230 | Out of Africa, into the Palace
judge Mullah Ali. A native of Ethiopia, he was enslaved at a young age and later
presented to the first chief harem eunuch Habeshi Mehmed Agha (term 1574–
1591), who manumitted him and set him on the path to a judicial career. In his
treatise, drawing heavily on Arabophone authors of earlier centuries who ad-
dressed this topic, Mullah Ali attempts to counter widespread popular belief in
the “curse of Ham,” which had been adapted by early Muslim theologians from
the story in the biblical Book of Genesis. According to the Muslim version of
the story, Noah’s son Ham mocks Noah for exposing his nakedness during a
drunken stupor; on awakening, Noah curses Ham with black skin and declares
that his descendants will serve those of his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, as
slaves. Mullah Ali takes some pains to demonstrate that the skin colors of the
earth’s various peoples were created equal, and that piety and good deeds, rather
than skin color, are the measure of a person’s worth. Those with dark skin “were
dyed with this color and tanned with this pigment from the beginning; it is clear
that it did not result merely from a curse or punishment or climate or [geographi-
cal] location.” That such a work was even produced, however, attests to the atmo-
sphere of tension created by the burgeoning influence of African harem eunuchs,
to say nothing of the participation of the Ottoman Empire’s East African periph-
eries in the empire’s political and intellectual life.
African Eunuchs in Ottoman Miniatures
African harem eunuchs are depicted not only in chronicles and treatises of the
type described above but in Ottoman miniature paintings as well. Since most
surviving Ottoman miniatures are court productions, it is not surprising that
eunuchs appear in them in a favorable, or at least neutral, light. What is striking
in these pictorial depictions, however, is the increasing frequency with which
harem eunuchs appear in palace miniatures from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century and the changes in the pigments and physical attributes employed to
“mark” a pictorial subject as a harem eunuch. Habeshi Mehmed Agha, the first to
hold the office of chief harem eunuch, which was created for him by Sultan Mu-
rad III in 1574, is likewise the first African eunuch to appear in court-sponsored
miniature paintings. Indeed, he is believed to have directed the imperial artists’
studio himself. In a series of illuminated chronicles produced by this studio, he
appears sparingly and in rather muted fashion as a pale blue figure standing or
sitting near Murad. With the marked exception of the 1581 Book of the King of
Kings, he appears in no more than one or two folios per work. (See figure 16.2.)
Although a few illuminated manuscripts produced in the Ottoman palace
are known from the seventeenth century, the chief harem eunuch does not, to the
best of my knowledge, appear in them. On the other hand, a simple illustration
from seventeenth-century Egypt shows a pair of young eunuchs, one black, one
white, hunting a stag with a bow and arrow. Here, the African eunuch’s skin color