The Rest Is History - 45. Top Ten Eunuchs

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook cross their legs and rank the best Eunuchs in history. From religious fanatics to operatic singers, they discuss the grisly glory these young men ‘enjoyed’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. In the 10th century, a time of stark religious divides in Europe, nothing was more authentically multicultural than the business of supplying eunuchs. German warriors on the eastern flank of Christendom, fighting the wars of the Saxon emperors, would take huge numbers of Slavs captive. The most attractive boys among them would then be taken to Verdun, where Jewish surgeons would castrate them,

removing the testicles and sometimes the penis. The boys would then be transported across the Pyrenees, taken across Spain to the Islamic Emirates in the south, and sold into the palaces there. Welcome to The Rest Is History. With me is Dominic Sandbrook. Dominic, crossing your legs this is quite a painful subject isn't it tom i i enjoyed researching this in a weird way but i

also found it very hard to have my dinner afterwards um yes we had we had meatballs unfortunately so it wasn't ideal but there there are there are so many kind of gruesome jokes on this and and yet of course it is at as it were, a tale of considerable suffering. It is. And I guess it's the only way we can, the only reason we can do it, Tom, is because it doesn't happen anymore. Because if it was a living scandal, then you wouldn't do a sort of semi-humorous podcast about it. Because it is an utterly gruesome business isn't it although of course i mean the the the looking on the positives um as we will see um becoming a eunuch wasn't

always totally 100 bad news because it was also a way to becoming um a very significant player in the kind of societies where eunuchs had considerable power and so basically what we decided was that we would we did the top 10 weird wars didn't we um and today we're going to do the top 10 eunuchs yes we've got i mean how could how to narrow it down to 10 is an interesting question because there are so many great eunuchs but i think we've got a good selection well at least i have so you've chosen five and i've chosen five um do you want to uh kick off sure well i'm gonna kick off with the eunuch's eunuch as i'd like to think of him the connoisseur's eunuch uh so he's a he's a fellow called baguas so some listeners will know of baguas because

basically he he ends up being picked up by alex Great. So Alexander has invaded Persia. He's defeated the Persian king, Darius, and he's sort of charging up through the Persian empire. And he ends up near the shores of the Caspian in a place called Harkania. And there, according to the accounts of Alexander's life, he basically sort of picks up this guy who's been a eunuch for Darius now the Persians like almost all ancient empires had eunuchs they had eunuchs in their court and of course a eunuch is is useful to a to an emperor or to a king because they can't have children so they can't they're not really a rival they can't found a dynasty of their own so they are sort of seen as trustworthy in that sense they're sort of good hangers-on and baguas is a is clearly a young man we don't know that much about him um the sources say he was exceptional in beauty and in the very flower of boyhood

and ever we really don't know that much there's one source quintus curtius rufus who writes centuries after the event a roman writer and he says he basically paints a very unflattering portraits of baguette so he's cunning he is sort of feline he he has this big description of him outsmarting a local satrap called orsonese and basically poisoning Alexander's mind against him but it's very hard to know whether that there's any truth in that or whether that's just sort of a Roman projecting this stuff onto Alexandria onto the Persians and onto the Greeks you know this sort of cunning effeminate behavior so you don't know how much prejudice there is in this rather than actual sort of historical source material um there is a good story in

plutarch plutarch says that when alexander was coming back from india um he's just got back this dreadful sort of desert crossing and they have this big sort of basically they have a big piss up where they all get drunk and they all do singing and dancing alexander is absolutely loaded he's completely wasted and bagoas does a bit of singing and dancing and he wins a competition and the macedonian soldiers all shout and roar and tell alexander that he should kiss him and alexander he says says plutarch threw his arms around him and embraced him tenderly now what it's very hard to tell from all this is whether was baguas really alexander's lover as some people think he

may have been was he an interpreter a kind of go-between with the local persian notables who alexander met as he kind of went through the empire um but but what's interesting is that he is a romanticized eunuch so he's most famously the hero of mary reynolds book the persian boy so mary reynolds used him in a great, one of the centrepiece of her great trilogy about Alexander. She uses Bagoas as the narrator. So we're with Bagoas when he's castrated. We see Alexander

through this. We are so with Bagoas. Yeah, it's a terrible scene. Any male who has read that sequence, that's definitely you crossing your legs. But it's a really interesting one because Maryary reynolds was of course a gay writer so there's this sort of gay subtext in a lot of her ancient world books and in this the alexander baggis relationship is this sort of great love story isn't it so baggis is the one guy who really everybody else is a

conniving politician but baggis is the one person who loves alexander and is true to him and has no agenda and which is obviously completely the opposite of the way that the roman sources said quintus curtius rufus painted him as having this sort of colossal agenda i mean this sort of conniving foppish figure and i guess that that cuts to the heart as it were of the way we we sort of see eunuchs so people you know people had eunuchs because they thought they were reliable because they thought they could be trusted but for a lot of people there is some there was something inherently untrustworthy I think because or unnatural about a eunuch and that explains the sort of the dualism with which they've often been seen in

in historical sources so so mine following up on that is a roman eunuch and we don't know his real name but the name he was given was sporus yeah basically kind of greek for spunk so a kind of very cruel nickname um and he was uh not a slave but a free a free boy um who who got castrated by the emperor nero and he got castrated for a very particular reason which was that nero was was absolutely madly in love with his wife who had the fabulous name papaya sabina uh and and like pete townsend she said hope i die before i get old um this was her great thing she she's basically the kind of archetype for a lot of the myths And like Pete Townshend, she said, hope I die before I get old. This was her great thing. She's basically the kind of archetype for a lot of the myths about luxurious women that get projected onto Cleopatra.

So she's the one who supposedly bathed in asses. OK. She had a range of cosmetics that was the most fashionable in Rome. So men wanted to sleep with her. Women wanted to be her. She was just tremendously cutting edge. But she died. And the rumour was that she was pregnant with Nero's child. And Nero came in late from the races. She nagged him, Nero kicked her in the stomach, and the resulting miscarriage killed her. We don't know whether that's true, but it's definite that Nero's grief was on a titanic scale. And although marries again a kind of again of a

kind of very classy sophisticated Roman woman he missed Poppaea so badly that he wanted to have her physically with him and so he sends scouts out to look for someone who looks like Poppaea and they find this boy who looks like Poppaea so he's clearly incredibly beautiful young boy and that of course is a major reason for for castration is that you halt the the process of puberty um and the romans were very keen on that so there's all kinds of they they would rub um ants eggs on onto the armpits to stop hair from growing um and blood from lam's testicles onto the cheeks to stop the beard from growing but the most brutal thing that you did was was to castrate someone so this is what Nero does and so this this this poor boy gets called Papaya Sabina and gets dressed in Papaya's robes has his

hair done as Papaya had done and wherever Nero goes this this Sporus Poppaea goes and lives out the life not as a eunuch but as a wife and this is so so it's a kind of terrible story it's a terrible story and at one point shortly before Nero um gets toppled and commits suicide Poppaea Sporus gives to Nero an image of Proserpina being abducted by Pluto. So the daughter of the goddess of the harvest being raped by the god of death and taking down into the underworld. And you can see all the kind of psychological resonance there. And then when Nero dies, Papaius Bina is there with him kind of mourns him plays the role of the mourning wife gets picked up by um the the head of the Praetorians um so the imperial guard in Rome very very sinister guy called um Nymphidius Sabinus who claimed to be the illegitimate son of

Caligula um certainly if it was it narrated quite a lot of the unpleasantness. He wants to make himself emperor, and he seizes Sporus as a kind of trophy, as a kind of icon of imperial rule. He falls by the wayside. Galba, a kind of upstanding, upright figure who would have no time with eunuch brides, becomes emperor, but rapidly gets dispatched in turn gets succeeded by a guy called otho who had previously been papaya's husband and nero who got rid of him so that he could marry papaya he then picks up sporus papaya and obviously is transfixed by him her as well he he gets dispatched by a guy called Vitellius who then arrives in Rome

declares himself emperor and announces that um his what he's going to do with Sporus is put him into the arena and have him gang raped by presumably by by by gladiators dressed as Hades so to kind of replicate this thing at which point poor Sporus kills himself. Wow. That's not a good story. It's a horrible, horrible story that kind of reminds you of the scale of the brutality and the cruelty that could underpin.

How old is Sporus, Tom? Do you know how old he is? 12 or 13. I mean, just on the cusp of puberty, I would imagine. So maybe this is a very good moment quickly we've talked about two ancient eunuchs now what is it about i mean in your to you as an ancient historian what is it about eunuchs that made them so attractive to you know ancient courts why do people want them why is there this huge trade in them why are people you know they seem so um they seem so disturbing to us but clearly they weren't disturbing you

know weren't disturbing to alexander weren't disturbing to nero what is it about them well i i think we've touched on all of them they they they can't um they can't have sex or get women pregnant they can have sex they can have sex because it's often said eunuchs were great lovers but they can't have sex and have women get get women pregnant so archetypally they are used to guard harems as also as you said they can't have children again they can't have children so they can't they they are seen to be more loyal and as in the case of sporus and probably in the case of baguas i mean we would guess their physical beauty it's it's the idea of of keeping that physical beauty intact and not letting them kind of sprout whiskers or acne or whatever but the one other question that you raised um is that um so you said galba wasn't the kind of person who would have any time for eunuchs

so are there always people who think there's something wrong about them who are who are opposed on principle to eunuchism if that's a word yeah in the in the roman court definitely in the roman court they're seen as as sinister and oriental yeah um not the kind of thing that an upstanding roman would have and so they become um kind of counter-cultural for people who want to push things out so so mycenas augustus's um great advisor he's flanked by two eunuchs and this is a kind of mark of his willing that you know he's kind of tweaking the noses of the respectable establishment so janus who is um tiberius's consigliere um he has a he has a um a eunuch called boy Toy. Oh, my God. Obviously, you can see why he's... And again, he's...

You know, it's kind of pushing the edge out, I guess. But in due course, as we will see when we come to my next choice, actually, the Roman world becomes more habituated to eunuchs. But what's your next? OK, so I'm going far forward in time. Am I allowed to... We're sort of ranging about chronologically, aren't we?

So I'm going to rush forward, because this isn't somebody who is a sort of institutionalised eunuch. He's somebody who's a bit of a one-off. He's called Thomas H. Corbett, Boston Corbett. So I know you know this story, Tom, because we were talking about it earlier. So he is the man, basically, to cut the long story short, he's the man who shoots and kills John Wilkes Booth the assassin of Abraham Lincoln and so this is a different kind of unit because

this is somebody who is basically auto-castrated rather than had it done to him as a boy so it's quite a sad story this actually they're all sad stories in their way but this is a particularly disturbing story I think because he's clearly mad He's born in London in 1832. He moves to New York. I mean, he's as mad as a hatter because he is a hatter. I mean, that expression comes from the fact that a hatter's worked with a substance called mercury nitrate, and mercury nitrate would basically poison you,

and it could make you mentally ill. And that seems to be what happened to boston corbett so he he moves to boston which is why he gets the name the nickname boston um his wife has died in childbirth and that clearly has sort of pushed him over the edge in some way because he becomes a street preacher and basically what we would now think of as he's a kind of religious maniac really he's a sort of fundamentalist he he's he believes god is talking to him he believes the world is sinful and all this stuff and in 1858 he's walking down the street in boston when he's accosted by two prostitutes and we don't know exactly what happened but we know that

he found the encounter very disturbing in some way clearly presumably he was aroused or he was tempted or something so he goes back and and he reads his Bible for a bit. And he reads the bit in, I think, Matthew, where it's like, if your eye offends you, pluck it out. If your hand, you know, cut it off. And he thinks, well, obviously the thing to do is castrate myself. And he does with a pair of scissors. Don't listen to this while you're eating your dinner.

He basically cuts himself open and takes his testicles out. Then, unbelievably unbelievably he goes and he goes out for a meal he goes out to like a restaurant or something and then he goes to a prayer meeting and only after that does he check into does he basically go to hospital and say oh by the way i'm i'm hideously mutilated can you please sort me out so after that he joins the union army um he's he's incredibly insubordinate he's always in trouble because because of his religious mania basically so when people give him orders he often disobeys them because he says god's given him a different order he's always completely saying he doesn't want to obey his officers because they're swearing or

drinking or something um and he is the guy is he's among the people who are sent to capture john wilkes booth and they're told bring him back alive don't shoot him he shoots him so he gets in trouble for that but he then sort of trades on that he goes around you know we were talking in our wild west podcast about the about the media in america in this period and he's a celebrity he goes and gives talks as the man who shot John Woods Booth. But that all sort of ends in tears. He becomes a hatter again. He becomes a preacher.

He basically becomes a sort of itinerant madman. At one point, he's the porter of the Kansas House of Representatives, a job he loses because he's sort of madly muttering to himself and waving a gun around. And even in Kansas, which is kind of lawless in those days people think this is a bit much and this is not ideal kind of porter behavior um and we don't really know people think he probably died in a forest fire in minnesota as a sort of sort of loony it's a very very sad and strange story um but he so that's another reason for cast for castration isn't it is religious mania yeah i think those are the two regions i i've got more religious maniacs to

come tom i've got more i've got i've got all the religious maniacs you might want so so there were there were um the priests of kibble the mother goddess right thought that they were called by the mother goddess to castrate themselves and so this was very much their gimmick was that they would castrate themselves and then roam the streets waving their their testicles in in the air so that that was very much that was all part of the fun yeah um but i i've also got someone who reputedly castrated himself um because he he felt that um christ wanted it um and that is the great church father origin ah yes yeah I think the the most brilliant of the church fathers born in in Alexandria in the late second century AD

and he more than anyone else fuses these two great traditions that you have in Alexandria of the Greek and the Jewish so he's a brilliant philosopher he's completely schooled in Hebrew scripture and he kind of blends the two to to create the kind of basically Christian theology so essentially he's the as much as anyone does he's the father of Christian theology so he's a brilliant brilliant man and the story is according to Eusebius who is a Palestinian bishop in the early fourth century a biographer of Constantine the great author of the first history of the Christian church great admirer of origin and he says that origin castrated himself and he did this again because he was mandated by his understanding of scripture and the verse in scripture it came from matthew and it was um

this line for there are eunuchs who have been so from birth and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven let anyone accept this who can so that's matthew 19 12 and supposedly origin was influenced by this to castrate himself now did he really very very serious doubts about this so origins supposedly told a bishop in alexandria a guy called demetrius that he'd done this in strictest confidence and this is where eusebius got it from but there are two reasons to doubt this account the first is that Demetrius and Origen had an enormous bust up um Demetrius felt that that um that Origen was kind

of insubordinate was too clever for his own boots was was kind of getting above himself so you could absolutely imagine that this is the kind of snide yeah uh malevolent backstabbing so he's so demetrius wouldn't be saying it in praise he would be saying this man literally has no balls basically supposedly he initially approved it and then just changed his mind right but the other reason to doubt it is that um origin actually wrote a huge commentary on matthew and he wrote on this very verse and he said don't do it but he could be speaking from experience he might say I've made a terrible mistake don't don't be my mistake yeah he could be because he says that people have castrated themselves and that these people have you know

people who've castrated themselves um people get repro you know they draw approach they draw scandal upon themselves so he might have been talking about himself personally i doubt it so perhaps i shouldn't have included him but he's very famous as someone who might be right yeah he's my choice we've got time for one more i think so i think what's really interesting about a lot of these eunuchs tom is that um they're shrouded in so much mystery aren't they and that's what makes them fascinating because people project onto them and they they you know what they want they see what they want to see and and my next example is a great example of that because he's a man called Samson Rowley and a few listeners on on Twitter said are you going to talk about Samson Rowley but of course the problem with him is we don't really know very

much so what we know about him is he's a Norfolk merchant's son in the 16th century he's probably from Great Yarmouth his father came from, so they're clearly involved in the kind of mercantile world. And in 1577, Samson Rowley is on the ship called the Swallow, which seems to be captured by the Ottomans. And I assume a lot of the people on the ship were killed, but he wasn't. He's castrated and turned into a eunuch and he converts to islam he takes the name hassan agha and he pitches up in algiers which is the sort of outlying

uh possession basically of the ottoman empire and he becomes um the sort of treasurer of Algiers. So he basically rises through conversion and through becoming a eunuch. This is not uncommon. So the chief executioner of Algiers was a butcher from Exeter, at the same time a man called Absalom. And in fact, the man who was running Algiers, who was Uluch Ali or Occhiali in Italian was a former galley slave from southern Italy so that shows you something

about how the Ottoman Empire worked that basically you could be captured and imprisoned and then work your way up so clearly there's a premium on people with experience from elsewhere and you would think that Rowley the reason Rowley becomes the treasurer is because he's a merchant because he knows his way around a ledger I mean he's lost his his genitals but he knows still knows how to sort of balance a budget so he becomes the treasurer there is a picture of him that shows him with a white turban very pale skin and kind of rosy cheeks although having said that because he's castrated at a late stage, it's unlikely that it would have had a massive impact on his appearance.

So this is probably, again, a bit more projection. But there's one source that people always pick up on, which is basically a letter from Elizabeth I's ambassador to him to say, can you use your influence to release some slaves? So he's often used as a kind of window into this relationship between elizabeth and the ottomans because of course they both hate the catholic powers so this was a period when elizabethan england was sort of trying to forge some links with the mediterranean global england exactly global yes exactly um but that's really

all we know of samson Rowley so a lot of people find him a fascinating figure particularly now because of course people are very into historians are very interested now in kind of interest in sort of wacky multicultural links and in links between England and the Islamic world and so on so he sort of looms much larger as a historical figure now probably than he's ever done before. But we know so little about him. And there is this sort of story. I haven't really seen any sources for it. At some point, people said to him, why don't you come back to England?

Why don't you come back to Great Yarmouth? And he said, you know, I'm fine. I'm in Algiers. I'm the chief treasurer. Why do I want to run a warehouse in Great yarmouth when i could be a very important person in north africa with this nice climate and eating tagines or whatever he's whatever he's up to that's part of the story that clearly goes all the way back to the 10th century and before because the the scale of the slave trade of people from europe going into the the islamic world is is absolutely enormous again perhaps something that we could

do a future podcast on. But Tom it's an interesting question with him would you rather I mean it's interesting I wonder would he rather have kept his genitals and stayed in Norfolk yes it's an impossible question. It's a question for Alan Partridge surely

yes well I think on Alan Partridge, surely. Yes, well, I think on that part, time for a break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman, and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip,

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on the very squirm-worthy subject of eunuchs. Now, we've done five of our top ten eunuchs, and Tom Holland, as always, has a eunuch up his sleeve. Tom, who's your eunuch? Never knowingly without a eunuch. Yes, so mine is, I think, one of the most remarkable figures in Byzantine history. So this is the Roman Empire. It's in the east, centered in Constantinople. Rome and Italy has fallen to the barbarians.

In Constantinople, the emperors there are not very happy about that. And the greatest Roman emperor of the 6th century, Justinian, has his eyes on on the reconquest of italy um and the guy who leads that is is belisarius who isn't a eunuch um but therefore could potentially be a danger to the uh to the emperor and so the guy who takes over from belisarius as the uh the guy who's in charge of bringing italy back into the roman empire is a eunuch um a a guy of armenian extraction called narses and we don't really know how or why he became a eunuch but we know that he is essentially kind of again very influential figure

in the in the kind of in the treasury of constantinople this idea that essentially the treasury should be run by eunuchs i think is a kind of interesting one that perhaps i'm trying to think of recent chances of exchequer philip hammond george osborne gordon brown but narcisse narcisse plays um a role in the kind of the great sports scandal um of of constantinople when um in 532 when the uh two rival teams in the um in the hippodrome um the blues and the greens rival factions supporting different charity teams there's a spectacular riot and the riot basically ends up burning down central constantinople and they can do this because freakishly the blues and the greens have teamed up normally they're inveterate enemies and narses plays a role in um getting the

blues back on side so that then justinian soldiers can slaughter the greens and that's the kind of classic role of the kind that you get in game of thrones with varys um the guy operating behind wheeling dealing offering bribes, pulling strings. Varys certainly as played in the TV drama is a large man. Narcisse was a thin man, very thin and slight, but it turns out he becomes a brilliant general. And he goes toaly after belisarius has been called back at a kind of incredible age i mean he's he first goes there when he's in his 60s does incredibly well gets recalled then goes out in his 70s and he goes there because all the other generals have failed against the a gothic king who's refusing to accept defeat marseilles defeats him um he then defeats a bunch of franks um who who very

contemptuous of him um as a as a eunuch um and he then uh he celebrates rome's last triumph so he takes his prisoners and his gold and his loot through the streets of rome and this is the very last guy to do what a way for Rome to to bow out. I know and and I mean imagine in the age of Nero saying that the last Roman who will celebrate a triumph will be a eunuch no one would have believed it and he then organizes Italy very very effectively and efficiently for 12 years um right the way into his late 80s um justinian dies a new emperor comes and it said that the the empress is very contemptuous of him um and sends him a golden spindle and says because you're a eunuch you shouldn't be organizing you know armies and states and things you should come home and

organize uh the the women weaving and narses it is said um says, well, well, I will weave you such a tapestry as you will never unpick. And the story is that his last dying thing is to send a message to the Lombards, who are the most terrifying enemy that the Byzantine Empire faces in Italy, who invade in the last months of Narses' life. But that story, I i think is untrue but i think what is true is that the lombards are waiting for narses to die before launching their invasion which is a kind of incredible tribute to him would he have would he have fought himself would he have gone into battle yes he's he's a he's a very very brilliant general and he kind of mixes and matches his his heavy infantry and his pikemen and his cavalry to brilliant effect he's one of the great great generals of antiquity i mean he's kind of you know up there with with hannibal and and he's an amazing

amazing guy wow and of course if he hadn't been a eunuch he would have been a threat to the emperor so he'd never have got that role and well he would and he would never have got into the court of constantinople so he would never have come to the emperor's attention so he's another winner he's another you know he's a winner so losing your testicles can be a huge kind of yes career advantage well my next choice is a man who definitely benefited from losing his testicles so almost all the people well we've talked about ancient people and we've talked about a religious maniac i mean this is somebody who loses his testicles basically for commercial reasons and he's a castrato singer farinelli probably the most famous of all castrato singers now we think of this as a as a must think of this as a very weird

thing but in the 18th century about 5 000 boys a year were castrated in italy um generally by their parents for they often came from poor families and because it was technically illegal the parents would always come up with a pretext they'd say he was being kicked in the groin by a horse or he was born um without them or he's had some you know he's fallen over and had some accident that means they have to be removed and they basically did this because they wanted them to be singers and they wanted them to make a lot of money and that's what happens with farinelli so he comes his father was the capelmeister at andrea cathedral in southern italy he's born in 1705 so he's from quite a well-off family but his father was the kapelmeister at Andrea Cathedral in southern Italy. He was born in 1705. So he's from quite a well-off family.

But his father died when he was young and the family needed money. And he was a good singer. So when he's 12, they have him castrated. So he's not that young. I mean, he's 12 years old. It's kind of like going to choir school, isn't it? It's awful. I mean, there's no anaesthetic.

I think they'd give kids opium often and they would bathe them in some sort of milk uh but you've got to imagine quite a lot of people probably die in the operation or or suffer hideous infections and things but anyway he doesn't die he's a he's a very good singer farinelli and he uh he becomes famous across italy he's known as illa gatto the boy he sings in palma and milan and places like that he goes off to vienna and then in 1734 he ends up in london and he's a huge hit i mean he's a great star he makes so much money so he makes five thousand pounds a year and i did the calculation you can you can do the calculations online there's a special

sort of website called measuring worth and in terms of earning power that's he's making about 10 million pounds a year um in the so he is a massive massive star he goes to versailles and then he ends up finally in madrid and he's basically the big singing star in madrid and then he retires to bologna when he's had enough and he's visited i mean he's such a celebrity he's visited I mean he's such a celebrity he's visited by Mozart and and Casanova and people like that they make pilgrimages to go and see him he's got this fantastic art collection that he's picked up on his travels so he's got Velazquez Murillo do we do we know what his relationship with his parents was uh no I don't

know that's a very good question so I don't know whether he he I would assume assume that people wouldn't castrate their children unless they thought they were going to benefit personally from it. So they would probably think that their children would, you know, send money to them if they made a lot of money. And you could make an enormous amount of money as a castrato singer. And the extraordinary thing, Tom, is when do you think the last castrato singer retired? 20th century. Yeah, yeah 1913 so it wasn't actually banned by the papacy i've got it written down somewhere 1903 1903 it wasn't banned until uh the so you know it's still going on throughout the night it's not as fashionable but there i think there was one recording of a castrato singer on youtube so in other words the last castrati were singing at a time when there was recording technology and they had this incredible vocal range and stuff

i mean that's kind of largely been lost i suppose um but that this that's an interesting thing because it's very different from most of the people we're talking about i mean this is a very cold-blooded economic decision yeah and so i just wonder whether whether um you know whether he felt grateful to his parents or resentful or well here's the interesting thing you can't have kids but you can still make love um and castrati were prized for that reason because they could they could supposedly perform for hours um you know yes and not get you pregnant yeah so it's it is an interesting question i mean a few of us would make that choice for our own children or would wish to have it made for us but did he i mean he was so rich as a result of this so on the subject of having sex and castration

perfect lead-in to my next um my next choice um which is the great peter abelard ah yes probably one of the most charismatic figures of medieval europe brilliant theologian brilliant rhetorician um described as a man possessed of inestimable cleverness unsurpassed memory superhuman capacity he he described himself as the only philosopher in the world he was the star of the paris schools um people girls swooned over him he was terribly charismatic um men flocked to hear his lectures um so an absolute star and he was employed by one of the canons at Notre Dame, a guy called Fulbert, to serve as tutor to Fulbert's niece, who was an equally brilliant woman called, well, young girl called Eloise. And Abelard, of course, had taken a vow of chastity. Did he let that get in the way of getting off with the incredibly beautiful, incredibly smart, incredibly charismatic Eloise? He did not. And so they had an affair.

Eloise fell pregnant. Abelard sent Eloise off to his relatives in brittany to have the baby he was a boy who was given the brilliant name of astrolabe it's kind of like calling your i suppose i don't know calling your your baby iphone or something i mean it's wonderful name um eloise came back to Abelard in Paris. There's a secret marriage. But by this point, Foolbear and the relatives generally are starting to get a bit Sopranos in their attitude towards Abelard. So Abelard sends Eloise off to a nunnery to keep her safe. He gets attacked in his his own room gets pinned down they get out the pliers and off off come his off come his goo the rest is history so he's left

maimed and and so humiliated by this so traumatized that that essentially this kind of brilliantly gifted public speaker retreats to a monastery in Saint Denis and feels that he has nothing to offer that he can't appear in public but he's still Abelard and so he starts investigating the the traditions of the origins of Saint Denis and disproves them so this doesn't go down very well so he's still up to his tricks and basically he then leaves Saint Denis despite having taken a vow that he'll stay there and he goes back onto the road and again he he essentially he becomes the kind of you know the great star um he he he keeps apart from from Eloise but they they write to each other over the course of of their life

um Abelard ends up um accused of heresy he gets officially silenced by the papacy um but he remains such a kind of charismatic figure that he gets picked up by the abbot of cluny which is the great monastery in burgundy and the abbot of cluny looks after to abelard until he dies and then when he dies he sends abelard to eloise and the abbot of cluny accompanies the coffin there abelard gets buried and a couple of decades later to eloise and the abbot of cluny accompanies the coffin there abelard gets buried and a couple of decades later when eloise dies um she gets buried alongside abelard and the story is that when they open the tomb to put eloise's body beside abelard's abelard's body he reaches up with his arms and takes eloise in his arms and they oh it's moving it's moving

yeah it is it i mean it's an incredibly a tragic one of the great tragic love stories but he's a bit different from our other eunuchs because he he doesn't owe his identity to his being a eunuch no like nazis his identity gets taken away by it yes yeah so i mean it genuinely is a mutilation, not just of his body, but of his entire career. Yes. He feels himself to be mutilated, humiliated by it. And it's a kind of shadow over his fame from that point on. But of course, it lends this tragic power to his story. Do you think we'd remember him so much if he hadn't had this sort of dreadful ordeal? I think he'd still be remembered by students of of medieval christian thought because he's that significant he's that important

um but but obviously you know there are all kinds of major christian thinkers in the middle ages that people don't really remember so do people remember saying outsell i mean students of medieval theology do but he's not a household name whereas eloise and abelard i mean you know people write songs about them he's there's still the theme of novels and films and dramas and so yes i think it's it's a crucial part of that anyway um my final choice my final choice but i've gone out i've gone big with my last choice so it's a man called kondraty ivanovich selivanov and he's not merely uh a eunuch, but he's a man who persuades tens, if not hundreds of thousands of other people

to be eunuchs too. So he lives in the late 18th century in Russia. Russia is, as everybody will know, or at least a lot of our listeners will know, it's a place where weird sects and cults proliferate for centuries. And there was a sect called the Clists, and they were kind of ecstatic flagellants.

They went around beating and whipping themselves. And Selivanov, he's a peasant, and he basically leads a breakaway from the Clists. The Clists don't go far enough for him. He claims that he is both the Messiah and he's the former Tsar,eter the third so russia has this great tradition of people pretending to be false dimitries or false this sort of peter the third is the one murdered by exactly exactly so huzzah in the those who've seen the great

so um so kandorati ivanovich selivanov says he's the son of God, he's the redeemer, and he wants lots of followers and he calls them white doves. And he says, basically, we need to break with original sin. And the way to do that is to castrate yourself or if you're a woman, to cut off your breasts. So he basically says your genitals or your sort of sexual organs are their signs of the forbidden fruit that Adam and eve took in the garden of eden and to get back to our sort of pure pre-full state we need to cut them off um and they they do so there are two ways of doing it there's one thing called the lesser seal

which i think you just cut your cut your testicles off And the greatest seal is when you cut the lot off. And they do this with knives and with razors and stuff. And then they get a hot iron and they cauterize the wound. If you've had the greatest seal and you're a man, you need to carry a cow's horn through which you can urinate. Now, you would think that this wouldn't really catch on, but you'd be wrong because thousands of people... becomes a big figure in St Petersburg and it gets lots of recruits in St Petersburg in Moscow in places like Odessa so kind of burgeoning growing cities Dostoevsky talks about it by the turn of

the 20th century there were probably about a hundred thousand scoptsy as they're called so there's a big cult. The communists suppressed it, and before that, people tried to suppress it. And so some scoptsy were forced into exile. So at the end of the... So at the founder Sieck, there are so many scoptsy in exile in Romania that they basically control the Bucharest cab trade. So if you get in a cab in Bucharest, or indeed perhaps in Budapest,

then the chances are it will be driven by a member of the Scoptsy, so a man who's castrated himself. And people do this, you know, in thousands. It's incredibly popular. Yeah, thousands of people do this in a kind of frenzy, believing that this is the route to heaven. And it's only really stamped out during the Soviet Union. I think there's a claim that there are Scoptsy around as certainly as late as the 1940s and there are some people who think there may still be some now they may flourish in some sort of nooks and crannies i mean you get what you people in the church of england worrying that they're a bit bit wishy-washy well by these

standards i mean maybe this would be the way to to reinvigorate yeah it's a it's a robust faith tom there's no doubt about that it's it's demand it's a demanding faith but presumably it has its rewards i can't imagine what they would be but well yeah i mean and imagine if you then realize you've made a terrible mistake that would there's no going back is there especially if you got to the cow horn stage i mean that's a pretty bad so my my last one um we're going to china yeah china is one of the um the the great centers of of world eunuchs um which is back four thousand years so and the the chin emperor um first emperor i mean already they've all the bureaucracy is run by byunuchs. So it's done both as a punishment, but as a way of getting ahead.

Yeah. It's a shortcut, as it were. It's like a graduate scheme. It's like a graduate scheme, yes. And my particular one is one we've already talked about, I think, with Michael Wood in the thing we did on China. And it's Zheng He, who lived between 1370 1370 1435 and he's the great admiral who leads the um the voyages of discovery that are sent out in the the early 15th century um he is

a muslim although a muslim of kind of quite an eccentric kind so when he goes sailing he he he worships the great goddess of the sea okay that's a very unusual kind of he um he got captured um in yunnan which was the last holdout of the uh of the mongol um rulers of china um by the ming who are kind of capturing it back at the end of the 14th century gets captured castrated introduced into the um chinese imperial court has a kind of you know meteoric rise rather in the way that nazis did um and basically gets pointed the admiral of these seven voyages that get sent out across the um the indian ocean all the way to as far as africa so he brings back ostricheses he brings back zebras he brings back a giraffe

he also cleans the seas of pirates so he captures the most notorious pirate of the age brings him back to China where the guy's predictably brutally killed the king of C ceylon sri lanka tries to oppose him um bad idea he gets taken back has to apologize um and essentially this is the kind of the great what if that what if china had continued this outward bound approach yeah um it's just on the the just just before the European expansion across the sea. So really, really fascinating figure. Still, he basically gets forgotten in China because these voyages get buried. Chinese imperial policy slams the brakes. It's not necessary.

It goes into reverse. So they get buried. But in recent times, he's become a very significant figure. He is still commemorated to this day in China. The 11th of July is the date that he first sailed in 1405. And the 11th of July to this day is Maritime Day in China. And what happened to him at the end when he got... I mean, did he get back and have a long, happy retirement?

He died on one of the voyages and got buried at sea. And on the topic of eunuchs lasting into the present day, do you know when the last imperial eunuch died? I'd probably guess, again, Edwardian, pre-First World War, maybe 1910. 1996. No. Wow. That's a great fact. So that's somebody who but hold on how old was he about 120

i mean he must have been well he must be one of those chinese people who just eat very healthy so he must have been a boy uh castrated at the imperial court yeah so the question so the question if the to sort of sum all this up i mean a lot of these people these people i suppose can be divided into two categories they're either religious maniacs or they are people who have you know being a eunuch has allowed them to rise to play a part they might not otherwise have been because they're not either because they're a singer or because they're a bureaucrat oh i think there's a third category which is people embroiled in in grotesque love affairs.

Yes, I suppose so. Yeah. Sporus is not a eunuch, really. He's not treated as a eunuch. He's treated as a bride. Yeah, interesting. So that's weird. And then Abelard is castrated as a punishment.

So that's kind of, I think, a third category, perhaps. But the question then is, you know, through thousands of years of human history, of sort of civilized history, as it were, there have been eunuchs. We are unusual in not having eunuchs. Do you think eunuchs will come back? I don't know. I don't know. That, I think, is an impossible question to answer.

I would have thought not, because I can't imagine any circumstance in which international opinion would regard um the harvesting of eunuchs as being in any way except you don't see the eunuch trade you know the way things are going who knows who knows i i can't i can't believe it no i mean because because pretty much every every society would regard it as being beyond the pale now it's a really interesting example of something that was taken for granted, no longer being accepted.

Yes, although I suppose we do have much more fluid attitudes to gender and things now, don't we? I mean, people have reassignment surgery and so on and so forth. So the idea of surgery per se or of changing gender is not anathema to us, as it was to our predecessors predecessors yes but eunuchs don't become women well sporus did he no he didn't because he that was what nero wanted okay and he offered prizes for people you know if if there were surgeons who could could do the necessary um surgery and they couldn't um to make him into a woman but couldn't do it and couldn't implant a womb so prepare remains you know as prepare he remains kind of infertile um and what's going on with nero there tom i mean

that's the real of all these issues of all these subjects i mean a lot of these make sense you know you can understand that somebody is is deranged or that somebody is wants money but why does nero want to do that okay well i think i'm not going to answer that because there's there's an exhibition on nero coming up at the british museum and i think it might be a good idea to to see if we could do a podcast on nero great specific great i think that's great so let's let's save that so let's i and i think we've we've run on long enough as it is um could i just put in a plea um where this is going out on thursday the tomorrow so if you're listening to this on thursday when it's dropped so friday 23rd of april st george's day i will be walking 40 miles across london from one end to the other along a sports ley line so i'll be going

from a cricket club in epping to lords to craven cottage to twickenham rugby stadium to a cricket club in chertsey and i'm doing that in aid of three homelessness charities to try and slay the dragon of homelessness dominic you are the saint george of our time i am saint george and um if you felt like sponsoring me that would be hugely hugely appreciated you can find the link if you go to my twitter page at holland underscore tom the pinned tweet there there is a promotional video showing me as a kind of rocky figure getting in training for this um event and there is a link that you could go and pay uh if you wanted to contribute to that so that would be very much busy if not no worries um i hope you enjoyed today's show.

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