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377 Pages
Celibate and Childless Men in Power
This book explores a striking common feature of pre-modern ruling systems on a global scale: the participation of childless and celibate men as integral parts of the elites. In bringing these two different groups of ruling men together, this collection shows that the integration of men who were normatively or physically excluded from biological fatherhood offered premodern dynasties the potential to use different reproduction patterns. The shared focus on ruling eunuchs and bishops also reveals that these men had a specific position at the intersection of four fields: power, social dynamics, sacredness and gender/masculinities.
The 13 chapters present case studies on clerics in Medieval Europe and court eunuchs in the Middle East, Byzantium, India and China. They analyse how these men in their different frameworks acted as politicians, participated in social networks and provided religious authority, and discuss their masculinities. Taken together, this collection sheds light on the political arena before the modern nation-state excluded these unmarried men from the circles of political power.
Almut HO6fert is Professor for Medieval Transcultural History at the University of Ziirich.
Matthew M. Mesley is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Huddersfield.
Serena Tolino is Junior Professor for Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg.
Contributors
Julia Barrow studied at St Andrews University and at Oxford University, where she received her Ph.D. with a thesis on The Bishops of Hereford and their Acta (charters) 1163-1219. She held many positions, including a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Birmingham. She spent one year working for the Victoria County History of Cheshire, before she got a permanent lectureship at the University of Nottingham, where she taught until 2012. She is currently Professor and Director of the Institute of Medieval Studies at Leeds University. Her main research interest is church history (700-1300), especially English episcopal charters and administration (1000-1300) and the career structure of the medieval clergy in western Europe (800-1250). She has published extensively, most recently “Way-stations on English Episcopal Itineraries, c.700c.1300”, English Historical Review, 127 (2012); and English Episcopal Acta, 35: Hereford 1234-1275 (Oxford, 2009).
Nadia Maria El Cheikh is Professor of History at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She received her B.A. in History and Archeology at AUB and her Ph.D. degree in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 1992. She has served as Director of the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies and as Chair of the Department of History and Archaeology. She received the New York University Global Affair’s International Visitors Program Grant in 2004 and in 2007 was the Shawwaf Visiting Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Her book, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, was published by the Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs in 2004 and translated into Turkish and Greek. She has co-authored a book entitled Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court. Formal and Informal Politics in the Caliphate of al-Mugqtadir (295-320/908-932) (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Her most recent book, Women, Islam and Abbasid Identity, was published in 2015 by Harvard University Press. In 2016, she was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut.
Jane Hathaway received her Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, in 1992; she was a student of Cemal Kafadar. She is currently Professor of History at Ohio State University. Her expertise is the early modern Ottoman Empire, particularly the Arab provinces (Egypt in particular) and the eunuchs of the imperial harem. She has published numerous books and articles related to these topics, including The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Oazdaglis (Cambridge, 1997); A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (State University of New York Press, 2003); Beshir Agha, Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Imperial Harem (Oneworld, 2006); and The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1500-1800 (Pearson/Longman, 2008). She is currently completing a book on the office of chief harem eunuch, to be published by Cambridge.
Jessica Hinchy is Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In 2013, she obtained her Ph.D. in South Asian History from the Australian National University. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, domesticity and colonialism in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century north India. She has particularly examined the colonial regulation of peoples classified as “eunuchs”, such as khwajasara? eunuch slaves and the transgender hijra community. Her publications include “Enslaved Childhoods in Eighteenth Century Awadh” in South Asian History and Culture 6, no. 3 (2015); “The Sexual Politics of Imperial Expansion: Eunuchs and Indirect Colonial Rule in MidNineteenth-Century North India” in Gender c& History 26, no.3 (2014); and “Obscenity, Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India” in Asian Studies Review 38, no. 2 (2014).
Michael Hoeckelmann studied Sinology, Linguistics and Political Science at Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat (WWU) in Minster. From 2005 to 2007, he studied Modern Chinese and Chinese Philosophy at Sun Yatsen University in Guangzhou, PRC. He obtained his Ph.D. in Sinology in 2013 at the graduate school of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Cultures” at WWU Minster. After holding a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at King’s College London and the University of Cambridge from 2013 to 2015, he now is Assistant Professor at the Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include Classical Chinese philology, the intellectual and religious history of China, and eunuchs and elite formation in medieval China. His publications include Li Deyu (787-850). Religion und Politik in der Tang-Zeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016) and “Gerechte Waffen und die Kunst des Strafens”, in Monumenta Serica 58 (2010).
Almut HO6fert studied History and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Bonn, Cairo and Freiburg im Breisgau. She obtained her Ph.D. at the European University Institute of Florence in 2001. She worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Basel (2001-2005; 2007-2011), and she has been Visiting Fellow at the American University in Cairo (2005-6) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2006-7). Since 2011, she has been a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor in Transcultural History of the Latin and Arabic Middle Ages at the Department of History of the University of Ziirich, where she is leading a project on Hermapbhrodites, Eunuchs, Priests: Gender Ambiguities and Masculinities in the Arab and Latin Middle Ages. Her research interests include empire and caliphate, cultural and religious history in Latin, Arabic and Byzantine Middle Ages, methods of transcultural and gender history. Her publications include Den Feind beschreiben. “Tiirkengefahr” und europdisches Wissen tiber das Osmanische Reich, 1450-1600 (Frankfurt a. M., 2003) and Kaisertum und Kalifat. Der imperiale Monotheismus in Friith- und Hochmittelalter (Frankfurt 2015). She also co-edited Geschlechtergeschichte global (L’homme. Europdische Zeitschrift fiir feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 23, 2) (K6ln, Weimar, 2012) and Between Europe and Islam. Shaping Modernity in a Transcultural Space (Briissel, Bern, Berlin, 2000).
Hugh Kennedy studied Arabic, Persian and History at Pembroke College (Cambridge) and obtained his Ph.D. in 1977 from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge, with a thesis on the “Politics and the Political Elite in the Early Abbasid Caliphate”. He taught at St Andrews University, where he also acted as Deputy Head of the School of History and then as Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He was Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews from 1997 to 2007. Since 2007, he has been Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies in London. His research topics include History of the Islamic Middle East, Islamic Archaeology and Muslim Spain. He has published several books on the history of the Middle East, like The Great Arab Conquests (London, 2007); in 2004, a revised edition of his Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 600-1050 (London, 2004), first published in 1986; and, most recently, The Caliphate: The History of an Idea (2016). He has edited several volumes, including the Historical Atlas of Islam (Leiden, 2002), and he has published numerous articles.
Stephanie Kluge studied History and German Philology at the University of Minster and obtained her M.Ed. degree in 2013. Since 2014, she has been a doctoral researcher in the Volkswagen Foundation Dilthey project Diversitas religionum. Thirteenth-century Foundations of European Discourses of Religious Diversity, led by Sita Steckel. She is currently working on a dissertation studying polemical and didactic discourses of purity, chastity and masculinity among thirteenth-century Franciscans and Dominicans. Forthcoming publications concern debates about chastity in various thirteenth-century genres such as historiography and exempla literature.
Mathew Kuefler studied at the University of Alberta and at Yale University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1995. He has taught at several universities, including Yale University, Rice University, University of Alberta, University of British Columbia and finally at the San Diego State University, where he is now a Professor of History. His main research interests are medieval gender and sexuality, as well as the history of childhood and the family and LGBTQ history. He is the author of The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago, 2001) and The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald of Aurillac (Pennsylvania, 2014); editor of The History of Sexuality Sourcebook (Toronto, 2007) and The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 2006); and author of numerous academic articles. From 2004 to 2014, he was director of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.
Ruby Lal is Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University, Atlanta. She holds an M.Phil in History from the University of Delhi and a D.Phil from the University of Oxford. Before Emory, she taught at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She is the author of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005), which won much acclaim, including more than 15 reviews in major international journals and magazines, such as The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique and The Times Literary Supplement. Her recent book entitled Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013) has been reviewed extensively in academic journals and magazines with wider intellectual concerns. She is currently finalizing a narrative history of Mughal Empress Nur Jahan, titled Uncrowned Empress (W. W. Norton, 2017).
Matthew M. Mesley was awarded a BA [Hons, 1st] History at the University of Exeter in 2004; an MPhil in Medieval History at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (2005); and an Arts and Humanities Research Council PhD at the University of Exeter (2009). In 2009, he was awarded a six-month Scouloudi Foundation Research Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, London. Between 2011 and 2016 he undertook a postdoctorate at the University of Ziirich, working on a research project entitled Die Mannlichkeit der Kirchenftirsten — directed by Almut H6fert and financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2014, he was awarded Medieval Fellow status at the Center of Medieval Studies, Fordham University, New York. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Huddersfield (UK) and an Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University (UK). Forthcoming publications include a chapter entitled “Chivalry, Masculinity, and Sexuality” in the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades and a contribution to Palgrave MacMillan’s Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe. He has also reviewed for the journals Early Medieval Europe, the Journal of British Studies, The Medieval Review, English Historical Review and Speculum.
Sita Steckel obtained her doctoral degree from Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversitat in Munich in 2006, after training in Medieval History, Modern History and English Philology/Medieval Literature. She has held positions at Munich and at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, but since 2004 she has mainly worked at the University of Miinster and is currently Junior Professor at Miinster’s Historical Seminar. Her current research project, based on a Dilthey Fellowship granted by the Volkswagen Foundation, is titled Diversitas religionum. Thirteenthcentury Foundations of European Discourses of Religious Diversity, and it primarily deals with religious polemics between different Christian groups such as monks/nuns, friars, clerics and laypeople. Recent publications concern not only religious polemics and conflicts within Christianity but also theoretical issues concerning the history of medieval religion.
Rachel Stone obtained a first degree in Mathematics; she then trained as a librarian and worked in a variety of specialist and academic libraries. She obtained a MPhil in Medieval History at Cambridge University and completed her Ph.D. at King’s College London in 2005. Since then, she has researched and taught in London and Cambridge and has also worked as a librarian. She is currently a Visiting Research Associate at King’s College London. Her research interests include Carolingian gender and women’s history and the development of the early medieval clergy. Her recent publications include Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire (2012), Hincmar of Rheims: Life and Work (2015) (co-edited with Charles West) and The Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga: Hincmar of Rheims’s De Divortio (2016) (jointly translated with Charles West).
Serena Tolino is currently Junior Professor for Islamic Studies at the Asia and Africa Institute of the University of Hamburg. She studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Naples L’Orientale, at Cairo University and at Dar Comboni for Arabic Studies (Cairo). In 2012, she was awarded a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the University of Naples L’Orientale and the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (cotutelle). From 2012 to 2016, she worked as Postdoctorate Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Zurich in a project on Hermaphrodites, Eunuchs, Priests: Gender Ambiguities and Masculinities in the Arab and Latin Middle Ages, directed by Almut H6fert. In Winter Semester 2013, she was Visiting Fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. She is particularly interested in Islamic law, gender in Islamic countries and sexuality in Islamic history. She has published a number of articles on homosexuality in Islamic law and in Islamic countries and the monograph Omosessualita e atti omosessuali tra diritto islamico e diritto positivo: il caso egiziano con alcuni riferimenti all’esperienza libanese (Homosexuality and Homosexual Acts between Islamic Law and Positive Law. The Egyptian Case with Some Notes on the Lebanese Case) (Naples, 2013).
Shaun Tougher studied at Queen’s University of Belfast and obtained his
Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews with a dissertation on the reign of Leo VI, 886-912. He subsequently taught at Queen’s and at the University of St Andrews. He is a Reader in Ancient History in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University. His main research interests include the history of the later Roman and Byzantine empires, Byzantium’s Macedonian dynasty, eunuchs in the Byzantine empire and in general and the family in Byzantium. His publications include The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (Abingdon and New York, 2008), Julian the Apostate (Edinburgh, 2007) and The Reign of Leo VI (886-912): Politics and People (Leiden, 1997). He also co-edited Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian the Apostate (Swansea, 2012), and he edited Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (London, 2002).
Preface
Eunuchs and bishops appear to be so different that it might come as a surprise to see a collection that brings these two groups of men together. Whereas bishops in the pre-modern world have been for some time the subject of historical studies, scholars only began to be interested in eunuchs from the 1970s onwards, and thereafter an increasing number of studies have been published, many in the last decade. Although the history of eunuchs is still relatively new, scholars have demonstrated that the image of the eunuch as the avaricious and manipulative guardian of the harem is an ancient stereotype, but one that fails to appreciate their many roles and functions. Indeed, court eunuchs were an integral part of pre-modern ruling elites, whose manifold responsibilities went far beyond the harems’ borders. With this scholarly appreciation of eunuchs as powerful figures in premodern dynasties, a striking parallel is evident: both eunuchs and bishops were either physically unable or normatively forbidden to father children, yet they still wielded significant social, political and cultural power in their respective societies. Our collection addresses this phenomenon. Without aiming at a strict comparison, it explores a variety of pre-modern cultures and analyses the ways in which both groups of men were excluded from legitimate or physical reproduction yet still remained an important feature of political dynastic systems.
In the introduction and first chapter, Almut Hofert sets out the analytical framework for the volume. She proposes the Shared Focus as an experimental comparative shapshot for transcultural collaborative projects and applies this approach to our topic. In so doing, she presents four interrelated fields in which both eunuchs and bishops held a special position: (1) their role as part of the ruling elites; (2) their involvement in kinship and networks; (3) their role in religion and their associations to sacredness; and (4) the understanding and representation of their masculinities and gender. As HO6fert points out, the masculinities of eunuchs and bishops were particularly complex, conflicting and, one could say, “kaleidoscopic”.
The case studies on bishops and eunuchs are themselves presented in four parts, which correspond to the four fields above. This placement reflects the main focus of the various case studies, although the boundaries are not strict. We have tried to reach a balance, in so far as contributions relate to different times periods and world regions; the collection covers the Late Antiquity to the nineteenth century, with chapters on the Middle East, Europe, China and India.
The contributions in the first part on “Bishops and eunuchs as parts of the ruling elites” provide a broader picture of bishops and eunuchs as political and military actors. Julia Barrow begins with a wide-ranging survey of the bishop and his roles in the Latin West between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Following this, she explores the importance that bishops had in fostering uncle-nephew relationships and providing education, patronage and institutional continuity for their charges. The contributions of Nadia Maria El Cheikh and Hugh Kennedy explore the significance of eunuchs in the Abbasid empire during the tenth century. Nadia Maria El Cheikh analyses the multiple roles and functions that court eunuchs held and the way they used their proximity to their masters as a way of acquiring authority. Hugh Kennedy presents a case study of the eunuch commander Mu’nis al-Muzaffar, whose military successes resulted in him having a particularly powerful position in Abbasid politics. Ruby Lal explores the ways in which the ideology of the Mughal empire intersected with ideas about court eunuchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In their manifold tasks, court eunuchs were part of a liminal zone, in which they were both loyal servants and officers of the empire.
The second part on “Networks and kinships” begins with Michael Hoeckelmann, who shows the crucial roles court eunuchs held in the late Tang dynasty (618-907) in China. Court eunuchs were often married and they could also adopt sons as successors — a practice that has been described as eunuch dynasticism. Rachel Stone analyses inheritance and succession patterns of Carolingian bishops in ninth- and tenth-century Europe. She explores how noble families tried to monopolise bishoprics, both before and after celibacy became the norm. Jessica Hinchy investigates high-ranking eunuch slaves, called khwaja-sara’i, in the North Indian province of Awadh. She suggests that their social and political roles were shaped by three factors: master-slave proximity, networks of adopted kin and disciples and adherence to hegemonic codes of masculinity. With the British annexation of Awadh and the historical transformations of colonial modernity in South Asia, the khwaja-sar@i were excluded from the political arena.
In the third part on “Religious authority and sacredness”, Mathew Kuefler shows that despite the Christian church’s theological condemnation of physical castration, some Christian believers thought self-castration was an appropriate choice. He explores how the relationship between eunuchs and sacredness remained a complex area of dispute. Matthew M. Mesley analyses the early thirteenth-century Cistercian text Dialogus Miraculorum, composed by Caesarius of Heisterbach. The ambiguous nature of episcopal authority is explored, as is the degree to which the medieval secular church was held up as the antithesis of monastic ways of living. Jane Hathaway analyses the involvement of Ottoman high-ranking court eunuchs in imperial religious politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She highlights the rise of the black chief eunuchs of the harem, who would endow charitable and educational foundations and were often appointed as head of the eunuchs of the Prophet, who guarded the prophet’s tomb in Medina. Being entrusted with one of the most sacred spaces in Islam, Ottoman chief harem eunuchs appear as pious servants to both sultan and the prophet.
In the fourth part on “Gender and masculinities”, Shaun Tougher investigates the court eunuchs in the Byzantine empire under the Macedonian dynasty (867-1056). He argues that eunuchs should be analysed vis-a-vis other Greek men. Byzantine court eunuchs were not only recruited from slave markets but also came from families of ruling elites and even had family connections to the emperor. Serena Tolino examines the position of eunuchs in the shi‘a Fatimid Empire (297/909 until 567/1171). She analyses a variety of genres, including medical and legal texts, and demonstrates how different sources throw a distinct light on the eunuchs’ gender. She also focuses on the ways in which sacredness was implicated in the relationship between eunuchs and the figure of the Fatimid imam-caliph. Sita Steckel and Stephanie Kluge demonstrate how, with the emergence of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth-century Latin church, several groups of celibate men competed within the arena of religious authority and gender. In the conflicts with secular clergymen, Franciscan and Dominican monks chose different strategies to represent and defend their chastity.
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This collection is part of a larger research project based at the University of Ziirich on “Hermaphrodites, Eunuchs and Priests: Gender Ambiguities and Masculinities in the Arab and Latin Middle Ages”, conducted by Almut HOfert and financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). In this project, Matthew M. Mesley examines the figure of the medieval bishop; bishops’ representation in English, German and Crusading contexts; and the relationship between their political authority and gender. Serena Tolino has worked on eunuchs in the Islamic Middle Ages, focusing on their role as political actors in the Fatimid Empire and the construction of eunuch identities and gender discourses.
The collection is a product of a conference held in Ziirich in August 2013. Our thanks go to the contributors to this volume for the hard work they have put into preparing their separate chapters. We are grateful to the SNSF as well as to the following departments of the University of Zirich for their financial support at the conference: the University Research Priority Program (URPP) Asia and Europe, the Kompetenzzentrum Ziircher Mediavistik and the Universitatsverein Ziirich. We are indebted to a number of people, including Roman Benz from the URPP Asia and Europe, who helped throughout the process with graphics, images, fliers and posters; Antje Fliichter, who accepted the difficult assignment of giving a final comment at the end of the conference; Michele Bernardini, Aldo Colucciello, Ashraf Hassan, Lisa Indraccolo, Marco Lauri and Nicola Verderame, who helped us with particularly complex transliterations in different languages; Matthew M. Mesley, who went through the challenging and meticulous work of editing all the chapters for an English-speaking academic audience; and his partner Christopher Bonfield, who helped so much with formatting the volume and provided much-needed technical and scholarly support. Serena Tolino would also like to thank the Islamic Legal Studies Program at the Faculty of Law, Harvard University, for its support during the Fall Semester 2013, which allowed her to carry on research on eunuchs in Islamic Law; and Ashraf, Sofia and Elias Hassan, for their patience, their support and their love. Almut H6fert (chapters) and Serena Tolino (bibliography) were responsible for finalizing the manuscript. Finally, we would especially like to thank Routledge, our publishers, who enthusiastically accepted our book proposal; and our editors, who have been patient, open and helpful throughout.
Almut Hofert, Matthew M. Mesley and Serena Tolino
Introduction
Celibate and childless men placed into
a Shared Focus: Ruling eunuchs and bishops between the intersections of power, networks, sacredness and gender!
Almut Hofert
Ruling eunuchs and bishops: To our modern eye, these two groups of men have nothing in common. Why would one make a connection between bishops, noble princes of the Christian church who crowned and counselled mighty kings, with eunuchs, the slaves and treacherous schemers in Oriental harems? As it happens, both groups converge upon the boundary between the European world (which had bishops, but not eunuchs) and non-European societies in Asia (which had eunuchs, but not bishops). Byzantium, where eunuchs served in high offices at the imperial court, but were also accepted into the priesthood, and could become powerful patriarchs of the Constantinopolitan church, acts as an intermediate zone if we were to draw a line between the “European” and the “Oriental” world.
In the first instance, there might seem to be little reason to bring together a collection of articles investigating ruling eunuchs and bishops — both groups have been much discussed in their respective areas of study. With this collection, however, we intend to demonstrate that, despite the fact that (or maybe because) eunuchs and bishops were very different kinds of men, it is useful to bring European and non-European history together and to look at them ina shared perspective on a global horizon.
Comparative perspectives in global history
In recent decades, historians have tried to overcome, or at least problematise, the practice of their academic discipline, which often considers “Europe” as the normative sphere of pre-modern history, whereas “non-European” history is dealt with in specific area studies — Middle Eastern Studies, Indology, Sinology and so forth.? Furthermore, new studies of global history have sought to transgress academic and historiographical partitioning of different “civilisations” with their separate histories. In particular, the historiographical wall between “the West” and “the rest” has come under scrutiny, together with the inherent Eurocentric nature of much historical analysis. In theory, most scholars agree that we lose much of the complexity and entangled nature of the pre-modern world when the historical agenda, its fields, methods and “universal categories”, are drawn solely from European material. The practice, however, of a history going beyond Europe proves to be more difficult. Most studies of global history have focussed upon modern history, with certain themes such as globalisation, colonisation and nation states being used to frame an analysis. Pre-modern history, on the other hand, is less prominent in recent methodological debates,’ although it was certainly extensively treated in twentieth-century studies on world history (for example, Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, but also Max Weber and Immanuel Wallerstein) or axial civilisations (Shmuel Eisenstadt).* These approaches, however, utilised the category of “separated civilisations” and have been since criticised for reifying historiographical civilizational borders.*
If we identify recent attempts to analyse different phenomena explicitly in a global context,° several labels and approaches apart from global history have been proposed: transnational, transcultural, translocal, imperial, entangled, connected and shared history and so forth.” Notwithstanding the differences (although there are some overlaps) between these approaches, there are two basic methodological ways of analysing different regions/ areas jointly, which may or may not have had contact with each other: (1) by comparison; and/or (2) by investigating relationships, interactions, exchanges, transfers and entanglements.* For the pre-modern era, however, historians have fewer choices: Before the modern inventions of mass communication and globalised transport, the extent and frequency of entanglements between different world regions were considerably less. Together with the limited survival of sources, especially for medieval history, there are fewer entanglements and interactions a historian can use to supplement his or her comparative perspective. Comparisons are also notorious for being challenging, precarious and time consuming, even more so on a transcultural level, if one wants to avoid the methodological traps of both civilisational approaches and Eurocentric analytical categories.’
In theoretical discussions on historical comparisons, some historians like William Sewell have made a distinction between a “comparative method” (the different kinds of historical comparisons that can be divided into different categories such as parallel/cross-comparison, generalizing/contrasting comparison, reciprocal comparison, etc.) and a “comparative perspective” (contextualising a concrete case within a broader context without a thoroughly executed comparison).!° The common ground for our collection is not a comparison but another kind of a comparative perspective.
The contributions in this volume present individual case studies on bishops or eunuchs in the Middle East, Europe, India, China and Byzantium. Taken together and complemented by further material, one can create what I would like to call a “Shared Focus” that points to structural similarities between both groups of men beyond their obvious differences. This introduction presents the Shared Focus on eunuchs and bishops. In so doing, I am not proposing that comparing bishops and eunuchs should be a new vast field of research. I understand our Shared Focus rather as an experimental comparative snapshot that benefits from the possibilities of a comparative perspective. The Shared Focus has the advantage of not being a holistic enterprise that addresses the grand narratives of global history. It serves, instead, as an experimental way for finding new analytical directions concerning topics of different scales, large or small, and it is particularly well suited for collaborative research projects.!!
The Shared Focus is carried out in three phases. In the first stage, two (or more) historical phenomena (A and B) are connected in a preliminary comparison through one or more common features. In does not matter whether A and B differ substantially in many other aspects — one is free to follow Marcel Etienne’s plea to comparer incomparable! and to take advantage of the distancing effect ( Verfremdungseffekt) that deprives both A and B of being self-evident. By comparing A with B, the results are then organised into an (always flexible) analytical agenda — be it a hierarchical or interdependent set of different fields or a simple list with more and less important questions. These questions of why actually do we have A (or B), and why in this specific form shed new perspectives on both A and B, which tend to be not so clear (or even hidden) when A and B are examined in isolation.
In phase two, this analytical agenda is applied to various case studies of A and B. The author of each case study can apply the analytical agenda with different priorities in mind, emphasising certain aspects more substantially and leaving other points to different contributors. Every case study is free to shift their focus in whichever direction is most appropriate for their topic and to respond to particular questions that they are confronted with. If the analytical agenda of the Shared Focus has proven to be too daring during this process, the enterprise could finish there by providing different case studies of A and B. Indeed, at the very least, the case studies present further insights and understandings of their specific topics, even if our analytical agenda might be rejected. However, if the analytical agenda has proven to be fruitful, we can move onto stage three. In this phase, the new findings of the Shared Focus can be synthesised, and further questions on a global or transcultural scale can be addressed in one or various fields.
I intend to demonstrate that our example, of ruling eunuchs and bishops, is a case in which a Shared Focus can be successfully applied in all its three stages. Whereas the obvious differences between court eunuchs and bishops coincide with the academic and historiographical borders between different “civilisations”, I hope to show that our Shared Focus sheds light on a transculturally common feature of pre-modern history: Celibate and childless men emerge as an integral part of the ruling elites in different societies and regions. By examining these groups together, we can appreciate how these men were embedded in a closely interconnected set of power positions, social patterns, understandings of sacredness, and gender. The analysis of celibate and childless men within this intersected set provides further insights into pre-modern rule. It also allows us to entangle the analysis of both bishops and eunuchs in a mutually conducive way: Thus, some questions that have been already considered in respect to eunuchs could prove to be of value in investigating bishops, as well as vice versa.
Similarities and differences between ruling eunuchs and bishops
The point of departure for our Shared Focus on ruling eunuchs and bishops consists of three similarities. Both groups of men:
1 were implicated in dynastic patterns of pre-modern rule, wielding significant social, political, economic and cultural power;
2 were either physically or normatively unable to father children;
3. from the nineteenth century, had either lost much of their political influence (the bishops) or had entirely lost such power (the eunuchs).
Both groups of men were heterogeneous within their categories, of course, yet there are three fundamental differences that can be applied to a majority of court eunuchs and bishops:
1. Their social origin and mobility Whereas bishops were often of noble descent and pursued their careers in the political-geographical ambit of their aristocrat families, eunuchs were mostly from the lower social strata of society and, before they were made slaves, they had often been uprooted far from their place of birth. In their various positions, however, bishops and eunuchs were both quite mobile - and both groups of men could and did travel over long distances in order to fulfil their many tasks.
2. Their institutional framework Bishops played prominent and powerful roles within the church; eunuchs were an integral part of a royal court infrastructure and were often recruited and educated within a military or imperial hierarchy.
3. Their body In the Latin Christian church (leaving Byzantium aside for a moment), priests and bishops had to be physically complete, whereas eunuchs underwent castration, a radical physical alteration that brought the eunuch into being.
In respect to academic research, there is still one general point to be mentioned that reveals a typical difference between research on European and non-European history: We have countless studies on bishops but far fewer studies on eunuchs. In the last two decades, however, studies on eunuchs have increased.”
In our project and during the work on this collection, we set up four fields for our historical analysis that proved to be intersected: (1) bishops and court eunuchs as part of the ruling elites, (2) their kinships relations and networks, (3) their position as regards religious authority and sacredness and (4) the understanding and representations of their masculinity and gender. In this introduction, I shall present these four fields with one important addition after the presentation of the first field: I will also touch upon the point of how, in late antiquity, not only spiritual but also physical castration was discussed as a way to practice celibacy. Being myself trained in the history of Europe and the Middle East, these regions receive more attention than others. The examples used in relation to our Shared Focus, therefore, privilege some areas within its global horizon. I will draw upon the chapters of this volume, but I have also added relevant research from other studies and sources. Due to the analytical profile of the Shared Focus, however, I do not summarise each chapter in this volume; each contribution has its own independent analytical agenda.
In respect to the bishops, some words should be said about the category of celibacy. It has been a major achievement of recent scholarship on clerical masculinities that the former “trajectory ... which underscored the centrality of celibacy as the most vital component of a cleric’s gender identity” has been abandoned: Clerical masculinities were defined by many factors indeed. With this collection, we do not intend to go back in time and claim that celibacy should be the primordial category with which to analyse medieval priests and bishops. My goal of presenting bishops and eunuchs between the intersections of power, networks, sacredness and gender hopefully shows that both eunuchal and episcopal masculinities were defined by a complex set of different factors. However, although celibacy was not the primordial category used to define these men’s lives, it was a persisting element that shaped the institutional and cultural framework for the medieval clergy. The same thing can be said about the childlessness of eunuchs. It is due to the comparative perspective of the Shared Focus that both celibacy and childlessness appear as the common feature of eunuchs and bishops and are thus singled out.
Bishops and court eunuchs in power
Eunuchs appear as court officials in the first millennium sc in both the Middle East and China.'* From this point until the nineteenth century, court eunuchs were employed in the service of numerous monarchies and dynastic households. Although they were not a universal feature, and their numbers and significance varied, on the whole the institution of court eunuchs was an important and persistent characteristic of pre-modern monarchic rule. The office of the bishop, on the other hand, developed later from the second century of the early Christian church. By the fifth century, the “monarchical bishop” was the leader of his local church, a potential imperial actor and a prominent political leader of his city — if not the ruler of the city.!° Around 1000, bishoprics were “small states, with almost everything which corresponds to our conception of a state: rulers, governments, central places, citizenship, legislation, taxation”; they were thus a central part of the European political landscape." In the late Middle Ages, the term prelate was increasingly used to define a group that placed bishops, archbishops, cardinals and high-ranking male monastic superiors together and defined them as powerful political actors who lived in great splendour and acted as cultural patrons.'”? Even with these significant changes over time, throughout, bishops continued to play a crucial role in European politics until the end of the Ancien Régime.
In contrast to bishops, court eunuchs were not leaders of “small states”. Yet at court, their tasks varied widely and might go far beyond the role of guarding the harem that has inspired modern stereotypes. Eunuchs often ran various offices of the imperial household, but they could be employed in any imperial office and served also as military commanders and governors. The eunuch general Narses, for example, defeated the Ostrogoths in 551, reclaiming large parts of Italy under the Byzantine rule of emperor Justinian. In Fatimid Cairo (973-1171), the two most important offices in the capital were the commandment of the local military force (shurja) and the market supervisor (hisba) — which were usually run by castrated men. All in all, eunuchs in service of a dynasty can be found in four different sectors: They were responsible for the (1) female and (2) male spheres of the imperial household, and they were employed — alongside non-castrated men — in (3) the imperial administration and (4) the military.
Since they could have access to all areas of the court, including the politically important harem, some eunuchs gained extraordinary political power and could often determine a dynasty’s fate. The following examples of exceptionally powerful eunuchs are partly drawn from the various contributions in this volume: In China, the eunuch commander Yu Chao’en led the imperial army against a rebellion in 763, thus saving the emperor and earning himself a central position in the empire (Michael Hoeckelmann). The Abbasid eunuch Mu’nis al-Muzaffar (d. 933), having prevented a coup against the new caliph in 908, became the military commander of Baghdad and was one of the leading figures in the Abbasid empire (Hugh Kennedy, Nadia Maria El Cheikh). Two eunuch regents would rule Egypt — first Kafir (946-968) and subsequently Barjawan (997-1000). In the Byzantine empire, where eunuchs were to a large extent not imported slaves but instead came from native families, chief court eunuch John Orphanotrophos (d. 1043) managed to obtain the imperial throne first for his brother Michael and then later his nephew Michael (emperors Michael IV, 1034-1041; and Michael V, 1041-1042) (Shaun Tougher). In eighteenth-century Awadh, a North Indian principality, the eunuch Almas ‘Alt Khan was a commercial magnate and commander of a vast army; he also had one-third of Awadh under his power, much to the irritation of the British East Indian Company, which later managed to exclude eunuchs from Awadh’s political scene (Jessica Hinchy). These cases demonstrate that, under certain circumstances, eunuchs could become exceptionally powerful and leading players in their empires or regimes.
However, the vast majority of court eunuchs were integrated into an imperial hierarchy of offices. In Byzantium, for example, court eunuchs who were in direct contact with the emperor were called chamberlains (cubiculari) and were directed by a chief eunuch, the praepositus sacri cubiculi. As we will see below, a special ritual was required for a court eunuch to become a member of the cubiculari. All in all, there was a wide range of Byzantine court offices for eunuchs, starting with guardians of the palace doors (papiai) and including positions like the deuteros (responsible for imperial furniture, ceremonial clothing and the imperial insignia), the pinkerés (cupbearer), the master of the table, the protovestiarios (first dresser) and the parakomonenos (“one who sleeps beside the bed”)."®
This kind of court hierarchy illustrates the main difference between bishops and eunuchs. Bishops were the heads of their sees and directed the administration of their diocese through their subordinates, whereas court eunuchs were part of a hierarchy with different levels of power, but they could potentially attain a high office, one that might lead to a prominent political role in the empire. Furthermore, the institution of court eunuchs was more fluid than the episcopate. The presence of court eunuchs was often bound to the life cycle of a dynasty. Once the court was fixed at one place for a lengthy period of time and consolidated its structures (often together with a more elaborated court ceremonial), the number of eunuchs usually increased. In some (and perhaps most) cases, one can also observe that the establishment of an elaborate eunuch hierarchy at court coincided with a decrease in eunuch military commanders, who tend to be more prominent in the early stages of a dynasty.
Celibacy, eunuchs and priests in late antiquity
Although the institutions of court eunuchs and bishops took very different paths, there is a short, but significant, overlap during the time when the episcopal office took its shape in the early Christian church. As Peter Brown has shown in his famous study, the perception of the body changed in late antiquity. In the Christian ascetic movement, sexual desires were no longer considered to be a part of needs and feelings that had to be moderated and controlled as with excessive appetite, drinking habits, rage and passion. According to Brown, sexual lust was placed within a central position in which Christians viewed the weak, earthly human body in opposition to the immortal soul. The sexual body was no longer neutral but marked as carnally sinful. As Jesus Christ was delivered by virgin birth, a life lived in chastity and without sexual desire prepared the believers for the heavenly kingdom.’ Among early Christians, physical castration was one option for leading a chaste life and was discussed and practiced more often than it is generally believed.” In the long run, however, the church fathers prevailed by declaring that human sexual desire should be overcome through willpower rather than castration: Spiritual, not physical, eunuchism was promoted.
In order to grasp this transitional and diverse field of sexual renunciation in early Christianity, it is useful to look at the terms that were used for eunuchs. One of the main features of eunuch history is that we cannot always be confident that certain men were in fact eunuchs. Court eunuchs had the titles of their office and often specific designations (for example, in Arabic, there is khadim, “servant” and ustadh, “master”), but these terms were not exclusively applied to eunuchs.”! It is telling that Arab chroniclers usually do not use the explicit term khast (“castrated person”) when commenting upon court eunuchs; although to our modern eye, we might consider castration to be the central feature of eunuchism, their physical condition was just one factor among others that determined their ranks and roles.
In late antique Greek and Latin, there were several terms for castrated men: tomias, ektomias, praecisus and spado (all designations mean “cut man”, referring to eunuchs whose genitalia had been partly or entirely been removed); thlibias (“pressed hard”: eunuchs whose scrotum had been tied up); and thlasia (“crushed”: eunuchs whose testicles had been crushed).”” In Roman law, the definition of the jurist Ulpian (ca. 170-223) was preserved in the Digesta (50.16.128), which uses spado as the main term for eunuchs: “The designation spandones is a general one: it contains those who are spadones by nature, as well as the thlibiae thlasiae but also any other kind of spadones”.*> With these words, Ulpian distinguished three categories of eunuchs. (1) “Eunuchs by nature” were probably males without fully developed sexual organs.*4 (2) Thlibiae and thlasiae were put into a second category, probably because both types of eunuchs did not suffer any amputation. (3) Techniques that involved cutting off the testicles and, in the most extreme cases, even the penis, were then included in Ulpian’s third category. Galli were the eunuch priests in the cult of the goddess Magna Mater.”> The Greek term eunuchos means literally “guardian of the bedchamber (eune “bed”, echo — “to guard”). In the twelfth century, Byzantine authors added another meaning to the etymology of the term, claiming that eunuchos was a derivate of eunoos, the “well-minded”.?6 Eunuchos was used for castrated men, often as a synonym for the above-mentioned terms, but it also had a much broader meaning. In the second century CE, ewnuchos could refer to “any non-reproductive man, whether he was castrated, born without adequate reproductive organs, or had suffered injury that rendered him sterile”.?” Celibate monks and even nuns could be described as eunuchs too.?® In the famous words of Matthew 19:12, ewnuchos was the designation for a man living without a wife. After being questioned about whether a man is allowed to leave his wife, Jesus first stated, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder”, but he also concedes that some men might not be suitable for a married life:
For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. [Matt. 19.12, King James Version]
Whereas the King James Version translates the term eunuchos of the Greek original text literally (as did Jerome in the Latin Vulgate), most German versions follow Luther’s translation, which rendered “eunuch” in its broader meaning as “being unsuitable for marriage”.
In discussing sexual renunciation, Christian theologians often referred to Matthew 19:12 and gave different explanations as to how these three categories of eunuchs should be understood.”? In the third century, Clement of Alexandria (d. 215) reported the attitudes of a Gnostic school that distinguished on the basis of Matthew 19:12 three categories of eunuchoi: (1) men who had by birth a disinclination towards women and therefore should not marry; (2) men who had been physically emasculated by misfortune and are unfit for marriage; and (3) those “who eunuchize themselves for the sake of the heavenly kingdom” and therefore renounce marriage.*° Gregory of Nanzianz (d. 390), an eminent theologian and bishop of Constantinople, interpreted the three kinds of eunuchs in Matthew 19:12 differently and thought it unlikely that Jesus had physical eunuchs in mind when he spoke these words:
It seems to me that this word is not related to the bodies, but hints through the figure of the bodies towards something loftier. For it might be little, very feeble and unworthy of the [divine] word if one was to understand it in respect to the physical eunuchs [ton somatikon eunouchon] only. We have to think about something worthy of the Spirit!>*
According to Gregory, the (1) “eunuchs which were so born from their mother’s womb” were eunuchs by nature and thus should not be proud of their disposition, because they had not chosen their chaste fate. Moreover, those (2) “which were made eunuchs of men” were actually not physical eunuchs but Christians who have been instructed by a teacher to distance themselves from evil. Finally, the (3) “eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” are those Christians who have not been instructed by anybody — be it a mother, a father, a priest, a bishop or any other teacher — but have found the way to become ready for God’s kingdom by themselves: “you have amputated [exetemes] yourself, you have eunuchized [eunouchisas| yourself, you have amputated the root of evil”.?
Ambrose of Milan (339-397) praised the “eunuchs [spadones| who have castrated themselves by will, not by necessity” and did not “restrain guilt with a knife”.*> As Mathew Kuefler has shown, the symbol of the eunuch was assimilated into the ideals of Christian perfection and masculinity. Through spiritual castration, the Christian monk became a “manly eunuch” and a spiritual warrior for Christ. In so doing, he left his wife and family behind him, for, as Jerome stated, “the love of Christ and the fear of hell easily break such bonds as these”.**
As spiritual castration became an established ideal for the Christian monk, physical castration was increasingly less accepted. In 325, the first canon of the council of Nicaea excluded from the clergy any man who castrated himself but admitted those who have been castrated “by barbarians” or for health reasons.** In practice, eunuchs were admitted as priests and bishops in the Eastern church, whereas in the Latin West, a priest had to be physically intact. It was only in the sixteenth century, when the popes employed castrati as singers in the cappella palatina, that we see something comparable to eunuchs in the Latin church. However, it is significant that between the second and fourth century, the history of eunuchs and bishops intersect in a number of ways. Physical castration was discussed as an option for leading a chaste life. Furthermore, Roman Christianity modulated their ideals of sanctity by aligning gender and the body in the figures of the saints, monks, nuns and bishops. It is not a coincidence that in this complex fabrique, the eunuch as the embodiment of sexual castration and a potential symbol for gender ambiguity was a central point of reference. It is also a consequence of this development that bishops who became ecclesiastical princes, as part of the secular clergy, were often challenged by the ascetic and celibate life of the monastic orders.** In the early church, bishops could even marry. From the fourth century onwards, however, the popes tried to establish the criteria for future bishops, which would restrict clerical marriage: Candidates for the episcopal office should marry a virgin (not a widow or a divorced woman), they should live in strict monogamy and, if they were to have a family, they must do so while they were still in the lower ranks of the clerical hierarchy. If they decided that they could live with their wife in a chaste marriage, they were allowed to pursue the higher orders.°”
Although we have important studies on how pre-modern conceptions of gender and masculinity shaped ideals of clerical celibacy and chastity, large parts of the scholarly literature on bishops appear to have ignored the fact that gender history might provide a valuable contribution and open up new research questions and avenues of investigation. The history of the church reforms and the investiture conflict in the eleventh and twelfth century, for example, has been considered to be a struggle for clerical identities according to an apostolic ideal, as an attempt to bring the church under papal control and as a conflict between the twin swords of priesthood and kingship where the political power of each was negotiated. Megan McLaughlin, however, has re-evaluated the gendered language of the debates: The ecclesia was the bride of Christ, simony (the acquisition of ecclesiastical offices through money) was condemned as prostitution, disobedience towards the pope was branded as contempt towards the mother - the language of this time marked immoral actions as rape, incest and fornication, whereas right actions were embedded in discussions about love, kisses and tender embracing. As McLaughlin has shown, it was not by coincidence that questions about authority and political order were negotiated in these terms. The highly gendered and sexualised representations of the church, bishops, popes, kings and laymen, and the relationships between them, incorporated the late antique discourse on sex and gender and were interwoven with new questions about family, marriage and sexual norms.**
One can, therefore, still argue with good reason, to quote the seminal article of Joan Scott, that “gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power”,® and that it is also integral to any position of power. With ruling eunuchs and bishops, we have two groups of men who were integrated within the ruling elites and were singled out by their position within the gender order — in being deprived (at least in theory) of sexual intercourse through spiritual or physical castration. Although in the early church, bishops were not at first expected to live the celibate life of monks, the late antique ideal of sexual continence and renouncement of a family life was an increasingly challenging model that prescribed celibacy for bishops in officio. In the long run, Latin bishops could not father any legitimate children, whereas in the Eastern church, married bishops had to separate from their wives.*° The late antique model of spiritual castration was incorporated into the eleventh and twelfth-century reform movement debates concerning how the clergy should be distinguished from the laity.
Celibacy thus became one of the important norms that were linked to the episcopal office, whereas eunuchs usually could not procreate. In our Shared Focus, bishops and eunuchs are put together under the umbrella category of celibate and childless men because they usually could not be part of a father— son succession. As will be demonstrated, this norm resulted in alternative reproduction patterns and offered pre-modern societies opportunities to utilise celibate and childless men with specific functions.*! Both eunuchs and bishops acted in similar ways to that of other men in the ruling elites, but they were distinct in that they were supposed to lead a celibate life. The late antique overlap in the history of eunuchs and bishops demonstrates that this common feature was linked to the fields of religious purity and family life.
Kinship relations and networks: Social dynamics of celibate and childless men
By the fifth century, bishops often came either from the municipal elite or the senatorial aristocracy, which provided these groups with a close ally who held a wealthy and powerful position.” In the seventh century, most bishops in the Frankish empire were recruited from an aristocratic background, and this continued to be the case in the following centuries.*? However, bishops did not always derive from local aristocracies. Throughout the Middle Ages in England, for example, incumbents for the episcopal office tended not to be recruited from the higher nobility.*4 Even in the Merovingian empire (fifth— eighth century), where it has normally been assumed that bishops were of an aristocratic origin, this understanding has been questioned.* Since the position of the bishop was always embedded in different social-political contexts and connected to a wide array of clerical and royal settings and institutions, the aristocratic bishop was but one — although certainly an eminent type — among others. Further, the establishment of episcopal celibacy differed throughout Western Europe. As the contributions of Julia Barrow and Rachel Stone make clear, episcopal dynasties were common in Ireland, England, Brittany and Normandy until the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In most parts of the Carolingian empire (750-900), on the other hand, the married bishop who ideally lived in a chaste marriage with his wife had become an exception, notwithstanding that this model was still upheld in contemporary canonical theories. In France, the number of both married bishops and priests decreased in the sixth and seventh century as the clergy was mostly recruited at a young age. While father-son successions were practiced to a lesser degree, the uncle-nephew relationship became increasingly important. In this volume, Julia Barrow demonstrates that, until the eleventh century, young boys who were expected to embark upon a clerical career were taken into the care of a clergyman who was often their maternal or paternal uncle. Bishops also participated in uncle-nephew fosterage; they acted as paternal figures, supervised their nephews’ education and paved the path for their ordination and further advancement in the church. Bishop Hincmar of Reims (d. 882), for instance, claimed that he had taken his nephew (later Bishop Hincmar of Laon) from his cradle into his house, even washing his nappies.*°
As Rachel Stone points out in her contribution, the end of father-son direct inheritance of the episcopal office in the Frankish empire created both losers and winners. Noble families might no longer be sure that their preferred candidate would occupy a bishopric. However, although an episcopal see might be no longer the fixed prerogative of one family, the ruler might have more opportunities to choose an episcopal successor (among different families) that suited his needs. With the episcopal succession open to a wider circle of potential candidates, some aristocratic families could also accumulate several bishoprics in different parts of the empire, expanding their area of influence if they were fortunate. Because competition for the episcopal office increasingly became more intense, with no inevitable outcome, the uncle-nephew patronage proved to be more flexible and therefore more suited to the new dynamics in the empire — a son has only one father but might have several uncles. When the Carolingian kings lost power in West Francia at the end of the ninth century, however, a number of aristocratic families managed to regain their control over certain bishoprics. At the same time, the geographical landscape for episcopal candidates narrowed in the now politically fragmented landscape; the number of married clerics and bishops started to increase again.
The example of the Carolingian empire shows that, although canonical theory still accepted married bishops and priests who lived chastely with their wives, a number of social-political factors influenced, and sometimes determined, whether this model was practised or not. The appointment of unmarried bishops, together with the system of uncle-nephew fosterage, was evidence of both the impact of the Carolingian reforms in the empire and an increasingly competitive aristocracy that sought power and influence through the episcopal office. It is not a coincidence that Carolingian bishops started to confidently express their collective role as imperial actors in the ninth century: As guardians of the divine law, representing the church and the priesthood, they claimed, in concert with the king, to guarantee the wellbeing of the empire.*”
All in all, one has to be careful when assessing the question whether or not bishops practised celibacy, which had been greatly advocated for by the church fathers, by investigating how families adjusted their strategies and how ecclesiastical networks developed.** The episcopal office could not have succeeded as a prominent position of power for more than a millennium if it had not adapted to very different conditions. It is, however, important for our Shared Focus that celibacy as a theoretical requirement for the episcopal office was a constant throughout and that it offered an alternative to the father-son succession of former episcopal dynasties that could be drawn upon when social-political dynamics made such an alternative opportune.
In the eleventh century, clerical and monastic lifestyles changed in an increasingly populated Europe, and new monastic orders such as the Cluniacs and Cistercians were established. In the cities, communities of regular canons like the Premonstratensians and the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine arose, standing between the secular clergy and monastic orders. The popes endeavoured to challenge episcopal power and make the church more centralised, with the apostolic see in Rome on top of an institutionally effective hierarchy. In this process, reformers stressed the distinctions between the laity and the clergy by promoting for the latter celibacy and cultic purity. Reformers like the papal legate Peter Damian (1007-1072) lamented the unchaste lives of clerics:
O bishop (sacerdos), you whose name means to make sacred, that is, that you should offer sacrifice to God, why are you not terrified to offer yourself in sacrifice to the evil spirit? By committing fornication you cut yourself off from the members of Christ, and make yourself physically one with a harlot .... Are you unaware that the Son of God was so dedicated to the purity of the flesh that he was not born of conjugal chastity, but rather from the womb of a virgin?”
The reformers spoke with many voices, stressing different points.°° However, the late antique concept of the holy church as manned by celibate officials was a recurrent topic that was adapted to the world of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. As Peter Brown has put it: The church was based, ideally, on the ethereal, nonphysical continuities of teaching and baptism administered by the clergy. Birth alone did not guarantee salvation. By insisting that its leaders no longer beget children, the Catholic Church in the West made plain that it enjoyed a supernatural guarantee of continuity that no ancient city could claim. If they were to be respected as the leaders of a “holy” institution, bishops and priests had to remain anomalous creatures.*!
To conclude: Bishops added a specific dynamic to medieval society, offering alternatives to family reproduction patterns. Like other men, bishops were integral to kinship and familial structures; whether they acted as fathers or primarily as uncles in promoting their kin was due to many factors. As the institutional framework of the church developed and distinctions between the clergy and the laity were increasingly stressed, particularly so in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, so bishops increasingly did not father legitimate children. But even before this time, bishops, along with other high-ranking clergymen, were singled out in being simultaneously part of political and ecclesiastical networks. They were positioned between the reproduction patterns of kinship and the institutional continuity of the church that was viewed as holy and eternal.
If one looks at the recruitment paths and networks of court eunuchs, the picture is at least as complex and multifaceted as in the bishops’ case. Eunuchs belonged to the “slave elites”. Whereas research on slavery has been dominated for a long time by studies that explore the oppressive nature of slavery, recent general approaches have taken into account the powerful positions that slaves might hold in the Middle East and beyond.” This perspective sheds light on the high social and geographical mobility of the Middle Eastern ruling elites. Female slaves for the court harem, who were exchanged as gifts in diplomatic exchanges, might have come from an even more diversified horizon — transforming the harem of the Fatimid caliphs (909-1171), for example, into a “multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and religiously and linguistically diversified feminine universe”. It is often repeated that eunuchs, as slaves of foreign origin and thus with no ties to their home families and no possibility of producing offspring, were the ideal servants for a dynasty in which ultimate loyalty to a master was prized.** But despite this assumption, we see that eunuchs were part of many different kinds of social and political networks.
As Michael Hoeckelmann demonstrates in his chapter, Chinese eunuchs married and adopted children. During the Tang dynasty (618-907), the number of court eunuchs increased significantly. Court eunuchs came mainly from the lower strata of society, and so their recruitment complemented Tang nepotism with a more open social dynamic. Court eunuchs were also considered to be favourable marriage candidates for families who sought to move up the social ladder. As was also a custom in the military, eunuchs adopted sons and thus contributed to a mixed system of meritocratic and inherited court offices. Surviving tomb inscriptions from the Tang era show that eunuchs were buried as family men, beside their spouses and children — a practice that scholars have labelled “eunuch dynasticism”.
If we turn to the Mediterranean, it seems at first that the concept of the “alien eunuch” is confirmed. Roman law prohibited castration — eunuchs had to be imported, at least in theory. This notion of the alien eunuch was continued in Byzantium and the Muslim empires — in the latter because Islamic law prohibited castration. As Ezgi Dikici has argued, each imperial tradition had its “favourite barbaric lands” located at the imperial borders (like Abyssinia and the Caucasus), which provided the empire with eunuchs. In the Byzantine empire from the ninth century onwards, however, eunuchs were also recruited from domestic families: “Unlike the first strategy that relied on the exploitative and hegemonic relationship established with an external and subordinate region, the second strategy created an additional path of upward social mobility for the imperial subjects in the empire’s core territories”.
In the sixteenth-century Ottoman empire, this twofold pattern was further developed. The Ottoman empire is also a valuable example because it is only from the sixteenth century onwards that imperial Middle Eastern archives are preserved. With archival sources becoming available in the early modern period, family ties and networks of court eunuchs are much easier to trace. In the new Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, there were two different corps of eunuchs: the white eunuchs of the inner court and the black eunuchs who guarded the sultan’s harem. Whereas the white chief eunuch was in charge of the male sphere, the black chief harem eunuch supervised the harem. Foreign visitors compared the strict discipline of both the male and female spheres that these two chief eunuchs supervised with monasteries.°°
According to Dikici’s stimulating hypothesis, one might speak of three different recruiting paths for Ottoman eunuchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth century: (1) the black eunuchs, who originated mostly from sub-Saharan castration centres in the Sudan, Abyssinia and Nubia; (2) white eunuchs, who were war prisoners that were brought into the Ottoman empire and served in the palace and were castrated there for a eunuch carrier; and (3) devsirme-eunuchs, who were recruited with other slaves within the Ottoman devsirme system. In the Ottoman devsirme, young boys, mainly from the Balkans, were taken from their families as part of a tax payment; they would convert to Islam and were trained in military or administrative skills. The practice of devsirme was disputed among Ottoman lawyers because it could be considered as the enslavement of freeborn Ottoman subjects. The castration of some of these enslaved boys was an even more delicate subject and is perhaps why there are very few sources on castration within the Ottoman Empire. One example of a devsirme-eunuch is the white eunuch ‘Ali Pasha (d. 1511), who was twice grand vizier and was recruited from a village near Sarajevo. As with other white eunuchs, whether they were recruited among war prisoners or within the devsirme system, he continued to have relationships with his family and his homeland. Ismail Aga, to use another example, served in 1621-1623 as chief eunuch and founded and endowed a mosque in his hometown of Malatya in East Anatolia. He managed to arrange for his brother Siileyman to be brought to Istanbul and to become a court page; this brother was later promoted to the grand vizierate and was married to the sultan’s daughter.*”
Whereas white eunuchs, like other Ottoman officials, served as an intermediary between the palace and their homelands, black eunuchs were less likely to maintain relationships with their original families. However, black eunuchs did maintain important networks beyond the imperial capital. The first eunuch in the newly created office of the Baabtisaade Agasi (chief eunuch of the harem) was the black eunuch Mehmed Aga (appointed in 1574). Mehmed, who was supposedly an Ethiopian and had been castrated in East Africa, came at first to the court of the Ottoman governor in Cairo, who then sent him to Istanbul, where he pursued a brilliant career.°* As Jane Hathaway has shown, black eunuchs often maintained lifelong relations with Cairo and Egypt. In the recruitment pattern for black eunuchs, the Ottoman governor in Cairo selected suitable, already castrated candidates from slave caravans arriving from sub-Saharan Africa. Those few of them who managed to become chief eunuchs of the harem were also responsible for supervising the imperial endowments for holy foundations in Mecca and Medina. These endowments received substantial parts of their income from Egyptian villages. Ottoman chief eunuchs of the harem were also interested in maintaining relationships with Egypt, because they were usually exiled to Cairo when they were dismissed from their office. From the late seventeenth century, this retirement-exile pattern was turned into a prelude for their final post, the honourable appointment as guardian of the Prophet’s tomb in Medina.*? For the Ottoman dynasty, the establishment of the office of the harem’s chief eunuch would turn out to be a valuable strategy in overcoming the dynastic crisis of 1600, when several sultans died young. This situation resulted in the increasing political significance of the harem; the sultan’s mother, his concubines and the harem’s chief eunuch became powerful figures, whereas the white eunuchs lost their influence over time.”
If we turn to North India in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the case study presented by Jessica Hinchy, we see once more that eunuchs were not isolated individuals who depended entirely on their — albeit important — relationship with their masters and mistresses. In Awadh, a former province of the Mughal empire, court eunuchs (called khwaja-sar@ts) came either from abroad (mostly Ethiopia) or from the Indian subcontinent and were enslaved through war, kidnapping or sale by their own families. After their training at court, khwaja-sar@is were employed in the administration of the household and of the state; they collected land revenues and acted as diplomats and military commanders.
the brothers of their fellow boy eunuchs. As adults, they adopted sons, whose right to inherit, however, was often not accepted by the eunuchs’ owners. Since adoption was disputed or even forbidden in Islamic traditions,°! Awadh is an example of the differences between legal prescriptions and practices in Indian Islamic politics. These networks of adoptive kinship were complemented by teacher-—disciple ties that were an important feature in pre-modern India. The submission of disciples to specific legal, moral and disciplinary practices has been labelled “monastic governmentality” . Khwaja-sar@ts teachers were responsible for their disciples (both eunuchs and non-eunuchs) who could also inherit their teachers’ administrative position. The khwaja-sara@is, on the other hand, expanded their political influence with an increased number of disciples.
These examples demonstrate that eunuchs broadened the spectrum of social reproduction as bishops did. As bishops, eunuchs could act as fathers and husbands, as brothers and uncles. But more often, they did not. As imported slaves from “the barbaric lands” outside the empire, they provided particular dynasties with a specific form of personnel, suited for the needs for courts that were organised into segregated female and male spheres. The career paths of eunuchs were also attractive for a second recruitment strategy that brought eunuchs from within the empire to the court, thus offering imperial subjects the possibility of social mobility. Eunuchs maintained a broad spectrum of biological and adoptive kinship as well as networks both at court and beyond the capital. The institution of court eunuchs, therefore, provided dynasties with different options of staff recruitment and added to the social dynamic within the empires. Both eunuchs and bishops were parts of both kinship and institutional networks — like other men. But the position of celibate and childless men was special insofar as they offered opportunities for a particularly broad spectrum of social relationships.
Religious authority and sacredness: Celibate and childless men between sacred and profane spheres
In order to unite ruling eunuchs and bishops in our third field of the Shared Focus, we must apply the concept of religion and sacredness more broadly, so as to encompass celibate and childless men.°? Eunuchs and bishops played a number of roles in Christian, Islamic and other religious practices, but both groups were also connected to the sacredness of pre-modern monarchies; indeed, in claiming a religious standing in the divine order, premodern rulers relied on both eunuchs and bishops.
The most visible link between bishops and sacred kingship was the ritual of coronation. From the sixth century, archbishops and patriarchs of Western Europe (Byzantium is more problematic) increasingly crowned and anointed their Christian rulers. In crowning kings, queens, emperors and empresses, (arch)bishops and popes bestowed upon these rulers a kind of religious legitimacy — an arrangement that could prove either advantageous or problematic for the ruler. Bishops could also be venerated as saints - St Nicholas of Myra and St Martin of Tours are two of the best-known examples. Whereas in the early Christian church, the common model of sainthood was martyrdom, the figure of the episcopal saint would increasingly become more prevalent throughout the Middle Ages.® Furthermore, although most bishops would never be elevated to sainthood, as ecclesiastical princes, their office was still associated in part with sacredness.
However, as has been argued, the religious authority that bishops wielded did not remain uncontested. There was a wide spectrum of opinions on the episcopate, and contemporaries both praised and bitterly criticised bishops, individually and collectively. Around 935, Bishop Rather of Verona would write gushingly of those men who held the office:
They are gods, they are lords, they are Christians, they are heavens, they are angels, they are patriarchs, they are prophets, they are apostles, they are evangelists, they are martyrs, they are anointed, they are kings, they are princes, they are judges not only of men, but also of angels ... they are scholars, they are preachers of the Last Judge, they are guardians, they are the eyeball of the Lord, they are friends of the living God, they are sons of God, they are fathers, they are the lights of the world, they are the stars in the sky ... they carry the keys of heaven, it is in their power to open and close heaven.
On the other hand, bishops were often targeted for failing to live up to the standards of their position within the church. William de Montibus (ca. 1140-1213), who served as a chancellor under the bishops of Lincoln, found not only bishops but also all the secular clergy to be more than wanting:
Satan and all demons give thanks to archbishops, bishops, archdeacons, deacons, and parish priests because by their examples Christians are entirely turned to evil so that daily and without any impediment they are seized for the confinements of hell.°
Indeed, as part of the secular clergy (even if they were monks themselves), bishops were constantly challenged by monastic lifestyles. Matthew Mesley explores in his chapter the writings of Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca. 1180after 1240), a Cistercian monk who sought to disseminate the proper way of living to Cistercian novices. Caesarius often focussed on the failings of the secular clergymen rather than upon the laity. At the same time, he also pointed to examples of episcopal misuse of authority and power. Bishops in medieval Germany often acted in similar ways to the secular princes of the Empire. For example, Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne (reigning 12161225), in whose diocese Caesarius’ monastery was located, was one of the powerful political figures of his time. He acted as an imperial administrator for the mostly absent emperor Frederic II and took part in securing former royal rights (like coin minting, levying taxes and holding markets) for the ecclesiastical princes of the empire. He also consolidated the rights and territories of his archdiocese, to the disadvantage of the local aristocracy. After Engelbert was murdered by one of these competing aristocrats, he was venerated as a saint. Caesarius of Heisterbach was given the task of writing a saint’s life for a man that he likely considered “a good duke, but not a good bishop”.® In his vita, Caesarius presented Engelbert as a powerful, peacemaking prince who secured the ecclesiastical rights of his diocese. But he did not deny that Engelbert’s life did not reflect the image of an ideal bishop:
His precious death made up for the sanctity that was missing in his life. Although he was hardly perfect in his way of life, he was nevertheless sanctified through his martyrdom.”
It was only through his death as a martyr that Engelbert was freed of his worldly sins. Indeed, Caesarius portrayed in meticulous detail how Engelbert had been stabbed 47 times by his murderers and attributed the many wounds on every part of his body to every sin that Engelbert had committed in his life:
For he was punished in every member through which he had sinned. He was multiply punished at his head, as it was apparent from his cap, namely at the top of his head, at front and back of his head, at his temples, lips and teeth. He was wounded so heavily that streams of blood flooded and streamed down. They flowed into the cavities of his eyes, his ears, his nose and his mouth and filled them. He was also punished at his throat and his neck, at his shoulders and his back, at his chest and his heart, his belly and his hips, his legs and his feet so that you, reader, might realize the kind of baptism by which Christ dignified his martyr in dissolving everything that he had [sinfully] assembled by boasting, looking, hearing, smelling, tasting, thinking, by being luxurious and busy, by touching, striding, as well as through lightness, omissions and negligence in respect to discipline.”
Unlike secular princes and kings, bishops were constantly challenged by monastic ideals and the demands that were placed upon them by the various medieval reform movements. The model of episcopal leadership included roles within both the ecclesiastical and secular spheres and offered considerably more opportunities for contemporaries to critique bishops, than that of the model of royal and princely leadership. Kings might be accused of being not pious or unjust tyrants, but they were judged as rulers, not as spiritual leaders. Monks and eremitical saints gained religious authority when they renounced the world and lived an ascetic life. Bishops, on the other hand, stood between the spiritual and worldly sphere — they were religious, but they lived and performed their roles within the world. As princes and leaders of the church, they had to pay the price of their priestly superiority by being responsible for their subordinates and the laity. They were expected “to render an account for even kings of men in the divine judgment”, as Pope Gelasius (492-496) put it in his famous statement on spiritual and temporal power.’! How would they be judged by God when they had to live up to spiritual standards that were often not compatible with their worldly responsibilities? For contemporaries, and for bishops themselves, episcopal sacredness and religious authority was often genuinely ambiguous.
Whereas bishops gained religious authority and sacredness in officio, the dangerous and painful procedure of castration, which marked a court eunuch, implied nothing of the sort. In comparison to the great number of holy bishops, there were only a few eunuchs who were venerated as saints, and most of these were in Byzantium. The sanctity of these holy eunuchs, however, was not a result of their physical castration. Holy eunuchs fulfilled many of the same requirements for sanctity as other saints, and their hagiographers mentioned their castration often only briefly.” Likewise, Byzantine priests and bishops who were also eunuchs were not considered more saintly for having been castrated. On the contrary, it was believed that as they were eunuchs, they did not need to master their sexual appetites or strive for chastity, and as such were not afforded any further spiritual merit. Between the ninth and twelfth centuries, however, models of Byzantine sanctity did change; sainthood was made more accessible for eunuchs, whose chaste, angelic life was increasingly prized.”
Byzantine court eunuchs, on the other hand, were different from Byzantine clerical eunuchs. As Kathryn Ringrose has shown, the emperor was always surrounded by eunuchs, who marked the “imperial numen” that had to be protected from external pollution.“ Almost every object the emperor was given came from a eunuch’s hand. In ceremonies, the emperor seldom spoke but instead used signals, which were translated by the chief eunuch; indeed, outsiders seldom heard the emperor’s actual voice. In processions, the emperor moved amongst a group of eunuchs, who thus created a moving space that shielded the emperor from his surroundings. Eunuchs also controlled access to both emperor and empress.” Since the chamberlains (cubiculari) — all of them high-ranking court eunuchs — were the only people in the palace that could enter the quarters of the emperor and empress, they were in a privileged position in terms of procuring and transmitting information. The chief eunuch, for example, played a crucial role in imperial successions, as he was often the first person to know of an emperor’s death. A candidate for the imperial office might fail at the first hurdle if the court chamberlains refused to present him with the imperial regalia, which was essential for any legitimate coronation.” Byzantine court eunuchs, therefore, marked the sacred sphere that surrounded the emperor and empress — and they acquired political power by controlling access to the imperial office.”
Court eunuchs, who were promoted into the ranks of chamberlains, did so through the performance of a specific accession ritual. The report of the so-called Book of Ceremonial gives us a frozen but nonetheless interesting picture of this ritual. According to this source, the chief eunuch brought the future chamberlain to the enthroned emperor in the main reception hall (Chrysotriklinos) of the palace. The candidate was then to be brought into the nearby oratory of St Theodor (which housed the imperial crown and holy relics) in front of its “holy doors”. After giving the future chamberlain ethical instructions about his new office, the chief eunuch stated the following:
Observe whence comes this dignity which now you have received. It is completely clear that it comes from these holy doors. Recognize that you have received your dignity from the hand of the Lord. Guard yourself diligently that so long as you live you maintain these precepts and keep them close to your heart. Displaying and ornamenting yourself with the greatest virtues, you will achieve the highest levels of honors by dispensing our wealth and [from] the holy emperor, and you will be glorified among the members of the holy cubiculum.”
Thereafter, the eunuch lay on the ground and gave thanks to God. Next, the chief eunuch dressed him with a golden robe, after which he and the other chamberlains kissed their new colleague. The new chamberlain was then led outside the oratory and returned to the emperor, where he prostrated himself. As Ringrose observes, it appears significant that the new chamberlain receives his new dignity not from the emperor but directly from God, in the oratory of a saint, orchestrated by the chief eunuch.” This accession ritual also bears some similarities with the consecration of priests and bishops — particularly, the use of clothes to signify their new rank, the candidate’s position on the ground near an altar and how a higher-ranking figure officiates the ritual.
As Serena Tolino shows in her chapter, eunuchs played an equally important role at the court of the Fatimid caliphs (Maghreb and Egypt, 909-1171). The Fatimid caliphs were Shi‘i imams, who claimed an extraordinary high spiritual position — not only as direct descendants of the prophet Muhammad but also as imams who possessed divine knowledge and baraka (divine charisma). In the early Fatimid period, court eunuchs served their imams in a number of high-ranking offices, such as chamberlains, chiefs of the public treasury, governors or intendants. With the Fatimid Shii imams ruling over a mostly non-Shi‘i population, court eunuchs are represented in the sources as loyal servants, powerful commanders and fervent believers in their imams. When the second imam-caliph al-Qaim died in 946, and conflicts arose between the imam’s male relatives about the succession, court eunuch al-Jawdhar, who was part of the harem’s faction, managed to obtain the throne for his candidate, caliph al-Manstr (one of the sons of al-Qaim).*° In a later report written by al-Jawdhar’s secretary,*! it is claimed that, before his death, al-Qa’im had secretly designated al-Mansir as his heir, only informing al-Jawdhar of his plans. The early Fatimid-Shii theology held that the living imam would tell only one person which of his sons would be his successor. This person was called the hujja.** Because God knows all future imams, the acting /ujja was sharing divine knowledge of immense significance. In terms of Fatimid theology, therefore, the hujja was the most sacred position, apart from the imam himself; even the Fatimid chief theologian could not claim to be a conduit for divine knowledge. It is not likely that this lofty claim about al-Jawdhar being the /ujja of al-Qavim was either known or shared during his lifetime. But al-Jawdhar’s secretary — himself a eunuch, loyal to his master al-Jawdhar beyond death — saw alJawdhar’s role in the imam succession as the rightful action of the bujja. The report of al-Jawdhar’s secretary comes close to a “first person’s writing”*’, in that we have a rare view of how eunuchs perceived their offices. Al-Jawdhar’s claim (or that of his secretary) about his associations with sacredness are similar to the Byzantine eunuch’s investiture ritual of a new chamberlain. Court eunuchs, who surrounded their divinely appointed ruler, were not only aware that their role marked the ruler’s sacred status but also that they themselves might perceive this dignity as a direct connection to God. In 973, the Fatimid caliphs moved to a newly built palace in Cairo, and it was there that an elaborated court ceremonial was developed. As part of this process, a new corpus of court eunuchs was established, consisting of the so-called muhannakian eunuchs, who were in many ways similar to the Byzantine cubiculari. As Serena Tolino argues, the muhannakan eunuchs served in different ranks in close proximity to the imam, and this included important processions in which they surrounded him. They thus marked the imam’s sacred sphere.
The institution of court eunuchs would continue in Egypt under the Sunni Mamluk sultanate (1250-1517). According to Shaun Marmon’s study Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Societies, the two highest ranks among Mamluk court eunuchs were the zimamdar, the chief harem eunuch; and the muqaddam al-mamalik al-sultantya, the commander of the sultan’s military “family”, the Mamluk military slaves. We see here a similar division between the female and male spheres of the court, each with its own chief eunuch, which was found later in the Ottoman Empire. Both the zimamdar and the muqaddam al-mamalik al-sultaniyya were seen as guardians of moral and sacred boundaries. The zimamdar guarded the royal women in the harem against sexual transgressions, whereas the muqaddam al-mamalik al-sultaniyya did the same for the adolescent boys under his command, who were also regarded as potential objects of sexual temptation and disorder.** The Cairo Citadel, where the Mamluk sultans resided, was compared to holy places like Jerusalem and perceived as a sanctuary with the sultan at its centre. To Muslim eyes, this comparison was also quite plausible because from the twelfth century onwards, the great sanctuaries of Islam were guarded by eunuchs: the tombs of the Patriarchs (including Abraham) in Hebron, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Ka‘ba in Mecca and the prophet’s tomb in Medina. The eunuchs who safeguarded the prophet’s tomb were called the “eunuchs of the prophet”, a prestigious and wealthy “cultic organization ... [that] can best be described as a powerful and deeply symbolic ‘priesthood’ of some forty eunuchs”.** At this time, Medina was still dominated by Shi‘i Muslims. The eunuchs of the prophet — sent by the Sunni sultan in Egypt — helped to establish a Sunni presence in the city and were accordingly venerated for this role in Sunni hagiographies as being beautiful, pious, ascetic, compassionate and generous towards the poor. For Sunni Muslims, the chief eunuch in Medina inspired those in his presence with hayba — a strong emotion of fear and reverence that was also evoked by rulers and God himself.*° A fourteenth-century diploma of investiture associated the new (black) chief eunuch in Medina with the Companions of the prophet, in describing him as
the ascetic who prefers living in proximity [jivar] to his Prophet to all else, the humble one who intends by his service [to the Prophet] to be included among the group [zumra] of those who served him [the Prophet] in his lifetime.*”
The eunuchs of the prophet, therefore, appear outside secular time. Being deprived of contributing to the succession of their descendants through the fathering of children, as the fifteenth-century historian al-Maqrizi has put it,®* they were connected to the sacred time of Islam. According to an interview with the Saudi official in Mecca in 1990, there were still 14 eunuchs in Mecca and 17 serving at the prophet’s tomb in Medina. As the official stated:
God has deprived them [the eunuchs] of sensual pleasure in the world but he has enriched them with material possessions and, before that, with the honor of serving the Sacred House.”
We have already discussed how, in Ottoman times, the office of the chief eunuch in Medina became the honorary retirement place for the former chief harem eunuch in Istanbul. This career trajectory reinforced the networks of black eunuchs between Istanbul, Cairo and Medina. But the role of Ottoman chief harem eunuchs in Sunni Islam was not restricted to acting as guards to the Islamic sacred sanctuaries in Mecca and Medina. The aforementioned first chief harem eunuch Mehmed Aga was “one of the pioneers in building a critical mass of public religious structures” in sixteenth-century Istanbul.”” As Jane Hathaway shows in her chapter in this volume, the Ottoman chief harem eunuch also supported the Hanafi law school, which was promoted by the Ottoman dynasty in order to give a confessional Sunni coherence to the empire. The most powerful chief harem eunuch in Ottoman history, Besir Aga (term 1717-46) founded a religious school in Medina, donated Hanafi books to the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo and endowed a large religious-educational complex in Istanbul.?! These endowments are just one example of a more general policy in which chief harem eunuchs provided young boys with religious training in the Hanafi legal rite. In their death, chief harem eunuchs were rewarded with tombs in close proximity to either the prophet or his companions — and this was also the case when they died before becoming chief eunuch in Medina: Chief harem eunuchs who died in Istanbul were buried in the Eyiib Cemetery in Istanbul. This cemetery was founded around a grave that was ascribed to Aba Ayyab al-Ansart (576-ca. 670), the standard bearer of the prophet. The two most powerful Ottoman chief harem eunuchs, Mustafa Aga (term 1605-20) and Besir Aga (term 1623-24), were buried alongside Aba Ayyab and were associated with him: As Aba Ayyab once had converted to Islam and had loyally served the prophet, so had Mustafa and Besir Aga. Even today, numerous pilgrims visit this mausoleum complex. As Jane Hathaway puts it: “serving the sultan and serving the Prophet were intertwined and mutually reinforcing ... components of the Chief Harem Eunuch’s office”.””
To conclude: Unlike bishops, court eunuchs did not assume religious leadership or take responsibility in front of God for the spiritual wellbeing of their subordinates. Instead, court eunuchs were intrinsically linked to royal sacredness. In surrounding and shielding emperors and empresses, caliphs and sultans, in guarding the royal women in the harems, court eunuchs both created and performed royal sacredness. In so doing, they were loyal and pious servants to their masters and contributed to the religious coherence of the empire. Also in the Chinese empire, eunuchs took part in the emperor’s sacredness and acted as patrons of religion, in donating Buddhist temples, for instance.” But there are also cases in which eunuchs derived their authority through a direct connection to God. For example, under the Sunni rule of the Mamluk and Ottoman sultanate (1250-1922), eunuchs guarded the most important sanctuaries of Islam. As guardians of the prophet’s tomb in Medina, eunuchs were joined in unity to the sacred time of the prophet and his companions.
Their high position as power brokers, which resulted from the eunuchs’ exclusive access to their ruler and their control over the royal harem, could evoke harsh criticism from their political opponents. However, whereas bishops were attacked for failing to live up to the standards of ideal priestly conduct, the main reason for attacking eunuchs was not connected to their supposed lack of religious purity but was rather a consequence of their intermediary position between men and women.
Gender: Clerical and eunuchal masculinities
Criticisms directed at eunuchs could be as harsh and bitter as those that were aimed at bishops. Since antiquity, there have been authors who express their disgust at castrated eunuchs, often representing them as not proper (or less than) men. As Mathew Kuefler shows in this volume, Christian authors adapted earlier Pagan and Jewish judgements regarding eunuchs.
The church father Basil the Great (ca. 330-379) thought the eunuchs of a rich household were
a disgraceful and detestable set ... neither woman nor man, lustful, envious, ill-bribed, passion-filled, effeminate, slaves of the belly, mad for gold, ruthless, grumbling about their dinner, inconstant, stingy, greedy, insatiable, savage, jealous. What more need I say? At their very birth they were condemned to the knife. How can their mind|[s] be right ...? They are lecherous to no purpose, of their own natural vileness.™4
This quotation summarises the kind of polemical discourse that was representative of a certain viewpoint regarding eunuchs. To a certain degree, this discourse still today influences cultural understandings of eunuchs as wicked and greedy schemers of the harem. This discourse was certainly reflected in many different periods and places. In China, the image of the vicious and treacherous eunuch was a frequently used topos in medieval historical texts.”> The image of the effeminate eunuch was bolstered by the belief that eunuchs prefer to have sex with other men.” Some chroniclers did also draw upon the more critical discourse on eunuchs, either in depicting them in a negative vein or in presenting them as an exception to the rule. The famous Greek historian Procopius (ca. 500-562), for instance, reported that the victorious general Narses, who had defeated the Ostrogoths in 552, was “keen and more energetic than would be expected of a eunuch”.”’ In the main, however, when eunuchs were mentioned in historical narratives, they were mostly presented according to their different tasks (i.e. military commander, financial supervisor, chamberlain, chief eunuch, etc.) while their castrated status was not made explicit.
In non-narrative texts, Arab writers might perceive the eunuchs’ position between the male and the female spheres in royal and rich households as a problem. The Muslim jurist al-Subki (1284-1355) listed all sorts of offices and professions in fourteenth-century Muslim society (like the caliphal office, the military, the civilian bureaucracy, religious scholars, craftsmen, shoemakers and beggars) and placed the eunuchs in one group (fawdshiya). Although al-Subkt prized some valuable qualities in eunuchs (like kindness, devotion and obedience to their masters and firm leadership), he also found that they had more questionable characteristics (like a harsh manner, a tendency towards jealousy and a lack of rational thought) that he attributed to the eunuchs’ similarity with women. Since a eunuch moved within both male and female spheres, it was thought that he might become confused regarding his gender identity: “when he mixes with women, he tells himself that he is a man, when he is with men, he tells himself that he is a woman”.”*®
As Serena Tolino shows in her chapter, polymath al-Jahiz (ca. 776-869) stated that the eunuch’s “nature is divided between the one of the male and the one of the female. His behaviour will be neither pure nor clear, not that of a man or a woman, but mixed”.” Statements like these tempt us to conclude that medieval eunuchs could be categorised as a “third gender”, standing somewhere between men and women. Kathryn Ringrose has suggested as such in respect to Byzantine eunuchs.!
Abdallah Cheikh-Moussa, in a brilliant article from 1982 - doing gender history avant la lettre —- has made another suggestion. Cheikh-Moussa pointed out that al-Jahiz ascribes a variety of the eunuchs’ characteristics (jealousy, envy, weepiness, insatiable appetite and lust, frivolity, greed, revengeful scheming, etc.) to their proximity to women, children and old men. The underlying conception, therefore, is not a binary between men and women. The normative model is rather that of the adult (not a boy or old man) uncastrated man (for whom there exists an Arabic term that al-Jahiz uses, the fabl), who is also a sophisticated urban citizen of sound mind. This adult, urban male is contrasted with women, children, old men, eunuchs and even adult male nomads, farm workers, Abyssinians or Indians.'°! The eunuch’s hybridity, therefore, is not a hybridity between two genders. There are instead many factors that determine al-Jahiz’s idea of an ideal human being, categories such as age, gender, lifestyle, race and male fertility. The ideal human being is judged according to these different factors. Insofar as it is gendered as fall, this quality appears not as binary (male versus female) but as unique. Through effemination and hybridisation, this pure, male gender is then polluted and degraded. This reflects, but only to a certain degree, Thomas Laqueur’s findings, in which he concluded that before the modern, biological female—-male binary, scholars operated with a one-sex model that was embodied by men, whereas women were considered to be imperfect men.!° But al-Jahiz’s text (which deserves a prominent place in source books on gender history but, unfortunately, has not yet been translated from the Arabic) is very much an example where we have to think of gender as a “multi-relational category” that is intertwined with other factors such as “age, religion, ethnos, race or even class”.!™
Whereas Kathryn Ringrose has proposed the “third gender” category to analyse eunuchs, Shaun Marmon has classified eunuchs as “a category of nongendered individuals who both defined and crossed highly charged boundaries of moral and physical space in the world of the living and in the world of the dead”.'!"4 Third gender or non-gendered — it appears significant that scholars have thought about these two notions also in respect to clergymen. Robert Swanson has argued that there were cultural tensions between the “maleness” of clergymen and his suggested concept of “emasculinity” - in which, through celibacy, the clergy became like angels and thus could be perceived as a third gender.' Jo Ann McNamara has stated that until the twelfth century, the monastic chastity that was required of both monks and nuns, and was considered a superior lifestyle to that of the laity, tended to erase gender differences between men and women and ultimately led to a crisis of masculine identity.!°° Third gender or no gender, one or two sexes: what category do we use? And what do we do with debates concerning the concepts of sex and gender?
Especially from the late 1990s onwards, a further category was introduced into gender history: the concept of masculinity. Until recently, one can observe a striking asymmetry among historians, who use the category of masculinity much more often than the concept of femininity. For the novice in gender history, this may come as a surprise — if historians have worked so hard in order to show that not only women but also men have to be analysed as gendered beings, why do historians talk a lot about masculinities but much less about femininities? This asymmetry is partly due to the historical development of gender history: The subject evolved in the 1980s from women’s history, whose main aim was to bring women as historical actors into focus (writing “her-story” instead of “his-story”). Within women’s history, gender emerged then as a “useful category of historical analysis”.!°’ It was through the concept of masculinity that historians started to also analyse how men are gendered — while gender remains the general category in order to study both “men” and “women” (as well as persons and practices that transgress male-female binaries).!°* Within this process, the categories of third gender or non-gendered for Christian religious men were rather left to the side. Perhaps, this was partly just an analytical by-product of what appears to be a scholarly consensus in using the category of masculinity for studying the gender history of men. However, such a consensus proved useful insofar as it opened up perspectives on plural and competing masculinities, which avoided the danger of reproducing modern essentialist assumptions concerning male-female binaries.
In his chapter, Matthew Mesley points out how the study of clerical masculinities has shown that medieval clerics were “powerful figures of authority in their own right”. But clerical masculinities were not simply an amalgamation of the different masculine characteristics of laymen. As noted above, secular clergymen and bishops were constantly challenged by monastic standards of asceticism, religious purity and celibacy. Mesley’s analysis shows how Caesarius of Heisterbach propagated a particular form of Cistercian masculinity in which he not only often evoked the differences between laymen, secular clergy and monks but also sometimes drew upon alternatives, such as the concept of the spiritual warrior and knight.
The contribution from Sita Steckel and Stephanie Kluge demonstrates that conceptions of monastic masculinities were never monolithic. When the mendicant orders (the Franciscans and Dominicans) developed as orders in the late Middle Ages, they built their monasteries not in the countryside but in the cities, where they preached to laymen. Mendicant preachers were popular with large parts of the urban population and competed with the secular clergy in providing pastoral care. They were much more exposed to those living in the world and were in daily contact with women who might still be considered as “rotten food, a stinking rose, a sweet poison” or deemed to be “evil from the origin, a portal to death, a disciple of the snake, counselled by the devil, a fount of deception”.'” Being in contact with women and consequently always fearful of temptations, mendicants had to prove that they lived chaste lives and were superior to both the secular clergy and the older monastic orders. The sample of sources examined by Steckel and Kluge suggests that Franciscans solved this problem rather traditionally by practising a superior masculinity of discipline, chastity and piety, which they contrasted to the undisciplined, carnal and irreligious secular priests. Dominicans, on the other hand, did not create a dichotomy in which the secular clergy was conceived of as the enemy. Incontinence was rather seen as a normal human weakness that could be mastered through learning about worldly dangers. Using didactic texts, young Dominican novices might move from a naive understanding of the world to a more nuanced view about sexuality and women, and thus they could acquire a “shield of knowledge” against the world’s carnal temptations. Advocates of the secular clergy, on the other hand, proposed that contact with women should be either avoided or submitted to social control. As Steckel and Kluge point out, the competition for chastity as a legitimate basis for religious authority took on a new dynamic in the second half of the thirteenth century as the mendicant orders emerged as new players in the religious scene. Since the scholarly texts that were authored at this time were the first to be printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, these different notions of masculinity, which grounded clerical claims for religious authority, had an impact beyond the Late Middle Ages.
If we adapt the concept of masculinity as it has been analysed for secular and monastic clergy in our Shared Focus to eunuchs, we can abandon the notion of eunuchs as either a third gender or as non-gendered individuals. Instead, we can place eunuchal and clerical masculinities together and consider the results. Eunuchal and clerical masculinities stood in opposition to the masculinities of laymen and non-castrated men (Arabic fubil, sg. fabl). This opposition was crucial (although not absolute — e.g. reproductive men could also be accused of being effeminate).'!° As celibate and childless men, eunuchs and clerics were singled out in respect to reproduction patterns and marked the boundary between profane and sacred spheres. This specific position shaped clerical and eunuchal masculinities in a similar way.
Exploring the notion of eunuchal masculinities, there are two points that seem to be particularly significant. Although the polemical discourse on eunuchs as a reprehensible kind of being is striking, it was less powerful and omnipresent than one might first think. As mentioned above, we can often not be sure whether certain generals, governors and other high court officials outside the harem were actually eunuchs or not. Individual eunuchs often appear in the chronicles in officio without any distinction from their non-castrated colleagues. In these instances, their status as eunuchs was obviously not considered worth mentioning by chroniclers. But this is not the case in other sources. In her contribution, Serena Tolino looks at Islamic legal sources, medical texts and religious traditions. In the former, eunuchs were mostly treated in similar ways to other men, with rights to marry and divorce and even, in cases where their testicles had not been cut, the ability to father children. In so doing, Islamic jurists did not comment upon the gender status of eunuchs but viewed them as men, notwithstanding their castration. This is an interesting difference to hermaphrodites, whose legal status as either women or men, or as something in between, was debated at length." Medical texts, on the other hand, operated on the basis of a continuum between male and female, with eunuchs located closer to the masculine pole. Eunuchal masculinities, therefore, were like pictures produced in a kaleidoscope: They appeared like different shapes depending on particular historical contexts, as well as the different genres and discourses in which they featured and the perspectives of those who discussed or represented them (eunuchal or non-eunuchal voices). Missing from the historiography however, are in-depth sustained studies of eunuchal masculinities; these could draw inspiration from works on clerical masculinities, with their emphasis on the competition between the secular clergy, monastic orders and mendicants. We do have preliminary findings (for example, in Ringrose’s study, which considers both ecclesiastical and court eunuchs)!!* and some hints here and there. Hugh Kennedy and Nadia Maria El Cheikh, for instance, have noticed the competition between Mu’nis, the powerful eunuch military commander in Baghdad, and the eunuchs at the Abbasid court.'% We could therefore ask, in a more systematic way, whether the masculinities of different groups of eunuchs (for example, black versus white eunuchs, eunuchs in the imperial household versus military eunuchs, harem eunuchs versus eunuchs serving the ruler) differed in certain times and places. Since we have very few instances where we can grasp the self-representations of eunuchs, in contrast to the many clerical voices we can listen to, such an enterprise, however, might be rather limited. It would prevent us nonetheless from taking our modern concept of “eunuchs” — which implies a homogeneous group of men, notwithstanding the many different historical designations for eunuchs — as a guarantee that all eunuchs shared the same gender identity. However, it seems to me that even if we knew more about different, and perhaps competing, eunuchal masculinities, my hypothesis of kaleidoscopic eunuchal masculinities might still stand and be worth considering also in discussions of clerical masculinities. By kaleidoscopic masculinity, I mean that the one and same eunuch was submitted to different degrees and ways of gendering in different contexts, no matter whether he was a harem eunuch or a military commander. One could describe these fluctuations as “fluent”, “ambiguous” or “liminal”, but the concept of kaleidoscopic masculinity expresses more clearly that a eunuch could be seen as either fully male or a dubious hybrid being or almost male or non-gendered, depending on the context. A victorious eunuch general might be perceived (and see himself) as a fine example of military manhood, but political opponents of the eunuch might in their criticism draw upon the polemical discourse on eunuchs, depicting him as effeminate, treacherous and scheming.!" Eunuchal masculinities could take the shape of non-castrated manhood in chronicles, being almost male in legal texts, partly male in medical tracts, a despised hybridity in the polemical discourse and a kind of non-gendered identity at the prophet’s tomb.!*
Furthermore, the very existence of eunuchs was embedded within a deep contradiction in these societies: Castration was often legally forbidden and not supposed to occur, and yet, castrated men were needed. This contradiction resulted in either outsourcing castration beyond the imperial borders or in delicate concealment and silent tolerance of castration within the empire. Sometimes, these contradictions came to the surface. Ruby Lal points out that Mughal emperor Jahangir (reigned 1605-1627) forbade the castration of children in the province of Sylhet, where families sent castrated boys as tax payments to the province headquarters. As Jahangir proudly noted in his memoirs for the year 1608:
I issued an order that hereafter no one should follow this abominable custom .... [The governors of Bengal] received firmans that whoever should commit such acts should be capitally punished and that they should seize eunuchs of tender years who might be in anyone’s possession. No one of the former kings had obtained this success. Please Almighty God ... no one shall venture on this unpleasant and unprofitable proceeding.!"
Jahangir did not pursue this policy, however. According to his own memoirs, he would in later years receive eunuchs from Sylhet, and he never again discussed his attempt to end this practice.
With this example in mind, we touch upon a significant difference between bishops and eunuchs: Whereas the recruitment of bishops from the priesthood was seen as an honourable career path, the physical castration of eunuchs was legally banned and considered to be a cruel mutilation. However, eunuchs and bishops were similar insofar as both groups were faced with deep contradictions concerning their position. As we have seen above, bishops were torn between spiritual standards and worldly responsibilities, making it almost impossible to be both a good bishop and a good duke, as Caesarius of Heisterbach remarked. Clergymen had to conceive of their masculinity in ways that confirmed their manhood, notwithstanding their abstinence from reproduction. Clerical and eunuchal masculinities, therefore, operated between different understandings of gender and between different social contexts and discourses. While one might concede that noncastrated men and women also had multifaceted gender identities, clerical and eunuchal masculinities were particularly complex and embedded in various societal contradictions.
Conclusion
Celibate and childless men in power were a common feature of pre-modern dynastic rule, embedded in very different social, economic, institutional, religious and cultural frameworks. Like other men and women, they stood between their original families and institutions such as monasteries, bishoprics, harems, court hierarchies and military corps. By being excluded (usually) from a father-son succession, however, bishops and eunuchs offered societies the potential to use different reproduction patterns, thus providing flexibility and presenting alternatives that other social groups could not offer to this degree. Eunuchs were recruited from within and outside the territories in which they lived, and although they could be cut off from or remain in contact with their original families, in their new roles they developed networks and engaged in adoptive kinships that acted as a mechanism for social mobility. Before the eleventh-twelfth century, bishops could be married and have children, or they might act as fathers in other ways by providing care and training for their nephews. But even after episcopal marriages were no longer considered acceptable, bishops were still useful to the reproduction patterns of their aristocratic families. An aristocratic family needed enough children to ensure the survival of their dynasty, but not too many —a bishop was an ideal backup for their family in case a succession was endangered by the death of a brother.!'” Celibate and childless men, therefore, broadened in different but particular ways the social dynamics of their environments.
Among gender historians, it has become a consensus that gender should not be analysed as an isolated element but in relation to other factors like religion, class, race and age. Although this principle should be applied to all historical actors, celibate and childless men are a specific and unique group that proves this approach is indeed appropriate: Their masculinities were particularly complex, multifaceted, conflicting and kaleidoscopic. As celibate and childless men, they stood at the very intersection of power, social dynamics, sacredness and gender. All these factors were deeply intertwined with each other, but the combination of such could differ from time and place. As Nadia Maria El Cheikh points out in her chapter, eunuchs had a privileged position because they could move between the female and male spheres at court. Bishops grounded their superiority over worldly leaders in certain debates by their spiritual responsibility towards God. Their religious authority, on the other hand, was constantly challenged by monastic orders. Bishops had a hybrid identity as secular and ecclesiastical leaders (as Matthew Mesley has phrased it), which put them in an ambiguous position in the light of their worldly and religious requirements. Eunuchs were embedded in an even bigger societal contradiction: Empires required their services, but their castration was considered illegal. Celibacy and castration singled bishops and eunuchs out among other men, at times associating them with the sacred sphere. But they could also fall from a much further height than other men and be charged with being worldly, effeminate or overrun with sexual lust. Among all the social roles of pre-modern societies, celibate and childless men had an outstandingly complex position in relation to men and also between men and women, family and network patterns and, finally, sacred and profane spaces.
In the nineteenth century, bishops lost much of their influence in modern politics. At the same time, the number of eunuchs decreased dramatically. The main reason for this disappearance was not that castration of boys and men was suddenly judged to be cruel — as we have seen, castration had been long considered illegal and was often viewed as a terrible mutilation. Eunuchs and priests in their long garments were marginalised altogether. In the political arena of the modern nation state, politicians were mostly married and started to wear suits, thus conforming to modern globalised standards of bodily practice, as the late Christopher Bayly has suggested."* If one wanted to explore why bishops and eunuchs disappeared from the political stage of modern nation states, one has to take into consideration how an entire set of factors — political system, family networks, sacredness and gender — changed. The Shared Focus on celibate and childless men in power, therefore, points to some of the big questions about both modern and pre-modern rule and societal patterns.
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