Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  In their preface to the finished work as it appeared in 1611 the “workemen,” as the revisers styled themselves, state simply that they tried “to make a good translation better, or out of many good ones, one principall good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath bene our indeavor, that our marke.” They did not disdain, they said, “to revise that which we had done, or to bring back to the anvill that which we had hammered.” Nor did they bind themselves to a rigorous precision in using exactly the same English word every time for the same original word of the text, “for is the kingdom of God become words or syllables?” Their freedom of language preserved the work of their predecessors; in fact, the first of their thirteen rules sealed the style set by Tyndale by explicitly ordering that the Bishops’ Bible was “to be followed and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.” How basically honest was the attempt to get as close as possible to the original meaning set down in ages past in Palestine, how astonishingly free of doctrinal partisanship, is evident from the instructions to the revisers. Names of prophets, for example, and all other proper names were “to be retained as nigh as may be, accordingly as they were vulgarly used.” Angled interpretations were prohibited by Rule 6: “No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew and Greek words.” Finally in the preface the revisers acknowledged their constant effort to steer clear both of the “scrupulosities of the Puritans” and the “obscurities of the Papists” and firmly stood by their purpose that “the Scripture may speake like it selfe, as in the language of Canaan, that it may be understood of the very vulgar.” This they accomplished, and this was their glory, for their Bible became not only understood by every one from the “very vulgar” to the most educated, but known, remembered, and loved.

  CHAPTER VI

  MERCHANT ADVENTURERS TO THE LEVANT

  In the age of discovery, when Europe was bursting its boundaries in every direction, the Elizabethan navigators and merchant adventurers were in the vanguard. These “stirrers abroad and searchers of the remote parts of the world,” boasts Hakluyt, “have excelled all the nations and people of the earth.”

  “For which the kings of this land before her Majesty,” he continues, “had theyre banners ever seene in the Caspian Sea? Which of them hath ever dealt with the Emperor of Persia as her Majesty hath done, and obtained for her merchants large and loving privileges? Who ever saw before this regiment an English Ligier in the stately porch of the Grand Signor of Constantinople? Who ever found English consuls and agents at Tripolis in Syria, at Aleppo, at Babylon, at Balsara …? What English shippes did heeretofore ever anker in the mighty river of the Plate … land upon the Luzones in despight of the enemy … trafficke with the princes of the Moluccas … and last of all return home most richly laden with the commodities of China as the subjects of this now flourishing monarchy have done?”

  The return home “richly laden” was the chief factor in Elizabethan expansion. The impetus that drove the explorers was trade; their goal was the merchandise of the East. Palestine for the time being was forgotten in its character as Holy Land and became but a trading post, a way station in the commerce opened with the Ottoman Empire. Crusaders fired with zeal to split the heads of Turks gave way to gift-laden ambassadors who sued the Turk for trading privileges with soft words and promises. In the course of the commercial and diplomatic relations established between England and the Sultan’s empire at this time the foundations were laid for England’s future strategic involvement in the Middle East.

  The Crown went into partnership with the merchants and navigators, subsidizing their expeditions and collecting handsome profits on their return. Above all, out of this activity England reaped a navy. As trade expanded, more and more ships were built to carry it and more and more crews trained to sail them.

  Meanwhile another instrument of empire, the chartered company, grew up along with the navy. Formed by groups of merchant adventurers, the companies were granted monopoly rights to trading privileges in particular areas in return for an annual tribute to the Crown. The first to be chartered was the Muscovy Company in 1554, and the second was the Levant Company chartered in 1581 to trade in the dominions of the “Grand Senior,” the Sultan of Turkey.

  Palestine lay within those dominions, but it was a Palestine that had been for a generation neglected, unvisited, and all but forgotten by Englishmen. From Torkyngton, the last of the pilgrims in 1517, to Anthony Jenkinson, the first of the merchant adventurers in 1553, there are no records of English travel in Palestine. That gap of roughly a generation saw the overthrow of the Catholic Church in England and the establishment of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem. These two events were responsible for a new era in England’s relations with Palestine. In 1453 the new and more terrible Turks captured Constantinople, which has remained theirs from that day to this. By 1540, at the height of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Turks ruled in Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cairo, in Budapest and Belgrade, in Rhodes and Algiers. They straddled all roads to Palestine by land or sea. A Christian traveler was regarded by them as legitimate prey, to be captured as a slave or killed as an infidel whose death assured the perpetrator a place in Paradise.

  Not only had the risks of the journey to the Holy Land vastly increased, but also the compelling motive had disappeared. Salvation, according to Protestant theory, was to be won by the soul’s journey, not by the body’s. “The best pilgrimage,” wrote Samuel Purchas, “is the peaceable way of a good conscience to that Jerusalem which is above.” Wherever the Reformation took hold, pilgrimages ceased, at least for the time being. Along with the sale of indulgences and pardons they were condemned by the Protestants as the most objectionable of the forms and ceremonies of the Catholic Church — forms whose public performance was substituted for private morality. In that day Protestantism still meant protest, reformation still meant reform; and the most urgent reform was replacing the mechanical means through which Rome bestowed grace with the effort toward an inner virtue. To undertake the physical journey to some pilgrim shrine only endangered the soul’s journey, as Purchas said, and he added the awful warning that “to ascribe sanctity to a place is Jewish.”

  Commerce, not salvation, was the new lure of the East. Where once the pilgrims disembarked, bales of English woolens now rolled onto the quays. Spices and silks, wines and oils, carpets and jewels were brought back in exchange. Caravans from Arabia passed through Palestine, were bartered in the market places and transshipped at the ports to the waiting vessels of European merchants. The land of Palestine itself contributed little to the new commerce. Under the Turkish despotism the devastation of the land that had followed the various Arab, Seljuk, Christian, and Tartar invasions and battles went on apace. Terraced vineyards crumbled away, hillsides eroded, cisterns and aqueducts choked up with silt. The land that had supported the gardens and palaces of Solomon, and all the “crowded, busy world” of Biblical times, was but a backwater of the Ottoman empire. Even its ports, Jaffa and Acre, though still busy, were secondary to Scanderoon, port of Aleppo, on the one hand and to Alexandria and Algiers on the other.

  But the future fate of Palestine was involved in the development of the Levant trade as a whole. When England first entered the “Turkie trade” in the reign of Elizabeth the foundations of her future empire in India and the Middle East were being laid, however unwittingly. The merchants of the Levant Company opened the Middle East to England’s commerce. Pushing ever eastward, the same group twenty years later founded the East India Company, whose role in the development of the British Empire is well known. In this instance, a reversal of the usual order, the flag followed trade. The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers. It was they who first put England into official diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire. The religious attachment to Palestine that had played so great
a role hitherto and would do so again—this was for the moment absent. It is a striking fact that in all the correspondence of the Queen and her ministers with the “Turkie” merchants regarding negotiations with the Sultan, appointment of ambassadors, terms of the company’s charter, there is, except for a casual reference in passing, no mention whatever of the land for which so many generations of crusaders had fought and died, the goal of a thousand years of pilgrimages.

  Before the reign of Elizabeth the “Turkie trade” was largely monopolized by the Italian city republics, whose practiced fleets knew every wind and tide, every cove and port of the Mediterranean. Although Hakluyt lists several sporadic voyages by “divers tall ships of London to Tripolis and Barutti in Syria” in the early sixteenth century, the English made no concerted effort to break the Italian shipping monopoly until the balance of power in the Mediterranean was changed by the battle of Lepanto in 1571. When the battle was joined the combined forces of the Spanish Hapsburgs, the papal states, and the Italian cities under the command of the dashing Don John of Austria, brother of the Spanish king, numbered 270 galleys and 80,000 men. At the end of that terrible day, wrote Knolles, Elizabethan historian of the Turks, “the sea was stained with blood and covered with Bodies, Weapons and fragments of broken Gallies.” The Turks’ fleet was destroyed, their sea power in the Mediterranean smashed. They lost 220 ships, 25,000 men killed, 50,000 taken prisoner, and 12,000 Christian galley slaves released by the victors. “Never,” claims the historian Lafuente, “had the Mediterranean witnessed on her bosom nor shall the world again see a conflict so obstinate, a butchery so terrible, men so valiant and so enraged.” The victory aroused glittering visions of reviving the throne of Constantine and sweeping the Turk clean out of Europe and the Levant, back into the Scythian wilds whence he had come.

  Don John saw himself an emperor in Byzantium. But the Turk, despite his defeat, remained a danger to Europe for over a century, until turned back at the doors of Vienna in 1683, and, even after that, a great power for over two centuries more. Still the toppling of the Turkish fleet in the Bay of Lepanto cleared the way through the Mediterranean. When news of the victory reached London, Holinshed reports, “There were bonfires made through the citie with banquetting and great rejoycing as good cause there was for a victory of so great importance to the whole state of the Christian commonwealth.”

  Naval supremacy did not, however, stay with the victors long. Venice, whose monopoly of the spice trade had been broken by the Portuguese, was already on the descent from the peak of her mercantile and maritime greatness. Within the next decade Spain’s haughty Armada was to be scattered and sunk by the English. In that event the hindsight of history recognizes the passing of control of the seas to the Protestant countries, with results that Lecky, in a burst of conscious righteousness, called “an almost unmingled benefit to mankind.” Of course the shift in power did not take place overnight. Spain remained a power to be reckoned with for some time; but the loss of the best part of her fleet, following a similar loss to the Turks and coinciding with the decline of Venice, served to open England’s sea road to the Middle East.

  England’s merchants had not waited for Drake’s smashing blow at the “Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.” Already the victory at Lepanto had awakened them to opportunities in the Levant. Two rich merchants of London were soon busy assembling men, money, and ships for a collective assault on the “Turkie trade.” One was Edward Osborne, a leading member of the Clothworkers’ Company, and the other was Richard Staper, whose tombstone describes him as “the greatest merchant in his tyme; the chiefest actor in the discoverie of the trades of Turkey and East India.” Behind them was Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s astute treasurer, whose eye was fixed on the gold that would accrue to the Crown when the Mediterranean trade winds should fill English sails. By 1579 Osborne and Staper had organized a group ready to invest in the new venture, and in that year, as their first act, they sent an agent to Constantinople to secure trading privileges from the Sultan.

  William Harborne, an M.P. for Great Yarmouth who two years earlier had visited Turkey and returned with a letter from the Sultan inviting the friendship of the Queen of England, was the man selected for the mission. It was an inspired choice. England’s whole future in the Middle East, and with it the future of Palestine, was touched by the diplomatic genius, the grit, the superb Elizabethan self-confidence of the first English envoy to the Porte. Off he went to a virtually hostile country and to a court of sinister reputation. Although the Sultan had once been gracious, the moods of Amurath III were notoriously unreliable. Access to him was guarded by jealous viziers and trigger-fingered janissaries. Other European envoys already established at the court were all inimical to Harborne’s purpose and certain to intrigue against him. Yet within a year he was home bringing a full treaty of twenty-two articles empowering the English subjects to trade in Turkish dominions. Later he served six years in Constantinople as ambassador. He “firmly laid,” says A. C. Wood, historian of the Levant Company, “the foundations of his country’s influence in the Near East and never again was it in any real danger of extinction by rival influence.”

  With Marborne’s treaty in their pockets Staper and Osborne petitioned the Crown for incorporation as a chartered company that would give them exclusive trade rights in the Levant. They pointed out the advantages to the state that would result from increased customs and an increased navy. In support of their petition Secretary Walsingham drew up a memorandum entitled “A Consideration of the Trade into Turkey,” in which he spelled out for the Queen the reasons why the project should receive official backing. “First,” he wrote, “you shall set the great number of your greatest ships in work whereby your navy shall be maintained, one of the principallest strengths and defence of this realm, which otherwise were like to decay.” In addition, he continued, an English company would eliminate middlemen from the carrying trade so that “you shall vend your own commodities with most profit which before did fall into strangers’ hands.” For that very reason moreover it might be worth using the Levant trade to incline the Sultan toward England and away from his uneasy alliance with King Philip of Spain.

  Convinced of the political advantages to be secured, and lured by the profits to be expected, Elizabeth on September 1, 1581 duly granted to Staper and Osborne and ten other merchants a charter as “The Company of Merchants of the Levant.” According to its terms only members of the company, by virtue of their having “found out and opened a trade in Turkey not known in the memory of any man now living to be frequented by our progenitors,” were thereafter permitted to enter the Turkey trade. Osborne was named governor and the membership limited to twenty. The company’s ships were to fly the royal ensign and their ordnance and crew to be under supervision of the Admiralty. In return for the monopoly conferred by the charter the company was to pay the Crown a yearly tribute of £500.

  More than a year’s delay followed while the Queen and the company quarreled over who was to pay the ambassador’s expenses. Beside salary and handsome presents for the Sultan he would also have to be provided with what is nowadays inelegantly called a slush fund. It was too much for Elizabeth’s unconquerable parsimony, and she flatly refused to accredit an ambassador unless his expenses were paid by the company. Osborne and his fellows refused in their turn to lay out another shilling.

  Finally the merchants, with their capital tied up in the waiting ships loaded with good wool cloth, gave in and decided to send Harborne at their own expense. In January 1583 the Great Susan set sail for Constantinople with Harborne on board and, as gifts for the Sultan, three mastiffs, three spaniels, two bloodhounds, “two little dogs in coats of silk,” two silver popinjays, a jeweled clock valued at £500, and other ornamental objects and rare treasures. Elizabeth stingily contributed a knighthood and letters of credential to the new ambassador.

  Once arrived, Harborne again justified the merchants’ faith. By his persuasiveness, his presents, and his craft in circu
mventing the machinations of his rivals he not only regained the Sultan’s favor and a restoration of the trade treaty, which had been canceled in his absence, but also secured terms more favorable than those enjoyed by the other Europeans and a reduction in export duties as well. “The mercurial breasted Mr. Harborne,” wrote the journalist playwright Tom Nash, “so noised the name of our island among the Turks that not an infant of the cur-tailed, skin-clipping pagans but talk of London as frequently as of their prophet’s tomb at Mecca.”

  Such fame was good for business as well as for diplomatic bargaining. The “Turkie merchants,” in their first five years of operation, made twenty-seven voyages to ten Levant ports, realizing on some shipments a 300- or 400- per-cent profit and paying to the Crown a total of £11,359 in customs duties. Osborne, governor of the Company, was knighted and elected Lord Mayor of London. The charter was renewed twice, the second time at a profit to the Crown of 800 per cent. A consulate was opened at Aleppo to handle the commerce of Aleppo, Damascus, Aman, Tripolis, Jerusalem, and “all other parts whatever in the provinces of Syria, Palestine and Jurie [Jewry].” To such estate had the Holy Land fallen—one of half a dozen trading posts lumped together equally under a consul’s jurisdiction.

  Not every voyage was a triumph. Pirates and “the dreadful touch of merchant-marring rocks” that ruined the Merchant of Venice and put him in bond to Shylock fell upon the English as well. Of three Levant Company ships that set sail in 1591 only one returned. Another under Captain Benjamin Wood, bound for Cathay with a letter from Elizabeth to the emperor of China, never was heard of again. How anxiously must Staper and Osborne have awaited word of the safe arrival of their ships! How often must they have paced the wharves scanning the horizon for the first distant glimmer of incoming sails! But if their ships did escape shipwreck and storm, plunder by Turks and corsairs, ambush by Spaniards or Venetians, and made home port safely, then their return ensured lush profits to the Turkey merchants. One argosy brought a cargo of “Rawe silks, Indico Bleue, all sorts of spices, all sorts of poticary druggs, grograynes, cotton yarns, cotton wooll, some Turkye Carpitts, cotton clothe and Gawles [jewels],” according to the same report made to Cecil. “Her Majestie’s custome,” the company added, “will amount to, at the least, for soe wee dare adventure to give for the same, the sum of £3,500.”