on that note, I think we'll take a short break. We'll meet you back after music interlude. So So So So

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So So Welcome back to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Emily Neumeier, and I'm here with Sanja Kazric, and we are speaking with Dr. Jane Hathaway about her new book on the chief eunuch of the Ottoman harem. Dr. Hathaway, one of the things that I was particularly interested in, and you mentioned this in your last comment, is Cairo and its importance to the chief harem eunuch, and really a huge group of eunuchs, not just as a source of revenue, but also as, I mean, you mentioned it as a retirement home. So I was wondering if you could say a few words about why Cairo was so important.

Yeah, of course, that's where it all started. I was coming at this topic originally from the perspective of Ottoman Egypt, and I wondered about that myself. a lifelong connection to Egypt, whether they wanted it or not. They were almost all castrated in Upper Egypt, brought in from the Horn of Africa, and castrated, it appears, in Coptic villages in Upper Egypt. And then they usually were purchased by the Ottoman governor of Egypt or one of the provincial notables, the only people who could afford Ethiopian eunuchs who were some of the most expensive slaves on the market.

And so their initial education, perhaps learning Ottoman Turkish, learning Arabic, learning about Islam, about household politics, etc., would have been in Cairo. The normal thing was for the governor or one of the grandees to present one of these eunuchs to the palace. And so that's the initial connection to Egypt. Then you have supervision of the pious foundations for Mecca and Medina, which draws so very much of their revenue from Egypt, so that gives him a sort of career-long connection. And then the retirement. Why send a eunuch back to Egypt? Part of it is just to get him far away from the capital. He wasn't officially supervising

the pious foundations when he was deposed and in exile. But he could, I suppose, have a certain role in their provincial supervision, like the people on the spot who held the tax farms. And there was the retirement community aspect. In the 17th century, you start to see a critical mass of retired harem eunuchs or deposed harem eunuchs, not just chief eunuchs, but all ranks in one particular neighborhood of Cairo, just west of Cairo's citadel. And it becomes a recognized phenomenon. Naima, in particular, recounts an incident in 1654, which he calls the Ethiopia incident or Habeshvakus. 1654, which he calls the Ethiopia Incident, or Habesh Vakasa. And so there is a military rebellion in the very distant province of Habesh, which Giancarlo Casale has called Ottoman Eritrea, which is pretty accurate. And not to go into too much detail on this rebellion, but it's

essentially an absentee governor who is threatened by local rebels. And so the governor, who has not even been to Habesh, he's camped out in Mecca, contacts the governor of Egypt and says, send some soldiers down there to put down this rebellion. And so it's 1654. This was not a good time to be an Ottoman soldier, no matter where you were based. They were serving constantly, their salaries were usually debased, it was a time of internal rebellion, and so the soldiers had had enough and they essentially told the governor, we don't want to do this, we always

put down this kind of revolt, it's all the way down in Habesh. And then, according to Naima, they said, why don't you send the harem eunuchs to do it? They have so much money. They get so much from the sultan's treasury that they ought to do something. And so it surprised me because it told me that they saw the harem eunuchs in Cairo as a discrete population and also a privileged one that did not pull their own weight. And they also kind of identified them with Habesh, with Ethiopia. There's an implication that they regard them as having a connection to that region. And so what happened is that the followers of the harem eunuchs were insulted by this, and they actually, there was a little street fight that broke out between the supporters of the eunuchs and these soldiers, and at one point the eunuchs themselves

protested. So, you know, you could imagine these elderly Ethiopian men wandering through the streets carrying signs that say, hell no, we won't go, or something like that. And then ultimately it was all papered over, and the soldiers did go down and put down this rebellion. But it was one particular neighborhood. There were houses that circulated among the eunuchs. And I drew a great deal on the seminal research of the late André Raymond, who quite literally wrote the book on Ottoman Cairo. And he actually identified various Grandi houses in this region. It's right around this pool that no longer exists called Birka Dalfil, the elephant pool,

because it looked like an elephant's head. And there was just this concentration of eunuch houses, and it became quite clear to me that they were passed down, as it were, from one generation of eunuchs to another. So they stayed in eunuch hands. You know, if you were exiled to Cairo, you would have identified the house you were going to stay in in advance. You would have your agent down there checking out the real estate, so that by the time you arrived, if you weren't unlucky like Yusuf and didn't have all your property confiscated, you'd have this very nice place to stay. You'd have a retinue of slaves. You'd have a very nice retirement setup that you would have planned for. Because most chief

haramuniks did expect to be exiled to Cairo. They did not expect to die in office or to be executed or anything like that, even though it did happen to some of them. Speaking of Ethiopia, one of the things that I found particularly interesting is this concept of permanence of separation that you mentioned in the book. So this idea that many of these eunuchs who were taken as slaves as young boys and castrated, had really no contact with their families or their initial familial networks. And to what extent this really differs with, I mean, for example, Dev Shidme recruits, who we know to have retained heavy contacts with their native regions, with their families, brought them into service. I know there are examples of eunuchs who did this as well, but for the most part, the sense that we get is that there was a permanence of separation

for these individuals and how that impacted them. Yeah, that is true above all for the eunuchs from the Horn of Africa. It seems not to have been as much the case for eunuchs taken from the Devshirme, and there were some, particularly in the 16th and early 17th centuries, who were recruited through the Devshirme and somehow were selected for castration. They might retain contacts, as other Devshirme recruits did, with their families and places of origin. The same with eunuchs from the Caucasus, and also eunuchs like Ghazan Ferrer, who was Venetian, who very famously brought quite a large part of his own family to the court. For the Ethiopian eunuchs and other eunuchs from the Horn of Africa, this seems not to have been the case.

I can't really come up with a hard and fast reason why. I can't really come up with a hard and fast reason why. In the book, I suggest that the African slave trade, the East African slave trade, was massive, chaotic, and anonymous, and that it was just not possible to retain this kind of contact. On the other hand, you do find things like a eunuch based at the tomb of the prophet in Medina who was sent to Ethiopia to recruit other eunuchs for service to the prophet's tomb and for the mosque in Mecca. So whether or not he actually contacts members of his kin group or the village or town where he lived, we can't know. members of his kin group or the village or town where he lived, we can't know. This is reported by the Scottish traveler James Bruce, who famously trekked through Ethiopia in order to, quote

unquote, discover the source of the Nile. So there is a sense, I don't want to say there's no sense of going back to your native place, but for whatever reason, there doesn't seem to be continued contact with the family of origin or at least none that we know about and this is true even though part of the horn of africa was under ottoman rule for part of the 16th and 17th centuries so as an art historian i'm i'm always my intent is always up for discussions about imagery and architecture. And you mentioned that Yusufa, we don't have any images of him. But as you do talk about in the book, we have quite a few images in other commemorative buildings left behind that you talk about.

Maybe we can focus on one particular image that I think is quite striking. And it's actually on the website, included with this episode. So our listeners can go and check it out as well. Why don't you talk a little bit about this image we have in front of us here. Right. It's a double folio or double page miniature from a translation, a Turkish translation of the Shahnameh, the great Iranian national epic. And it shows a scene that is not actually from the Shahnameh itself. It's a picture of Osman II, the sultan from 1618 to 22,

enthroned in front of his court. And what's so interesting is that the picture is divided in two with Sultan Osman and the African harem eunuchs on the right, and on the left, the white eunuchs of the third court, and the three non-eunuch officers, including the Silatar, of the Sultan's Privy Chamber. And just the division in personnel and color, the architectural division, is very striking. And Haji Mustafa, who was chief eunuch during the first couple of years of Osman's reign before being deposed and sent to Cairo, and he later came back after Osman was dead, is at Osman's left. And if you look at him versus the other African eunuchs, including his assistant, who's a little bit farther down the picture, he's very high up in vertical terms, higher than anyone else in the picture except the

Sultan himself. And he's portrayed, as he always is, as a very pale, gray-skinned man with delicate features, whereas his assistant is always depicted holding a rosary, holding a tesbih, worry beads, and is darker and wearing a smaller turban. And there is some physical differentiation among the crowd of African eunuchs behind the assistant. They don't just look like one indistinguishable mask. Yeah, it really is striking in this image, you know, with this double page that there's, with the binding cutting right down the middle, that there really is this

very stark separation between these two groups of the threshold eunuchs and the harem eunuchs. Is there anything else you'd like to say about the depiction of the eunuch in general in manuscript painting or architecture? Well, there is a chapter of the book devoted to what I call memorialization of the chief eunuch, so it's miniature paintings and tombstones for the most part. I was very interested in how African eunuchs are portrayed in manuscripts because it's part of this whole racial and color consciousness issue. And you do see it changing, although it's hard to draw any hard and fast conclusions. But what it seemed to me, and I'm not an art historian, as you know, it seemed to me that you see the sort of depiction of African eunuchs physiognomies

changing and becoming more detailed from the late 16th century, when Habeshi Mehmedah is sort of painted as a very generic gray or brownish gray-skinned person through the 17th century to the 18th century when Haja Bashir appears numerous times in the very famous Surname of the painter Levni and he looks a very certain way. It almost seems as if there's some attempt to portray his features quote-unquote accurately and those of other African harem eunuchs to the extent one can tell and I have to choose my words carefully here but it it almost seems as if Levney is trying to make a subtle distinction in facial characteristics between harem eunuchs and non-eunuch populations of various kinds. So it was very interesting just to see how this portrayal develops. And the 17th

century, as in so many other ways, seems to be the turning point where you really start to see a change. And it really begins with Haji Mustafaafa speaking of a haji bashir we have also on the website we have an image of one of bashir's complexes architectural complexes in in istanbul near the topkopa palace can tell us a little bit more about about that foundation yes he founded it in 1745 so just a year before he died. And it is near the Gulhane tramway stop. It's a very nice little foundation. It's been restored. And it consisted originally of a mosque,

Naqshbandi's Sufi convent or lodge, a Quran school, a Sabil or public fountain. And the most interesting thing thing on the right side of the mosque is the book depot, like a little place where Bashir cached his books, which were part of a library. That is the basis for the Hajj-e-Bashir classification in Sulaymaniyah library today. There were something like a thousand books in it. They were inventoried in the 19th century under Abdelhamid II. But it's very interesting to go into this cute little mosque, and you look to the right of the mihrab, and there are these

double doors, and over the top, the common library inscription, Feeha QUTUB KRIMA, or Inside Our Valuable Books. And so it could not have been the library itself. It must have been just storage for the books. And it makes some sense. You know, you put them right inside the mosque, that's where they're likely, most likely to be safe. But it just underlines the fact that Haji Bashir, like many other chief harem eunuchs, was a bibliophile and was a patron of intellectual culture. And also a patron of architecture. I mean, there's all these other, there's multiple foundations that you write about, not only in Istanbul. Yes, Cairo, Bulgaria, and the most fascinating one, he endowed a lighthouse in the little town of Sulina, Romania.

If you watch Mutasemusil, that's where Nicarca is supposed to be from. It's the easternmost point of Romania, right on the black, where the Danube meets the Black Sea. And because of the dangers of shipping, the hazards, that's why he founded this lighthouse. that's why he founded this lighthouse. Well, speaking of the imagery or the shaping of the image of the Chief Haramunic, and speaking of Muteshem Yuzil, I have to ask, what's your take on the representation of the Chief Haramunic figure in these types of popular modern soap operas? Well, where do I begin?

First of all, as both of you know, I have watched all of Magician Musial and Magician Musial Cosim, and I have to say it's not the world's most accurate depiction. Well, yeah. First of all, there are virtually no African eunuchs. There's one who is supposed to be Gulbahar Sultan's faithful eunuch, although he's a very statuesque man with a stentorian kind of James Earl Jones voice, which presumably a eunuch would not have had because their voices never broke. I mean, I enjoy the characterizations. Who doesn't love Sun Bol A, the chief eunuch in the original series? It's a great characterization by the actor. In Mutashim Yuzil Kursim, there's an actual historical figure as chief harem eunuch,

Haji Mustafa, who was in actual fact, as we've said, one of the most powerful chief eunuchs in Ottoman history. The inaccuracy, there are two things. First of all, the actor who plays him is not African. He's kind of olive skinned, but not African. And second, he's around until Qasim is killed when the actual Haji Mustafa died in 1624. So he's kind of like a zombie eunuch for 27 years. So he's not the one that strangled her with her braids in that case? No, that's Suleyman who was himself chief harem eunuch, but by that time Haja Mustafa was long dead and buried next to the tomb of Abu Ayyub.

So as Muhtesha Museum takes us into the 21st and the 20th century, one of the things that Emily and I both found incredibly striking in the book is the story of Nadir Aga, which in many ways seems to sort of exemplify this idea of the eunuch and post-Ottoman Turkish society. And as Emily mentioned at the very start, most of us are sort of, the idea of a eunuch in the 20th, in the 21st century is very jarring to us, and we feel like we're very far away from it. But as the story demonstrates, that's not the case at all. So I was wondering if you could give us that anecdote as well. give us that anecdote as well. Right. Nader A was never himself chief eunuch. He was Musahib or companion, actually, Musahib-i-Thani or Musahib-i-Sani, second companion to Sultan

Abdulhamid II. And his career exemplifies the fact that the actual official chief eunuch becomes less important as we go through the reforms of the 19th century, and these companions become more important. You also have the movement of the court out of Topkapı to Dolmabahçe, Çuran, and finally Yıldız, and with the spatial change, that changes the way, the dynamic of the harem eunuchs. So Nader Ağ was very young when the young turk revolution occurred i think he was about 17. his own memoirs give you an exact picture of how old he was because he never wrote formal memoirs but he gave interviews to various newspapers in later life and his accounts vary from one to another. So he turned against Abd al-Hamid and actually saved himself when the Young Turks took over by providing them with what amounted to dirt on his master, his former master. They might well have executed him had he not been willing to do

that. And then, like so many harem eunuchs, after the Young Turks came to power, they basically ended the harem institution. The concubines were all freed, and an attempt was made to reunite them with their families, most of whom were Circassian refugees at that point in Ottoman territory. And then the harem eunuchs more or less had to fend for themselves. Nader, it's kind of interesting, when he was still at the court, Abdulhamid made an attempt to find his birth family in Ethiopia. They were Oromo, what used to be called Gala, this population that today is on strike in Ethiopia. They complained of persecution. that today is on strike in Ethiopia.

They complain of persecution. So from the southern part of Ethiopia. And at the time, Ethiopia was in turmoil. The ruler had been overthrown in a rebellion. There was a threat of Italian invasion. And so Abdulhamid wrote to the ruler at the time, Menelik II, and tried to get some kind of information about Nader's sisters. And Nader received this package from Ethiopia that said, unfortunately, we could not find them. but here are, I believe it was a rhinoceros tusk. They claim the rhinoceros was killed near Nader's ancestral village.

And he later found that his sisters had fled to Kenya, and he didn't see them again. They died before he could be reunited with them. So it's the one instance I know of where an African eunuch actually tried to relocate his family of origin. Then in later life, Nader actually lived into the 1950s. He died in 1957, and he bought a house in Goztepe on the Asian side and opened a dairy. He bought a herd of Crimean cows and really did make a go of it.

He claims to have been the first person in Istanbul to have delivered milk in bottles. There you go. So living on the Asian side was not uncommon for former harem eunuchs if they stayed in Istanbul. I speculate on the reasons why. I mean, if you were a eunuch, it was pretty hard to hide the fact. I mean, because of the hormonal, the lack of hormonal changes, your physiognomy would look a certain way. Your voice would be high.

You'd be abnormally thin or obese. People could tell. And perhaps in the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman collapse, you know, people associated with the court were not exactly welcomed with open arms. On the other hand, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk did have some kind of former palace or provincial court eunuch looking after his adopted daughters.

Oh, I want to add one thing, which is that there are a few eunuchs of East African and or Indian origin, maybe three, still left in Medina in Saudi Arabia. Slavery in Saudi Arabia did not end until 1962, so apparently castration was still going on into the 50s. castration was still going on into the 50s um they're referred there's a photo exhibit that was done by a saudi photographer in 2012 of the last of these men yeah they're quite elderly by now but the photographer just refers to them as the guardians and he said they were almost saintly like they they came in to have their photographs taken they said nothing they seem to be in another world like an otherworldly presence exuding the aura of the tomb but those are the last ones that's the end of the institution well thank you so much for taking us through such a such an interesting figure in ottoman history

this liminal figure at the ottoman ha. So, yeah, this has been fascinating. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much for joining us today on the podcast. The pleasure was all mine. Thank you. This episode is part of a larger series on the Ottoman History Podcast, Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World. If you go to the website, ottomahistorypodcast.com, you can find other episodes that are related to this theme, including the recent podcast by Leslie Pierce, where she recounts the story of Hürrem Sultan, or Roxelana. You can also find the images and further bibliography for further reading for this episode, again, on our website, autumnhistorypodcast.com.

So that's it for now. And until next time, take care.