In the Ottoman Topkapi court of 1749, Sultan Mahmud I assigned the title Kizlar Ağa, meaning “Master of the Girls,” to the influential Chief
of the Black Eunuchs. A eunuch, known as
kapi in the Turkish language, was a man whose testicles had been crushed or surgically removed—typically against his will—with the aim to quash his masculinity and fertility. Muslim law prohibited the desecration of
the human body, so Arab slave hunters traveled to Africa’s Sahel region to purchase or steal
pre-pubescent boys and castrate them, trafficking the paltry sum of survivors to the Ottoman Empire. As the most trusted of the legion of black eunuchs, the Kizlar Ağa served as the sole advisor and liaison to the sultan.
He educated the sequestered women of the sultan’s harem in etiquette, diction, and morality and was trusted to enforce both their separation from lustful young officers and
their sexual abstention with one another.
The emasculation procedure did not always stifle the Ağasi libido, however, and those who remained sexually eager often succumbed
to the women’s risky enticements, an infraction punishable by death.

Artist: Anthony Walker; engraver: Charles Grignion. Image: Habit of the Chief of the Black Eunuchs, in 1749 from Jefferys, Thomas, A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern: Particularly Old English Dresses. Vol. 1. London: Thomas Jefferys, 1757. Courtesy the New York Public Library. Sources: Junne, George H. The Black Eunuchs of
the Ottoman Empire: Networks of Power in the Court of the Sultan. London: I. B. Taurus & Co. Ltd., 2016. Scholz, Piotr O. Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History. Translated by
John A. Broadwin and Shelley L. Frisch. Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2001.