" Symeon the Sanctified was allowed on to Mount Athos – a eunuch who would then go on to found a monastery of eunuchs in Thessalonika. A sizeable number of patriarchs – the leaders of the Orthodox Church based in Constantinople – were eunuchs. The presence of this third sex – complicating the binary division of male and female – also, arguably, allowed women to enjoy an atypical degree of power in the city, a tradition that endured for 1,500 years, beyond the Ottoman conquest of the city in AD 1453. "

― Bettany Hughes , Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities