Originally Posted by ToTheQuick View Post
ToTheQuick (imported) wrote: Tue Aug 16, 2022 8:04 am
I've written a voluntary story using a procedure derived from the traditional Ottoman method that really gets me going, though obviously that's to personal ta
I'd urge you to submit it. There is not a
better place than here to give your self-expression wings.
Probably ToTheQuick means something else, but I remembered the following:
The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Imperial Harem
https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2017/hathaway-chief-eunuch
One rarely finds a eunuch who has, like him, an open forehead, a well-made nose, large, clear eyes, a small mouth, rosy lips, dazzlingly white teeth, a neck of exact proportion without wrinkles, handsome arms and legs, all the rest of his body supple and unconstrained, more fat than thin.
So runs a description of the Chief Harem Eunuch of the Ottoman Empire by the French merchant Jean-Claude Flachat, a frequent visitor to the Ottoman palace during the early 1750s. He was speaking of a man who had been enslaved in his native Ethiopia, transported to Upper Egypt for castration, then sold on Cairo’s slave market. He would have been presented to the imperial palace by the Ottoman governor of Egypt or one of Egypt’s grandees, and entered the harem as one of several hundred subordinate harem eunuchs. He would have worked his way up the harem eunuch hierarchy over several decades before achieving the ultimate office on the death of his predecessor.
In employing East African eunuchs, the Ottomans were following a venerable tradition. The use of eunuchs as guardians of a ruler’s inner sanctum dates to some of the world’s earliest empires. Stone friezes from the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which ruled northern Iraq and Syria from 911–612 B.C.E., depict smooth-cheeked young men—eunuchs—attending the heavily bearded emperor during his hunts. In fact, virtually all pre-modern empires in the Eastern Hemisphere, with the notable exceptions of western Europe and Russia, employed eunuchs at their courts.
The great Islamic empires, beginning at least with the Abbasids (750–1258 C.E.), likewise employed eunuchs. East African eunuchs seem to have been particularly popular as harem guardians for reasons that remain unclear. Lascivious African harem eunuchs are a trope in the Thousand and One Nights tales, many of which depict life at the Abbasid court in Baghdad. In actual fact, the harem eunuchs kept the sexuality of the harem residents in check rather than facilitating it, just as their counterparts in the barracks and the ruler’s privy chamber kept the sexuality of the male pages-in-training in check.
The Chief Harem Eunuchs of the era directly encouraged trade by serving as conduits for European luxury goods to the women of the harem. El-Hajj Beshir Agha (term 1717– 46), the longest-serving and most powerful Chief Eunuch in Ottoman history, presided over elaborate nighttime garden parties at which luxurious European baubles were conspicuously consumed.
El-Hajj Beshir Agha was, according to European observers, a “vizier-maker,” in stark contrast to the Chief Eunuchs of the Köprülü era, who served at the pleasure of the grand viziers from that family. But following his death in 1746, Ottoman grand viziers began to compete with the Chief Eunuch for influence, and they often prevailed.
But the Chief Harem Eunuch’s influence extended beyond palace politics, on the one hand, and the holy cities, on the other.
Clearly, the Chief Harem Eunuch was far more than a harem functionary. His activities reinforced the Ottoman sultan’s religious and political authority while contributing to Ottoman promotion of Sunni Islam in general and the Hanafi legal rite in particular. In the course of endowing religious and educational institutions, furthermore, he contributed to infrastructural development in the Ottoman capital and in the provinces
.