On reading el-Cheikh

[JesusA (imported)]

Yesterday I finally managed to acquire a copy of Servants at the Gate: Eunuchs at the Court of al-Muqtadir by Nadia Maria el-Cheikh (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2005, 48 (pt. 2), pp. 234-252). It examines the role of eunuchs in the court of a single Abbasid caliph, who reigned from 908 to 932 (295 to 320 in the Moslem calendar).

Two sections of the article stand out for me as important to understanding eunuchs both within and without the Islamic realm.

Early in the article el-Cheikh quotes a Moslem scholar who wrote about the Caliphate.

Hilal al-Sabi states that: It is generally believed that in the days of al-Muqtadir bi-allah…the residence contained 11,000 eunuchs (khadim) – 7,000 blacks and 4,000 white Slavs – 7,000 free and slave girls and thousands of chamber servants.

The number, while seemingly high at 11,000 eunuchs in a single establishment, is not too far out of line with what I had already expected. John Davenport (1875, pp. 135-136) quotes the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier as stating that “when he was in the kingdom of Golconda, in the year 1675, not less than twenty-two thousand individuals were castrated”. The 22,000 number for Golkonda (near the modern city of Hyderabad in southeast India) is also cited by Millant (1908) and Erlich (1991), though neither of them give a source. Davenport also notes that about 2,000 eunuchs per year were exported from the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan to the Moslem world. Generally, Bengal and Java are considered to have been the largest sources of eunuchs for the eastern end of the Moslem realm.

Farther west, the chief sources of eunuchs were Africa and the Slavic areas of Eastern Europe. The African eunuchs arrived by both the trans-Saharan trade and by ship up the east coast of Africa, sometimes being sent across the Indian Ocean to modern India, as well.

Slavic eunuchs were mostly handled by Christian slave traders who gathered the still pagan Slavs and shipped them west. (The English word “slave” is derived from “Slav,” indicating some of the importance of the trade.) The male slaves were castrated in France or Spain and shipped east for sale.

One of the Arabic words for “eunuch” is “saqaliba,” which also means “Slav.” There is even one source that I cannot now locate on my shelf, that quotes an Arab linguist as differentiating the two meanings of the word by stating the “all eunuchs are not Slav, and all Slavs are not eunuchs,” though the numbers were close enough for it to be a common misperception.

Ibn Khurdadhbih wrote during that time that “What comes from the Western sea is the khadam Saqalib [Slav eunuchs] and Greek and Frankish and Lombard boy-slaves, and Greek and Andalusian slave girls. It was common enough that “saqlaba” became a synonym for “to castrate.” A sales receipt of the period records “Four boy-slaves: one of them is unemasculated and the other three are Saqlabis.”

These numbers certainly make the 11,000 eunuchs in the household of the caliph seem reasonable.

More importantly, el-Cheikh discusses the roles that eunuchs played in the court of the caliph. The guarding of women was only a small part of the duties that they held. She quotes Hopkins (1980) as providing a small part of the answer with his argument that the chief role of court eunuchs was to soak up criticism “which might otherwise have fallen upon the ruler and so acted as a lubricant preventing too much friction between the ruler and other forces of the state.”

For el-Cheikh, however, the more important reason for eunuchs was that

The eunuchs served as go-betweens in transactions between men and women of the court and between the court and the outside world. Eunuchs were involved in mediating, brokering, and transmitting messages between persons who were constrained by etiquette from meeting the caliph directly. Many of the roles and functions ascribed primarily to eunuchs involved mediations and transactions across boundaries.

These roles as mediators and negotiators are what we find widely in the three millennia during which eunuchs served as important officials in imperial states across Asia. By the time of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, there were eunuch officials in high government positions. They served both within the court itself, as governing officials in far-flung provinces, and as ambassadors to foreign states. This continued at least into the 17th century in western Europe (see Freitas 2009 for a biography of an Italian eunuch-diplomat) and later elsewhere across Eurasia.

Not mentioned by el-Cheikh is another role that eunuchs played in some parts of Eurasia, but only briefly or to a minor extent in the Islamic realm (at least as far as I have information). They could also serve in the military. There were eunuch generals and entire ranks of eunuch chariot drivers and archers in the much feared Assyrian army. Rome was saved from the Ostrogoths by the Byzantine eunuch general Narses (Fauber 1990). There were many other Byzantine eunuch military commanders as well. At the Chinese end of the continent the admiral Zheng He is famed for leading his fleet on several voyages as far as the east coast of Africa and General Yishiha drove a Russian army out of Manchuria, securing it for the Chinese empire and providing the Russians with their first major defeat in East Asia.

The only reference I have found so far to eunuchs in Islamic armies is in David Ayalon’s Eunuchs, Caliphs and Sultans: A Study of Power Relationships (1999, p. 67) where he notes that in the year 656 (36 in the Moslem calendar), after the murder of Caliph Uthman, the governor of Syria threatened to intervene in the struggle for succession with his army that included 4,000 eunuchs. Ayalon notes that there were eunuch military commanders at later periods in Islamic history, though he does not name them or give any further details.

In the 20th century, Dabbs (2000) found that, even after adjustments for age, the higher the military rank, the lower the testosterone level. While U.S. generals have T levels above castrate, they are still very low for males of their age. This will probably become the theme for another post that I will make when I have the time….

All of the books and articles referenced above can be found in the thread here:

http://www.eunuch.org/forums/showthread ... bliography