Military Eunuchs

[JesusA (imported)]

While I’ve written and posted about the general topic many times in the past, I just received a new book yesterday that expands on one such post and provides information about another situation that’s new to me. (African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, by Michael A. Gomez. 2018. Princeton University Press, 505 pp.) There are only about a dozen mentions of eunuchs in the entire volume, however I found the following to be very interesting.

In the 1500s, the Songhai Empire, which stretched from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in modern Senegal in the west to what is now Northern Nigeria and much of modern Niger in the east, had a horse-mounted cavalry of 4,000 eunuch horsemen commanded by a eunuch general. These eunuchs were in addition to the 700 or so who accompanied the emperor on his travels and surrounded him when he appeared in public and in addition to the eunuch attendants of the women of the harem.

The rulers of the Songhai Empire, which began in the early eleventh century and peaked in extent and power from 1493 to 1592 under the Askia Dynasty, possessed a large harem of women sourced from many tribes on the periphery of the empire. The empire was a major source of both gold and slaves for the Moslem world across the Sahara and, later, of slaves for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Slaves were captured from many different peoples on the periphery of the empire speaking many different languages, but the women of the imperial harem each had eunuch attendants sourced from her own ethnic group and were generally boys captured in the same slave raid as the girls for the harem.

The demise of the Songhai Empire came with conquest by a Moroccan army led by the Spanish eunuch Jūdār. The Songhai Empire was in disarray with the disputed succession of a new emperor when Pasha Jūdār crossed the Sahara with 4,000 well-armed troops, many of them Spanish converts to Islam, some of them presumably eunuchs, and led by several additional eunuch officers. (Most of the sultan’s military officers in Morocco were eunuchs.) The eight English-made cannons that Jūdār brought carried the day against the over 40,000 troops of the Songhai army.

Jūdār is described as a short blue-eyed Spanish eunuch. He was captured as an infant in Castile by slave raiders and castrated by his owner as a young boy. He later entered service of the Moroccan Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur and rose to lead his army across the Sahara.

[Chesleyt (imported)]

Very interesting I would like to know more about us eunuchs in history all I've found are the Chinese and Russian eunuchs

[Paolo]

Try to post it again now. I fixed it. Or I think I have!

[sakebigoe (imported)]

Fun fact, the Soldier who shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln's assassin was a Eunuch. Thomas "Boston" Corbett castrated himself in 1858, then joined the Army in 1861 after the outbreak of the American Civil War, he served through the entire war. He was undeniably a strange and troubled individual but also undeniably a total bad-ass. If you feel like it hes an interesting individual to read about.

[cutnbulls2ox (imported)]

I guess after being castrated with no pain killers, only the most badass men were able to survive that pain and then go on to become soldiers who did not fear other, less painful and less unmanning, injuries in battle.