The castration of white Europeans and the export of eunuchs to Africa

For centuries, there was a flourishing business of castrating young men and boys in Europe and then selling them as slaves to the Muslim world.

Mention of eunuchs summons up for most of us images of those guarding the harems of Arab potentates. We are also aware that slaves on plantations in ante bellum America were on occasion castrated for some transgression or other. Whatever other horrors the Atlantic slave trade entailed though, routine castration was never one of them. It is true that black slaves in America and the Caribbean were, from time to time, castrated, but this was never a common occurrence and was usually inflicted due to exceptional circumstances, such as an accusation of rape. With the act of castration so likely to result in death, it would have made no sense to hazard the lives of slaves in this way too frequently. In Europe, by contrast, the castration of white slaves was carried out on an industrial scale (Tracy, 2013). In Venice and the French city of Verdun ‘castration houses’ were set up to produce eunuchs for export to Egypt and other Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The majority of the young boys were Slavs taken prisoner by the Vikings and then sold on to slavers. The Slavs, from whose name is derived the modern word ‘slave’, are an ethnic group which originated in what is today western Russia. By the sixth or seventh century AD, they had spread south into the Balkans, almost as far as Greece, and west into what is now Poland.

     In the seventh century AD, the newly created Arab religion of Islam began to be forcibly spread to the countries contiguous to Arabia; the area roughly equivalent to modern-day Saudi Arabia. Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt adopted the new faith and it was also carried west, along the Mediterranean coast to the Berber tribes which occupied what are today Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya. Between the years 642 and 708 AD, Arab armies conquered the whole of North Africa; from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean and imposed Islam upon the region. The Berbers were crushed and most converted to Islam. In the course of the 70 years or so which it had taken to subdue this vast area, hundreds of thousands of slaves had been acquired. These were those defeated by the Arab armies (Pipes, 1981). It was at this time that a subtle shift took place in the nature of slavery, at least in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

     Until the rise of Islam and the contemporaneous Arab conquests, there was a tacit understanding across most of the Europe and the Middle East that while it was quite alright to make slaves of those belonging to other nations, it was not really the thing to enslave one’s fellow countrymen. This distinction was observed in most cultures. With the coming of Islam, nationality was no longer the crucial point, but rather religious faith. Mohamed, the founder of Islam, was not initially opposed to the keeping of slaves. He bought and sold slaves himself. What he set out in the Qur’an were new rules for the treatment of slaves. They were to be regarded as fellow human beings, rather than just possessions and freeing them was presented as a charitable and meritorious act. In the Hadith, a collection of stories about Mohamed which also details some of his teachings, more restrictions on the practice of slavery are to be found. For the devout Muslim, only two ways of acquiring slaves were now acceptable. One of these is if a child is born into slavery; the offspring of two slaves. The other was by capturing people in the course of war, which was of course already at that time a long-established method of creating new slaves. There was though a new limitation on this practice too.

      Traditionally, soldiers and civilians belonging to an enemy nation could be seized and enslaved when their territory had been overrun. It did not matter which gods, if any they worshipped, the important thing was that they belonged to another nationality or ethnicity. For Islam, the case was now altered, for it was forbidden to enslave any free Muslim. It did not matter if the person was black or white, Arab or Berber, rich or poor; Muslims could not be made slaves. This meant of course that if a steady supply of new slaves was required, it would be necessary either to keep fighting wars of expansion against non-Muslim countries or to resort to buying them from slave traders. This was frowned upon, from a strictly religious viewpoint, but just about tolerated, as long as the slaves being bought were not Muslims.

     As we shall see, this new idea of a prohibition on the acquisition of slaves based not on nationality but rather on religion, had a profound influence on slavery from the seventh century onwards. Precisely similar prohibitions were also placed upon Christians in later times, in that only non-Christians could be captured as slaves.

     The conquest of North Africa had yielded up to 300,000 slaves and the rapid growth of Islam in the wake of the invasions may have owed at least as much to the desire of the conquered Berbers not to end up as slaves as it did to the merits of Islam as a religion. The only test of whether somebody was really a Muslim was a simple one. If they were able to declare, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohamed is his messenger.’, then that person was a Muslim. This simple statement of faith alone was sufficient to prevent anybody in Muslim dominated territory being seized and taken into slavery. There was an added bonus to being a Muslim, in that Muslims were taxed more lightly than Christians, Jews or out-and-out heathens.

     The Muslim world of the eighth century thus covered a very great area, and most of those living in countries such as Syria, Egypt and so on professed to be Muslims. A word needs to be said at this point about the mode of government of such a vast empire. After the death of Mohamed in 632 AD, a successor was chosen; a man who would be both the religious and civil leader of the expanding Muslim empire. This person would have spiritual and temporal authority and his role might, very roughly, be compared to that of the Pope in the Catholic Church. These successors were known as Caliphs and they wielded an extraordinary amount of power. The first Caliphs were related to Mohamed, either by marriage or blood (Kennedy, 2016).

     The idea that slaves could only be non-Muslims from outside the empire created something of a dilemma, because it meant that they would in future need to be acquired from the beyond the borders of the Muslim lands. It was a question of looking south or north. One way of getting them would be to launch raids against non-Muslim countries and simply carry off men and women by main force. This was regularly done in both Europe and Africa. The other way to get slaves would be to buy them, just as one would do with any other desired commodity. It is perhaps no coincidence that it was at this time that the Vikings from Scandinavia began to engage in the slave trade. We often tend to think of the Vikings as ferocious pirates who sacked monasteries and pillaged wherever they were able, but there was invariably a strong business-end to their activities and when they found that there was a good market for living captives, rather than dead victims,  they eased up on the slaughter and began taking prisoners instead and selling them to the Muslim world.

     The Vikings burst onto the historical record in the summer of 793 AD, when a raid was carried out on the monastery of Lindisfarne, off the coast of northern England (Parker, 2014). Many of the ecclesiastical articles at Lindisfarne, the candlesticks, containers for the host, boxes containing holy relics and so on, were made of silver and gold. Some monks who tried to protect what they thought to be sacred objects were killed out of hand. This tended to be the pattern for a few years, until the Vikings, who came from Scandinavia, the northernmost part of Europe, realised that young monks and nuns were in many ways even more valuable than the precious metals which they were stealing. A century after that first raid on Lindisfarne, a Flemish monk called Rimbert was visiting the Viking trading centre of Hedeby, in modern-day Denmark. He was horrified to find a nun who had been taken prisoner and was being sold as a slave. Rimbert managed to raise enough money to free the unfortunate woman. By this time, in the late ninth and early tenth century AD, the Vikings had found that the most profitable market for slaves, especially those who were young and attractive, was the Muslim world, both North Africa and the Middle East.

     Apart from general slaves who would be labourers, domestic servants and so on, three specific kinds of slave were in great demand by Muslims. These were attractive young women, strong, healthy adolescent boys and eunuchs. For now, we shall be looking at the demand for eunuchs.

     Polygamy is not forbidden in Islam. Mohamed himself had a dozen wives (Armstrong, 2006) and some of his later followers had many more than this, as well as large numbers of concubines. The maintenance of a harem consisting of many wives and sex-slaves was a sign of wealth and importance in Muslim society for some centuries. It must be borne in mind that neither the Christian nor Hebrew Bibles forbid polygamy and that some of the most revered figures in both religions practiced polygamy to such an extent as to make Muhammed and his successors seem positively restrained in their appetites! King Solomon, for example, was said to have 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3). Even the most famous of the sultans does not come near to matching this incredible harem.

     The word concubine may be familiar to most readers, although its precise meaning obscure. The status of concubines varies greatly between cultures and historical ages. Concubines are women who have a regular sexual relationship with a man and yet are not married to him. Sometimes, concubines are indistinguishable from mistresses, in that they are not married and their children are illegitimate. In other cases, the concubine is very similar to a wife, although one of slightly inferior standing. In Islam, concubinage was an accepted institution and rich and powerful men wanted to have as many concubines as they could afford to keep. To keep a harem was a display of ostentatious wealth. It meant that in addition to wives, the owner of the harem could have his pick of other attractive women who were bound to allow him sexual access to their bodies. Many of these women had been purchased as slaves.

     To guard and protect their harems, important and powerful Muslims required eunuchs; men who were incapable of taking surreptitious advantage of all those attractive women. Eunuchs were men who had been castrated, so that they were no longer able to perform sexually. There was a problem with finding eunuchs though, because the Hadith contained the express and precise views of Mohamed on the whole idea of castrating or otherwise harming slaves. His opinion on the matter could not have been plainer: ‘Whoever kills his slave, we will kill him: whoever mutilates (his slave). We will mutilate him, and whoever castrates (his slave), we will castrate him’ (Sunan an-Nasa'i 4736).

     This all seemed quite straightforward; a devout Muslim was not able to castrate one of his slaves. There was incidentally another and more practical reason not to try and create eunuchs and this was that the death rate among grown men who were castrated was very high, either from infection or post-operation complications such as the urethra becoming blocked and the victim’s bladder bursting as a result. One estimate was that for men past puberty, the mortality rate could be as high as 90 per cent. Even when the procedure was carried out skilfully by those well practiced in it, the majority of those subjected to this hideous operation, carried out without anaesthetics, did not survive. In the sixteenth century, many eunuchs were created at a Coptic monastery in Egypt. Despite taking every precaution and being very skilled at the operation, two thirds of those castrated at this monastery died (Wilson & Roehrborn, 1999). This, remember, was under the best possible conditions for the time.

     The solution to the difficulties, both practical and religious, which prevented Muslims from making their own eunuchs was to engage slave traders in Europe to provide a ready-made product which could then be purchased, already castrated and in good health. These eunuchs were manufactured in Europe, usually from pre-pubescent European boys and the history of the vile trade has almost been forgotten today.

Before we look at the trade in, and creation of, eunuchs, it might be interesting to think a little about the mechanics of the thing and why there were such difficulties in maintaining the supply of eunuchs to the Muslim world.

     The highest rate of success when creating a eunuch is when boys who have not yet begun puberty are used. The shock to the system is less and the survival rate better. The prognosis depends also upon which methods are used and how extensive the operation is to be. In some of the earliest records of castration, the testicles are merely crushed and rendered useless. There is no loss of blood in such a process and although the pain would have been excruciating, the chances of it resulting in death would be minimal. The ancient Assyrians used this technique, as did the Italians when creating castrati; boy singers who were castrated to preserve their soprano voices (Feldman, 2015). Other relatively benign procedures include opening the scrotum with a small incision and then scoring the testicles until they are so damaged that they simply wither away. The mortality rate from operations of this kind is very low. Unfortunately, these methods did not fit the bill for the eunuchs required for service in Muslim palaces or harems. It was not enough for somebody to claim that a eunuch’s testicles were useless and damaged beyond repair. Nor was it sufficient for the testicles to be removed. Before a eunuch could be used, an inspection had to be carried out to confirm that not only were the testicles and scrotum completely absent, but that the whole of the penis had also been amputated. More than that, periodic inspections were carried out to ensure that the penis had not started to grow back (Ayalon, 1999).

     The reason for being so ruthless about the extent of castration is that even with the testicles removed, it is sometimes possible for a man to have an erection of such firmness that he is able to have intercourse. Radical castrations in which scarcely even the stump of the removed penis are left proved to be the most effective way of ensuring that the women of the harem were left unmolested by those whose duty it was to guard them.

     Cutting off both penis and testicles can easily cause a person to bleed to death. Even if this does not happen, the risk of subsequent infection is very great. This was particularly the case before there was any clear understanding of how infection spreads and at a time when there were no antibiotics to treat it, even if it developed and was correctly diagnosed. This is one factor which greatly contributed to the high number of deaths from this treatment. One method devised to make amputations as clean and hygienic as possible, introduced another risk. This was cauterisation with a red-hot iron as soon as the body part had been removed, which prevented excessive bleeding by sealing up the open ends of the severed blood vessels. This worked well enough when cutting off a hand or foot, but was not practicable with radical castrations as it would lead to scarring and obstruction of the urethra.  The possibility of scar tissue or strictures forming in the urethra and so preventing the bladder from draining was in any case high. If this happened, then the bladder could simply burst, with consequences which were invariably fatal. If, three days after the operation, the man or boy was unable to urinate then, ‘the passages have become swollen and nothing can save him’ (Penzer, 2005).  Metal plugs could be inserted immediately after the penis had been cut off, in an attempt to prevent the urethra from closing during healing, but this was still a chancy business.

     Of course, if one bought a slave and he subsequently died of the effects of castration, then the price paid was simply lost. For this reason, rather than any humanitarian considerations, it was important to do the utmost to ensure that the victims of this barbarity survived their mutilations. It was to cater for this need that enterprising souls set up special centres in Europe where boys could be brought to be castrated. For two or three centuries, this was a flourishing industry in Italy and France.

     Problems with the urinary tract, at least in the short term, could often be prevented by inserting a small plug in the urethra, immediately after the penis had been removed. This was kept in for three days and the boy not allowed to drink liquid or urinate during that time. When the plug was removed and urine flowed, then the danger of death by a ruptured bladder had passed. From then on, and for the rest of his life, the castrated boy would either have to sit or squat in order to urinate. Incontinence was a frequent disability and for some the plug became a permanent feature of their lives, only being removed when it was necessary to void the bladder. Many suffered leakage at other times and it was not uncommon for a eunuch to smell of urine.

     There were various routes by which the slaves reached the European cities where the specialised castration centres existed. Since the great majority of the boys operated on were Slavs, they were usually brought down through what is now Russia and into Europe from the north. The Vikings captured prisoners in the Slav lands and then sometimes sold them on to other slavers who would bring them to Europe. Just as there was a prohibition in Islam on the castration of slaves, so too did Christianity frown upon the practice. Indeed, even trading in Christian slaves was unacceptable, which made the unconverted heathens from what is now Russia ideal for the purpose. Being neither Muslim nor Christian, nobody cared sufficiently about them to try and discourage the cruelties which were perpetrated upon them. Writing in the eighth century, Paul the Deacon described, ‘innumerable troops of captives’ being taken south from Slav lands and also what is now Germany (Foulke, 1974).

     There is a curious circumstance associated with this trade and it is as follows. It is sometimes asserted today that the transatlantic slave trade was dominated in the eighteenth century by Jewish merchants. This is a debatable point, but no such uncertainty attaches to the role of Jews in the medieval slave trade, which largely involved the export of white slaves from Europe to North Africa. The reason for this is not difficult to ascertain.

     For a thousand years or so, Christian Europe was at odds with the Muslim world of North Africa and the Middle East. Invasions took place in both directions. At one time, the Muslim armies swept across the Pyrenees into France and then, a few centuries later, European armies converged on the Middle East and occupied much of it; setting up Christian kingdoms in Jerusalem and other places. Four hundred years later, Muslim armies were marching through Europe and only halted at the gates of Vienna. All these military activities were, at least nominally, motivated by religious fervour; the desire to convert unbelievers to the one true faith of, depending upon one’s origins and skin colour, either Islam or Christianity. It followed as a matter of course that Muslims travelling through Italy and France were viewed askance in just the way that Christians in Syria and Algiers would be. Jews, not being bound to one side or the other, could often travel, and trade, more freely. It was accordingly far easier for a Jew to transport slaves to Venice or Verdun and then on to Africa, than it would be a for a Christian.

     As early as the late fifth century AD, a pope gave permission for Jews to bring non-Christian slaves into Italy, from where they were then sent to North Africa.  Pope Gelasius was appointed Pontiff in 492 AD and from the first year of his reign was happy to see Slavs and Germans brought south, en route to Africa. This was the beginning of extensive Jewish involvement in the slave trade. Within a century or two, the Jews were accepted as being the chief slave traders between Europe and Africa and the Middle East. A large part of their trade was in young men who had been brought to southern Europe to be castrated and then sold to Arab markets as eunuchs.

     In the later ninth century the Arab writer Ibn Khordadbeh was giving a detailed account of the routes which were being used by those trafficking in slaves. In his work Book of Roads and Kingdoms, he gave a detailed and precise account of who was behind the trade and how they moved their goods to and from Europe. Most of the slaves were bought by Jewish traders in what is now Russia, Ukraine and the Balkans and then taken to Venice or Verdun to be operated upon. As Director of Posts and Police for a province of the Abbasid caliphate, Ibn Khordadbeh was in the best possible position to know about such things (Meynard, 1865). The traders whom he wrote of were the Radhanites, a guild of Jewish merchants about the origin of which there are a number of theories. What is certain though is that the Radhanites were an international business, who travelled across Europe, Asia and Africa, dealing in luxury goods of high value. These men were multi-lingual and had bases across the whole of the known world, from Western Europe to the far East, from northern Russia to Africa. To quote Ibn Khordadbeh:

     These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman, Frankish, Spanish, and Slav

     languages. They journey from West to East, from East to West, partly on land,

     partly by sea. They transport from the West eunuchs, female slaves, boys,

     brocade, castor, marten and other furs, and swords (Meynard, 1865).

     As we have seen, the Slavs were mostly heathens; that is to say they were neither Christians nor Muslims. As such, they were regarded as fair game by anybody who could catch them and take them from their homes. Russia and the Ukraine were good sources of Slav slaves and so were the Balkans, which were also populated largely by Slavs. Bosnia was especially convenient, for it had a coastline on the Adriatic Sea; a short journey by ship from Venice. The slave trade from Bosnia flourished for centuries, coming to an abrupt halt in 1463, when the Ottoman Empire invaded and occupied the area (Clarke, 1998). The loss of this important source of slaves was compensated by the opening up of a new and larger, indeed seemingly inexhaustible, supply elsewhere. At about the same time that the Ottomans were taking over the Balkans and closing it off to European slave traders, the Portuguese were starting to exploit West Africa in a serious way. It was during the sixteenth century that the slave trade between Europe and Africa really took off.  By 1540 some 12,000 slaves a year were being imported into Europe by the Portuguese. In Lisbon, the capital city, 10 per cent of the population were enslaved Africans (Grant, 2009). Who needed Bosnia, or indeed any Slavs, when Africa was apparently able to supply any demand?

     Just to remind ourselves of the situation at which we have been looking. For black slaves in America and the islands of the Caribbean, castration was a rare and terrible punishment inflicted in exceptional circumstances. The castration of white children in Europe who were to be sold into slavery in North Africa or the Middle East was, on the other hand, a regular occurrence which took place for centuries.

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