236 | Out of Africa, into the Palace
Here, the soldiers were referring to the thirty-odd Ethiopian eunuchs who
had been exiled to Egypt from Topkapı Palace and were now living comfortably
in Cairo while performing no official service. Among them was Uzun Süleyman
Agha, whom Dervish Abdullah accuses of engineering the murder of Kösem Sul-
tan in 1651. Outraged at the soldiers’ accusations, the eunuchs themselves staged
a protest, and violence broke out between their followers and the soldiers. As
punishment, the governor of Egypt briefly imprisoned Uzun Süleyman and sev-
eral other eunuchs in the fortress of Ibrim, far to the south on Egypt’s border
with Sudan. As for the soldiers, although they ultimately followed orders, going
to Habesh and putting down the rebellion, their complaint demonstrates that
they recognized the exiled eunuchs as a coherent community and that they were
aware of their Ethiopian origin, in addition to the privileged lifestyle that they
enjoyed. The eunuchs themselves lived in a tightly circumscribed area around
and near the pond, located just west of Cairo’s citadel, known as Birkat al-Fil, or
Elephant Pool, because its shape resembled the head and trunk of an elephant.
Their concentration in this neighborhood, which at the time was the hub of elite
residence in the city, likewise indicates their own consciousness of ethnoregional
solidarity and perhaps exclusivity.
A key indicator of this sort of ethnoregional consciousness would naturally
be African eunuchs’ contact, or at least attempted contact, with their homelands
and families of origin. We now know that a considerable number of noneunuch
elite slaves employed in the Ottoman palace and in the households of provincial
grandees maintained such contact. This would have been no simple task since
many of these officials were either products of the devşirme, the distinctively Ot-
toman practice of collecting boys from among the subject Christian population of
the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia, or elite military slaves (mamluks), captured
in slave raids in the Caucasus and sold in the slave markets of Istanbul and Cairo.
At least a few eunuchs of European origin are likewise known to have nurtured
such ties—most famously, no doubt, the Venetian Gazanfer Agha (d. 1603), who,
as noted above, headed the corps of white eunuchs who guarded the threshold of
the sultan’s audience chamber. Among African eunuchs, however, such ties are
virtually impossible to find. This may result largely from the nature of the East
African slave trade, which tended to be massive and anonymous. In contrast,
Gazanfer and other Venetian courtiers, including his brother, mother, and sister,
were specifically recruited by Murad III’s favorite concubine, the Albanian Safiye
Sultan. Only in the early twentieth century is it possible to find an Ottoman court
eunuch attempting to locate his remaining family in Ethiopia.
From this evidence, we might well conclude that there was little or no sus-
tained, meaningful identification as Ethiopian, and certainly not as “African” writ
large, among Ottoman harem eunuchs, at least before the twentieth century. Yet
such a conclusion seems premature in the face of the unmistakable consciousness,