The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker.

• Author: Zilfi, Madeline C.
• Position: Book review

The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker. By JANE HATHAWAY. New York: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. Pp. xvi + 323. $105, [pounds sterling]75.

Jane Hathaway's The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem is as full a picture of African eunuchs in Mediterranean history as readers are likely to find, or construct for themselves. The picture or, more precisely, the set of depictions that Hathaway offers, combines the history of imperial institutions and of slave procurement with prosopography and individual biography. The geographical setting extends from the Horn of Africa to both shores of the Mediterranean, though the epicenter of demand in the early modern era was the imperial Ottoman court at Istanbul and its satellites.

The story that Hathaway tells begins with two chapters tracing the long and only partly known emergence of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa as the reservoir of eunuch manpower in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. The preference for East Africans--Ethiopians, Habeshi, Galla, Oromo, et al.--was already established in Byzantine and early Islamic times, but the regularization of the eunuch slave trade, the elaboration of eunuch roles, and the sheer numbers involved cement the association with Ottoman dynastic culture between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Most of the boys who were removed--seized--from East Africa were castrated on the margins of the Ottoman empire, principally Upper Egypt and the Sudan, and transported to one or another Mediterranean court. Those who survived the barbarous cutting might end up in Egypt, the Moroccan sultanate, or one of the semi-independent principalities and fiefdoms of North Africa and the Arabian peninsula. The bulk of the trade, though, led one way or another to the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. Were they the "lucky" ones? Such designations hardly fit the slave condition, much less that of eunuchs. Eunuchs' very survival brought lifelong physical maladies and humiliations. However, part of those burdens might be lightened by appointment to the opulence and access afforded by the imperial Ottoman court. It is these relatively few individuals--some seventy-six from the mid-sixteenth century through the turn of the twentieth--who are the real subject of Hathaway's study. Each served varying terms as Chief Harem Eunuch, protector of the inviolability of the royal women's and family quarters. For most of that period they were also guardians of...