Meandering notes on eunuch history

[JesusA (imported)]

Stream of consciousness, but I thought that a few of you might be interested in the strange ways that my mind works....

The first shah of Persia in the Qajar dynasty (1789 to 1925) was Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar. He was castrated as a 5-year-old boy when a revolt led by his father against the Zand dynasty was crushed. The father escaped, but his young son was captured and castrated on orders from the Zand shah. The title “Agha” was generally reserved for court eunuchs. He became head of the clan after the death of his father and set about building an army. He soon overthrew the Zand Dynasty to become shah of Persia, expanding its borders to its greatest extent in over a millennium. While he was still being held as a hostage in the Zand capital, Fath Ali, the 5-year-old son of his brother, was also taken as a hostage, though not castrated.

After the death of Agha Mohammad Khan, the son of his brother, Fath Ali Shah Qajar, became the second shah in the Qajar Dynasty. Fath Ali Shah was always depicted with a long, heavy black beard, unlike his eunuch uncle, who of course grew no facial hair. Also, unlike his uncle, he produced a great many children from the over 1,000 women in his harem (and probably about that number of eunuchs). His eldest son was one of FIVE sons born the same year (1203 AH) to the women in his harem. They were born when he was only 17. Fath Ali Shah Qajar was survived by 57 sons, 46 daughters, 588 grandchildren and many great grandchildren. One contemporary source states that he had over 5000 living descendants at the time of his death. (The Qajar family has kept detailed genealogical records and the Qajar Family Association still holds regular gatherings, always accompanied by an academic conference on Qajar Persia with papers by historians and others.) The current head of the Qajar family lives in Texas.

On his accession to the throne, Fath Ali Shah Qajar had 100 Christian boys from Georgia castrated to be trained up as a palace guard. During the Zand Dynasty, Georgia had declared its independence from Persia. After its reconquest by Agha Mohammad Khan, 15,000 Georgian women and children were sent the Persian homelands to be sold as slaves. It is generally noted that many of the Georgian boys were then castrated. There were hundreds of eunuchs in Fath Ali Shah’s harem, mostly from the Caucasus region (modern Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) or Turks from Central Asia.

The fourth of the Qajar shahs, Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar, took up photography as a hobby, along with painting and poetry. His favorite photography subject was the women and eunuchs of his harem. One of his photographs, which I have used in several public lectures, is of 53 child eunuchs in his harem. The youngest of the 53 looks to be a toddler and is held by an adult eunuch. There is also an old, bearded man in the photo. Other than the old man and the single adult eunuch, the oldest of the 53 young eunuchs in the photo looks to be teenaged. (The photo can be seen on the Guardian website, along with some other photos that include eunuchs: https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran- ... -in-photos (https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran- ... -in-photos)) Nasser al-Din Shah seemed to have a preference for formerly Christian eunuchs, selecting them from among Christian Circassians, Georgians, and Ethiopians. While he kept 100s of women secluded in his harem (reputedly over 1,000 with over 800 eunuchs to serve them), he had only 21 known children—11 boys and 10 girls.

I’ve recently been reading works by Laura Betzig, especially her book Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History. Betzig notes that secluding large numbers of women is a way of preventing other males from reproducing with them, enhancing the relative number of descendants that the despot has. Castrating a number of males also prevents them from reproducing and diluting the relative frequency of children produced by the despot. Someone with over 1,000 women in his harem is unlikely to produce children with most of them, but no one else will have children with them either. The eunuchs and other sterile castes (e.g., the slave soldiers (Mamelukes) of the Ottoman and Fatimid states) also did not produce offspring to compete with those of their ruler/owner.

Powerful men could produce an incredible number of descendants. It’s estimated that nearly 10% of ALL males in the areas that were once ruled by Genghis Khan are direct descendants in the male line of the Khan himself. The same number of women are also his descendants, but for males, they can trace Genghis Khan’s Y-chromosome in a direct male line.

Most historians seem to have ignored the demographic results of historic events. We can now even trace the demographic consequences of events before written history. There has been a recent set of papers on the historic genetics of the British Isles. Genetic typing of historic skeletal material shows that the male population of Britain was largely replaced by invaders from the mainland at least twice, with the women’s mitochondrial DNA continuing. On each occasion, nearly all of the extant male population was removed from the breeding pool and the Y-chromosome variants that they carried disappeared from the population.

Within the historical period we know of cases of intentional removal of a male population from the breeding pools while maintaining the female population. There are records of three incidents where the Persians, after defeating rebellious Greek populations, executed all adult males and castrated all boys. It probably happened elsewhere in the Persian Empire, as well, but only three events effecting Greeks were recorded in the surviving Greek literature.

It was Ming Dynasty policy in wars against the Hmong populations of what is now southeastern China to behead all defeated adult males (usually all males over the age of 14 or 15) and castrate all boys when putting down any rebellion. At least one town in SE China still holds an annual festival to celebrate the event where Chinese males took the place of the Hmong males after killing or castrating all of them. The 1565 boys castrated after one group was defeated is the most cited in the literature, but it was apparently standard policy in fighting the Hmong and other instances are noted without detailed numbers. This case is well-known only because the victorious general was censured for the unacceptably high death rate of the castrated boys—329 of the 1565 died. Chinese men, and in at least one case Mongol men, were settled to replace all of the males of the local population after each such incident where the adult males were executed and the boys castrated.

When the Chinese army conquered Yunnan in 1381, which was then ruled by the Mongols, only the sons of some of the leaders (such as Zheng He) were castrated. Zheng He, of course, rose in status in the imperial harem and eventually became admiral of the Western Fleet.

When the Lin Shuangwen rebellion on Taiwan was put down in 1789, 40 sons of rebel leaders, ages 4 to 14, were castrated and sent to work in the Imperial Palace. When the White Lotus Rebellion in China was put down by the Qing government in 1804, all males over the age of 15 were beheaded and all boys ages 8 to 14 were castrated. Legend has it that younger boys were kept prisoner until age 8 and were castrated when they reached that age.

When a rebellion by Sufi Muslims in Gansu Province was put down in 1871, all of the adult leaders were sentenced to “death by slicing,” but only the grandsons of the leader were castrated. Again, when the Chinese put down a rebellion in Xinjiang Province in 1877, only the minor sons and grandsons of the revolt leader were castrated. His adult sons were beheaded. Other adult leaders were beheaded, but apparently no other children were castrated as a result of the rebellion. This is the last judicial castration that I have found in the Chinese literature, although parents continued to castrate their sons to serve in the palace or to have them castrated by professionals into the twentieth century.

Sun Yaoting, the last surviving eunuch to have served in the imperial palace in Beijing, was castrated by his father in 1910, at the age of 8. He was probably not the last boy to be castrated for palace service in China, but only the last to attain a position in the palace before the fall of the dynasty. He died in 1996 at the age of 93.

[Arab Nights (imported)]

The current head of the Qajar family lives in Texas.

Sultan of the Hill? (Sorry. Couldn't resist that one)

So this implies that mass castrations might not just be a Persian and Chinese thing, but also European? Interesting.

[gandalf (imported)]

Very interesting.