Hathaway|227as well as European travelers’ accounts, suggests that the animist tribes of the
southern and southwestern regions of Ethiopia were key sources of slaves. Enter-
ing court service as slaves meant converting to the brand of Christianity prac-
ticed by the Ethiopian emperors since the sixth century, an offshoot of Egypt’s
Coptic sect.
Yet slaves from these geographically marginal Ethiopian populations were
regularly transported to the coastal regions of the Horn of Africa. Once there,
many were castrated and served as eunuchs at the courts of the Muslim king-
doms that dominated the Red Sea coast during the Middle Ages. Others were
shipped by traders in the port cities of Massawa, today in Eritrea, and Suakin,
today in Sudan, across the Red Sea to the Hijaz and Yemen. Without question,
the Ottomans, once they entered the Horn of Africa, tapped into this traffic, fol-
lowing in the footsteps, no doubt, of earlier regimes in Egypt. And while a not
insignificant number of Ethiopian eunuchs came from the Sudanese slave cara-
vans, the majority, it appears, came by boat through the Red Sea.
Ottoman Attitudes toward Ethiopians
Ethiopians, known in Arabic as Habashi (Habeshi in Ottoman Turkish), were
historically regarded as a different ethnoregional category from the Zanj, the
blanket Arabic term covering the sub-Saharan African peoples west of the Nile.
In medieval Arab classifications of the world’s peoples, the category Habashi
seems to encompass not only Ethiopians but also Somalis and Eritreans. In
travelers’ accounts and merchants’ manuals from this period, in which slaves’
places of origin, appearance, and perceived positive and negative qualities are
viscerally and often crudely described, Habashis, male and female alike, receive
considerably better treatment than the Zanj, who are frequently derided as ugly,
foul-smelling, greedy, and lecherous—stereotypes applied to them by authors
who had only the most fleeting firsthand acquaintance, if any, with Africans—
although their loyalty and simple piety are occasionally praised. Habashis, in
contrast, are sometimes praised for their physical beauty and intelligence. As
if to confirm the validity of these impressions, the Egyptian historian Abd al-
Rahman al-Jabarti (1753–1825), whose ancestors came from what is now Djibouti,
on the Horn of Africa just east of Ethiopia, in his lengthy obituary of his father
(d. 1774), cites the following quatrain—which, it must be admitted, is not free of
essentialist sexual overtones:
An Abyssinian girl—I asked about her race,
And she smiled, revealing teeth like pearls.
Then I asked about the softness of what was hidden.
She said, “Why ask? I am of Amharic race.”