A Category That Crosses Empires, Courts and Temples

Castrated men held recognised, often powerful, roles across a striking range of premodern societies, serving in the Byzantine imperial court and church hierarchy, as senior administrators within the Chinese imperial palace system, in the harem and household administration of the Ottoman court, and within specifically religious offices, including the galli priesthood of Cybele and, considerably later, the Skoptsy, a Russian Orthodox dissenting sect whose members practised castration as a form of ascetic religious discipline.

Ringrose's study of eunuchs in Byzantium argues that eunuch status there functioned as a distinct social gender category in its own right, neither simply male nor treated as equivalent to female, and that this liminal status is precisely what let eunuchs occupy positions of unusual trust close to imperial and religious power, since they were understood to stand outside the ordinary dynastic and sexual rivalries that made other courtiers dangerous. The Chinese imperial system in particular relied on eunuch officials for centuries as a distinct administrative class, since their inability to found a rival dynasty made them, in the eyes of many emperors, a more politically reliable class of senior servant than ordinary court nobility.