Category Archives: Africa

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

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

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