Hathaway|235Egypt, first crossing the Bosphorus and heading east into Anatolia. They were
stopped, however, near the western Anatolian town of Iznik (the ancient Nicaea)
by a party of the rebels who had deposed the sultan. Taken into custody by these
insurrectionists, who had managed to obtain an edict from the new sultan, Sü-
leyman II (r. 1687–1691), condoning their actions, Yusuf was imprisoned in the
infamous Yedi Kule (Seven Towers) prison at one end of Istanbul’s Byzantine
land walls while the belongings he had left behind in the city were inspected. At
the same time, the new sultan sent orders to the governor of Egypt to confiscate
and sell all the property, including slaves, that Yusuf had accumulated there in
preparation for his retirement. Faced with financial ruin, Yusuf, as quoted by
an early eighteenth-century Ottoman court chronicler, cried, “I used to be the
chief harem eunuch. Now I’m just a ten-kuruş [two-bit] Arab!” (“Arab” was a
common Ottoman term for a sub-Saharan African, as was “kara Arab,” or black
Arab.) Yusuf did ultimately make his way to Egypt. Pardoned several years later,
he served during the early 1690s as head of the eunuchs who guarded the Prophet
Muhammad’s tomb in Medina, then returned to Cairo, where he died in 1717 at
the age of ninety-six.
To this highly personal account of a harem eunuch’s consciousness of his
humble origins may be added a 1654 episode that was recorded in Ottoman chron-
icles as “the Abyssinia Incident.” The Bosnian Mustafa Pasha had purchased the
governorship of the Ottoman province of Habesh (literally, Abyssinia), which
included present-day Eritrea and parts of today’s Sudan and Somalia, but had
named a deputy to oversee the day-to-day administration of the province; the
deputy in turn named an inexperienced young man as his own deputy.
However, the notables and wealthy merchants of Habesh complained of the
excessive customs dues that the two deputies collected at the Red Sea port of
Suakin and joined with the Ottoman garrison there to oppose them. A garrison
soldier known as Deli Dervish (Crazy Mystic) started a revolt by imprisoning
the two deputies. When the absentee governor sent a delegation from Mecca and
Jidda to Suakin to negotiate, Deli Dervish killed them all, along with the younger
deputy. The governor now sent a ship to attack Habesh but was rebuffed. He then
appealed to the governor of Egypt, who sent a two-thousand-man expedition to
crush the rebellion. Before setting out, however, the officers of this army com-
plained to the governor,
We are always assigned to quash the Bedouin bandits and send the tribute [to
Istanbul] and serve the pilgrimage commander; we never lack for service. This
time, let the eunuchs’ slaves and followers go to perform this service. They
have so much money and property from the sultan’s state that they should do
something.