 Out of Africa, into the Palace

The Ottoman Chief Harem Eunuch

Jane Hathaway

When the Venetian ambassador Ottaviano Bon wrote his description of the

Ottoman imperial palace, Topkapı, at the beginning of the seventeenth century,
he reported that the mother of Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–1617) had “at her gate a
black eunuch, the chief of the totally castrated black eunuchs, who, numbering
perhaps thirty, like him remain constantly guarding the aforesaid gate.” These
gate guardians represented only a tiny fraction of the eunuchs employed in the
harem as a whole; according to modern-day estimates, the corps of harem eu-
nuchs in Bon’s day numbered between 800 and 1,200. There had never been, nor
would there ever be again, so many eunuchs employed in the Ottoman harem.
What is more, virtually all of them were from East Africa, particularly Ethiopia
(known as Abyssinia). Bon himself never set foot in the harem, which was off
limits to any uncastrated adult male apart from the sultan himself. The world
of the harem thus acquired all the mystery and allure of any secret, highly re-
stricted place. That the sultan’s wives, concubines, mother, and unmarried sisters
and daughters were secluded there added to the aura of mystery but so, too, did
the large numbers of East African eunuchs who guarded the harem precinct.
To European observers, they were doubly exotic. Not only were they “outsiders”
from faraway Africa; they had been castrated before puberty and consequently
bore the marks of early hormonal deprivation: unnaturally high voices, absence
of facial hair, unusual height, and extreme thinness or obesity. (See figure 16.1.)
Did Ottoman observers likewise regard the harem eunuchs as exotic and
outlandish? Did the eunuchs themselves harbor a consciousness of African iden-
tity that marked them out from other Ottoman courtiers? These questions lie at
the heart of this chapter, which, by way of contextualization, also examines the
overall phenomenon of African, more specifically Ethiopian, harem eunuchs in
the Ottoman palace. The principal focus is the chief harem eunuch, who from the
creation of the office in 1574 through the mid-eighteenth century became increas-
ingly influential; as a result, he was also increasingly well represented in Ottoman
and European accounts of the sultan’s court.