The History of Sex: Istanbul -- The Emasculation of the Ottomans -- (Chap.II, Pt.7)

The Head Eunuch was a kind of Pimp-Master General in charge of spying on the girls for the sultan and scouting for new talent.

As the third most important official in the empire—after the Grand Vizier and the leader of the Ottoman Muslims—the Head Eunuch could talk to the sultan whenever he wanted.

The theory was that eunuchs were more trustworthy because their dynastic ambitions had literally been nipped in the bud.

Unfortunately, this argument failed to take into account the bitterness of men who'd been mutilated at the behest of a regime they were meant to serve.

EMASCULATED SULTANS

As with the Queen Mothers, who were packed off to the Palace of Tears when their sultan sons died, the selfish incentive for eunuchs was obvious: to grab as much as they could for as long as they could; let Allah take care of the greater good.

And as the sultans spent more time in the Harem, leaving their concubine mothers and corrupt eunuchs to govern, ironically it was the Ottomans themselves who wound up being emasculated.

A particularly nasty Queen Mother was Kösem, a Greek slave girl who effectively ruled the empire for much of the seventeenth century after having engineered the first regicide in Ottoman history (among countless crimes).

Kösem conspired to have her teenaged stepson, Osman II, murdered in jail by a combination of strangulation and 'compression of the testicles.'

Osman II -- executed at 17
after having his testicles 'compressed'

It was her husband who built Istanbul's famous Blue Mosque and temporarily stopped the tradition of murdering one's brothers upon assuming the throne.

Instead, he had his brother confined to a wing of the Harem known as the Cage—referred to delicately as the Twin Pavilions on the tour—keeping him doped up on alcohol and opium with a dozen concubines for company.

The 'Golden Cage'

When one of Kösem's sons emerged from the Cage to become sultan, he was so deranged he became known as 'Ibrahim the Mad.'

Besides regularly hosting one-man orgies around the pool—the one you see while visiting the Favorite Concubines' Courtyard—Ibrahim once had 280 of his odalisques tied up in bags and drowned in the Bosphorus.

One of the few to survive his jealousy was his beloved 'Sugar Cube'—an Armenian who weighed over 300 pounds—but his mother later had her throttled over dinner.

The Queen Mother finally got her comeuppance in her early sixties, when she tried to murder yet another young sultan.

The boy's mother found out about the plot and had the eunuchs hunt Kösem down, dragging her out of the Harem, stripping her naked, and strangling her outside at the Gate of the Aviary.

And that's where this tour ends.