The Anatomy of Melancholy

They may not so much as look out. If the husbands are great men, they have eunuchs to guard them, as do the Grand Seigneur among the Turks, the Sophis of Persia, those Tatar Moguls and the kings of China. “They castrate countless male infants to serve the king,” says Ricci: they castrate innumerable infants for this purpose. The king of China maintains ten thousand eunuchs in his household to guard his wives.

The sharifs of Barbary keep their courtesans so strictly that if any man so much as comes into their sight he dies for it; and if the women happen to see a man and do not cry out immediately, even from their windows, they must be put to death.

The Turks have I do not know how many black, mutilated eunuchs for this purpose—the white ones perform other services—usually sent from Egypt, deprived in childhood of all their genital organs and brought up in the seraglio at Constantinople to guard their wives. The women are so confined that they may not speak with any living man or associate with younger women, nor receive a cucumber or carrot as food unless it has been sliced, for fear—and so on. Thus they live, left alone with their unchaste thoughts for all their lives.

Women of the common sort, if they ever go out—which is very seldom—to visit one another or go to their baths, are so covered that no man can see them. So were the matrons of ancient Rome, “carried in a litter or a covered chair,” as Dio and Seneca record. “They walk completely veiled,” Alexander ab Alexandro relates of the Parthians in book 5, chapter 24; but, with his commentator André Tiraqueau, I think this should rather be understood to mean the Persians.

I have not yet told everything: they not only lock them up, “but also put locks upon their genitals.” Hear what Bembo relates in book 6 of his Venetian History about the inhabitants around Kilwa in Africa. “The Portuguese,” he says, “visited the towns of certain people who sew up girls’ genital parts immediately after birth, leaving the passage of urine unobstructed, and give them in marriage when they have grown up, still sewn together, so that the bridegroom’s first task is to cut apart with a blade the girl’s joined edges.”

In some parts of Greece today, as among those Jews of old, they will not believe their wives are chaste “unless they see a bloodstained cloth on the first night.” Our countryman Sandys says in his travels that this is strictly observed in Zazynthus, or Zante; and Leo Africanus says that in his time at Fez in Africa “they do not believe her to be a virgin unless they see a bloody cloth; otherwise she is sent back in disgrace to her parents.” Those sheets are publicly shown by their parents and kept as a sign of untouched virginity.