226 | Out of Africa, into the Palace
Ethiopian Eunuchs in the Ottoman Harem
By the time the harem moved to Topkapı Palace in the early 1530s, East African
eunuchs were more available to the Ottomans than they had ever been. The Ot-
tomans had conquered Egypt in 1517, and whoever ruled Egypt had direct access
to the routes along which annual slave caravans transited through Sudan, carrying
slaves from both Sudan itself and neighboring regions of East Africa. Furthermore,
northeastern Sudan, along with the coastal regions of the Horn of Africa, came
under Ottoman control in the 1550s, during the reign of Süleyman I, “the Mag-
nificent.” From then until the 1820s, when the regime of Mehmed Ali Pasha, the
autonomous governor of Egypt, occupied Sudan, the two key slave caravan routes
across the eastern Sahara lay partially in Ottoman-controlled territory. With the
conquest of the part of the Western Arabian Peninsula known as the Hijaz (1517)
and of Yemen (1538), moreover, the Red Sea became a virtual Ottoman lake, across
which Ethiopian slaves were often transported. Those destined to become eunuchs
were generally castrated in Coptic Christian villages in Upper Egypt.
Customs in East Africa itself may also have played a role in the popularity of
Ethiopian eunuchs at the Ottoman court. While it is unclear whether the Chris-
tian kingdom of Ethiopia had recourse to court eunuchs before the nineteenth
century, the emperors unquestionably employed large numbers of slave courtiers
from within their own domains. Like contemporary and earlier empires in Af-
rica, Asia, and Europe, the Ethiopian kingdom preferred to acquire such elite
slaves from the margins of its territory, if not from outside, and from ethnore-
ligious groups outside the ruling elite. Scholarship on the Ethiopian slave trade,
Figure 16.1 Topkapı Palace in the time of Ahmed III. (Adapted from Hillenbrand, Islamic Ar-
chitecture, 458. Reproduced by permission of Robert Hillenbrand and Edinburgh University
Press [www.euppublishing.com].)