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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Particularly important to England’s future was raw cotton, a strange new plant fiber which the Turkey merchants found for sale at Acre and Sidon. According to a contemporary account, “divers people in this kingdom, but chiefly in the county of Lancaster have found out the trade of making fustians, made of a kind of bombast or down, being a fruit of the earth growing upon little shrubs or bushes brought into the kingdom by the Turkey merchants.” Such were the beginnings of Lancashire cotton weaving, which in the day of spinning jenny and power loom was to become England’s leading industry.

  From Persia by way of the Levant the company brought plants, rare then, a commonplace now in everyone’s garden: lilies, irises, crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils, and laurel. One commodity that was to become famous in English life, which the Turkey merchants unaccountably passed up, was coffee. Agents of the company noted it as a popular drink among the Turks. They sit chatting most of the day, wrote the traveler Sandys, sipping it “as hot as they can suffer it; black as soote and tasting not much unlike it.” But the English coffeehouse had to wait until the East India Company, a later offshoot of the Levant Company, began importing the coffee bean in quantity.

  The East India Company, destined to transform England into an empire with vital effect on the fate of Palestine, was founded by the Levant Company merchants in an effort to break into the Far Eastern trade. The Dutch and Portuguese monopolized this trade. The fabulously profitable spices of the Indies, the silks of China, the muslins and jewels of India were shipped across the Indian Ocean and thence by caravan overland to the Levant cities, where English merchants could pick them up. But not an ounce of pepper or a single emerald could be transshipped by the Levant Company without paying handsome profits into foreign pockets. Already the price of pepper had doubled under the Dutch monopoly. The English determined to break open their own routes to the East. In 1601 the Turkey merchants founded the new company as a separate enterprise to develop the direct sea trade with India and the Indies.

  The history of the East India Company so far as it determined England’s policy in the Middle East belongs to a later chapter. In the meantime the affairs of the Levant Company brought England into more or less formal diplomatic relations with Turkey. Elizabeth, despite her miserly reluctance to pay an ambassador, made full use of Harborne and his successor, Sir Edward Barton, to try to win over the Grand Senior to England’s side against Spain. “The Queen of England is exerting herself,” wrote the Venetian ambassador at Constantinople in a dispatch of 1590, “by making large promises to persuade the Sultan to attack the King of Spain.…” He goes on to report signs of great preparations, much shipbuilding, and almost daily conferences between the Grand Vizier and the English ambassador. Intrigues were rife among the rival European diplomats, each trying to shift Turkey’s weight this way and that in the uneasy balance of Continental alliances. On one occasion the French ambassador was struck accidentally by a snowball thrown in the course of a game among some Greeks. “He fell into a great choler,” reports the English ambassador, Barton, and, “supposing it to be done by one of my servants,” he went home, armed his retinue, and set them upon the English with daggers, staves, and swords, “manifesting his great fury and malice against our nation.”

  In spite or perhaps because of incidents like l’affaire snowball Barton, who had become ambassador after Harborne’s death in 1568, equaled and even improved on his predecessor’s success with the mercurial tyrant of the Sublime Porte. Although the Sultan was regularly reminded by the other European ambassadors that their English colleague was a mere “stipendiary of merchants,” being still a paid agent of the Levant Company, this status did not prevent his being held in “extraordinary esteme” by the Sultan. He even left his post to accompany Mahomet III, the fratricidal successor of Amurath III, on one of his local wars. In fact, so far did Barton adapt himself to the life of the Sublime Porte that reports reached home complaining that the English embassy had taken on the character of a Turkish harem in which the staff “plied their whores, that at one time was rumoured to be in the house 17; but the ambassador caused all to depart except his owne, with whome and alchemy he waisted his alowance.”

  The lax-moraled Sir Edward Barton seems to have been the only person who actually enjoyed his stay at “this happy Porte,” as he called it. To his countrymen at home the Ottoman Empire was looked upon as the “present terror of the world,” in the words of Knolles. The Turks were “a most wicked people,” thought the merchant Staper. The general attitude of the English toward the despotism that had succeeded that of the Saracens was one of fascinated horror, a mixture of fear, hate, and awe, in some part a hangover from the Crusades but augmented by reports of cruel and lascivious iniquities unheard of before. The zeal with which Mohamet III, on his accession in 1595, carried out the heir apparent’s customary elimination of possible rivals to the throne by murdering all nineteen of his brothers caused thrills of horror in Europe. A flood of eyewitness accounts from ambassadors fresh from scenes of throat-slit bodies tumbled on bloody marble stairs spread through the Western capitals and echoed for years afterward with a steady accretion of gory detail in plays and verse. Spine-chilling villainies were always the role of characters impersonating Souleiman the Magnificent or Bajazet or Selim the Grim or various Janissaries, Mamelukes, and eunuchs who strode across the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages exhibiting every variety of wickedness and lust.

  The stereotype of the “terrible Turk” that developed during this period remained fixed in British minds for long after. It is relevant to our story, for the real Turk was the temporal ruler of Palestine for some four hundred years. The sixteenth-century alliance made in the days of Ottoman glory and power when Britain was just beginning her overseas career and challenging the dominance of Spain was not necessarily useful in the nineteenth century, when Turkey and Spain had both sunk into second-rate powers. But through sheer force of habit Britain persisted in it through the long agony of Turkey’s decline and decay, committed to the support of a decrepit potentate despite every argument of changed circumstance and historical logic. The policy that made sense in Harborne’s and Barton’s time made no sense at all when Turkey had become the Sick Man of Europe; but the less workable it became, the more desperately the Foreign Office clung to it, until at last the Turks themselves deserted the alliance in 1914. Then at last Britain found herself, almost against her will, aiding and abetting the demise of the empire that she had so long been propping up, and ultimately replacing Turkish rule by her own in the crucial area from Syria to Suez, which included the long-smothered “vilayet” of Palestine.

  Even Sir Francis Bacon, the keenest mind and most learned man of his time, so far shared the general awe of the terrible Turk as to call for a new crusade against the Ottoman despot. This “cruel tyranny” he raged, “bathed in the blood of their emperors upon every succession; a heap of vassals and slaves; no nobles; no gentlemen; no freemen … a nation without morality, without letters, arts or sciences; that can scarce measure an acre of land or an hour of the day … a very reproach of human society.” They have “made the garden of the world a wilderness,” he accused, for “where Ottoman’s horse sets his feet, people will come up very thin.” This diatribe, called Advertisement Touching an Holy War, was published in 1623 after Bacon’s fall from power as Lord Chancellor. It is of particular interest as anticipating almost to the very words Gladstone’s more famous “bag and baggage” speech denouncing the Turks two hundred and fifty years later.

  Yet the inveterate English travelers could not be altogether put off, even by such a dire and awful picture as Bacon’s. Some were agents of the Levant Company, like John Sanderson, a merchant adventurer who traveled about the East in the years 1584–1602 and found himself eventually acting as chargé d’affaires when Barton was absent on campaign with the Sultan. Some were chaplains of one or another of the English “factories,” like William Biddulph, chaplain at Aleppo, whose travel diary appeared in Purchas’s collection. Others
were simply tourists eager for strange sights and far-off lands. William Lithgow, a Scot, journeyed on foot throughout the Middle East over a period of nineteen years, covering, according to his own calculations, 36,000 miles. Fyne Morison, Sir Henry Blount, George Sandys, and Henry Timberlake were well-to-do gentlemen who, following the routes opened up by the Levant Company, voyaged out of curiosity to the classic lands of Greece and the Aegean, the Biblical lands of Palestine and Egypt, and the fabled wonders of Constantinople, ancient seat of the Eastern Empire.

  They toured in a very different spirit from that of the pilgrim forerunners—a spirit derisive of the religious legends attached to the holy places, skeptical of miracles and relics, and almost to a man careful notetakers and diary-keepers. Their journals, published with alacrity on their return home and read avidly by the English public with its eternal curiosity about the East, did much to keep alive acquaintance with the Holy Land during a period of otherwise general neglect. At each night’s lodging the traveler sat down to write his notes of the day’s sights, to pick apart the superstitions and fables of monkish guides and try to interpret what he had seen in the new light of reason, history, and probability. Lithgow, for example, in his Delectable and True Discourse of an Admired and Painefull Peregrination, remarks that the fissure in the rock on Mt. Calvary “lookes as if it had been cleft with wedges and beetles” rather than by a miracle. Timberlake, who made the tour in 1603, impressed by the barrenness of the country around Gaza, thought it improbable that the kings of Egypt and Judaea fought many great battles in that area, “there being no forrage for an army there but sand and salt water.” Sanderson was disappointed in the cedars of Lebanon, which he found “of indifferent bigness but not very hudge”; but the same trees impressed Lithgow by their grandeur. Their tops, he said, “seem to kiss the clouds.” The chaplain Biddulph typified the change from devout pilgrim to critical reporter when he classified the sights and stories of Jerusalem as “Apparent Truths,” “Manifest Untruths,” and “Things Doubtful.” Passages like these exemplify the new inquiring spirit of the Renaissance tourist.

  Factual detail was a characteristic of all their accounts. The better to enable his readers to visualize Palestine, Timberlake compares the distances between places of the Bible and familiar distances at home. “The river Jordan (the very nearest part thereof) is from Jerusalem as Epping is from London.… The Lake of Sodom and Gomorra is from Jerusalem as Gravesend is from London.”

  The homebound public could never be satiated. They loved every inch-by-inch detail—possibly the reason why the travelers kept such voluminous journals. It was expected of them. In the English Traveller, a play by the prolific Jacobean dramatist Tom Heywood, staged in 1633, the title character entertains his friends with tales

  About Jerusalem and the Holy Land:

  How the new city differs from the old,

  What ruins of the Temple yet remain,

  And whether Sion and those hills about,

  With the adjacent towns and villages,

  Keep that proportioned distance as we read.

  The natural features and local customs of the country interested these travelers far more than the religious traditions. Sanderson refused even to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, “by reason I had a great controversie with the Popish friars.” Lithgow ridiculed the antics of the Greek and Latin Catholic friars worshiping and kissing the “wooden portrait of a dead corpse representing our Saviour, having the resemblance of five bloody wounds.” He called the ceremony a “singular dottage of the Romish folly,” noting with approval how the Turks derided the spectacle, “laughing them to scorne in their faces.” The adventurous Timberlake even preferred prison to accepting the help of the Greek Patriarch. Becoming entangled in some scrape with the Turks, he was advised to declare himself a Greek in order to acquire the Patriarch’s protection, but he refused “because I protested that I would rather be protected by the Turk than by the Pope or himself.” A friendly Moor who had traveled on Timberlake’s ship eventually interceded and procured his release.

  Yet the aura of the Holy Land sometimes overtook even these determined skeptics. Fynes Morison found his mind filled with “holy motives” on first touching Palestine’s soil, and his brother Henry, though a thorough Protestant, instinctively fell upon his knees in the traditional pilgrim attitude and kissed the ground, so impetuously in fact that he bumped his head and “voided much blood at the nose.”

  Few among the travelers of this period showed any curiosity about the original inhabitants of the Holy Land. The position of the Jews was already as bad under Ottoman rule in the Levant as it was under Christian rule in Europe. In any Moslem city, according to Hakluyt, “the surest lodging for a Christian … is in a Jew’s house, for if he have any hurt, the Jew and his goods shall make it good, so the Jew taketh great care of the Christian for fear of punishment.”

  John Sanderson, factor of the Levant Company, gives an account of a journey in 1601 in company with seven or eight Jewish merchants from Smyrna, Damascus, and Constantinople. The chief of these was “Rabby” Abraham Coen, “who favored and much regarded me,” fortunately for Sanderson, a quarrelsome man who was forever getting into trouble with “Popish friars” and “villainous Moores.” On several occasions Rabby Abraham managed to save Sanderson from the consequences of his irritable temper and once even bought his way out of gaol, where Sanderson had been put by “the grisly Turke and his rascally terrible attendants.” No doubt some of the 10,000 or 12,000 ducats that “my ritch companion Jews” had sewed into the quilted undergarments of his servants on leaving Damascus, for fear of “theeves who abound in those countryees,” were used to effect Sanderson’s release.

  Sanderson records during the journey many visits to his companions’ houses of worship and “coledges or scoles of lerninge” and how his fellow travelers were forever buying “holie books of the declaration of their law,” enough to load two or three pack mules. He tells how the Jews endow their “great doctors and scoles” with a yearly stipend, how they try at least once in a lifetime to visit Palestine or send their bones there to be buried, how the “graver and better sort of Jewes” who were his companions never discussed religion for fear of displeasing him, but that from others he learned their opinion of Christians, whose most learned men could not expound the letter A, whereas Jewish scholars could write whole volumes on the first letter only.

  It was his companions’ custom, he noted, to give alms to needy fellow Jews wherever met; Rabby Abraham at Sefet gave 2,000 dollars (sic) and 1,000 at Jerusalem, and the others according to their ability. Indeed Rabby Abraham “was so respective, kind and courteous that never in any Christian’s company of what degree soever, I ever did receive better content.” They parted company with moist eyes. “A most devout, zealous, and softhearted man he was. I cannot speake too much good of him in regard to his great humanitie and extraordinarie charitie, his measure being more in those performances than is to be found in many of us Christians.”

  One final word Sanderson has left us of a people already 1600 years old in exile. “They know, they said, that Jerusalem shall be built againe and their Messias come and make them princes, as they have bine in time past, but then to govern all the wourld.”

  The year after Sanderson’s return home Queen Elizabeth died, forcing upon the Levant Company the necessity of obtaining a new charter from the new sovereign. So the long-drawn-out quarrel over the responsibility for maintaining and paying an ambassador began all over again with James, the first Stuart. If there was one thing in which the Stuarts equaled the Tudors, it was in being tight-fisted. And James, with his limited views, saw no reason for keeping an ambassador to the “heathens” at all. The Turkey Merchants for their part, most of whom now had funds tied up in the new India Company, were unwilling to continue carrying the expense; but as they could get their charter on no other terms they were forced to acquiesce even in the Crown’s right to name the ambassador, whom the company paid. Finally in 1605 a c
harter was granted to “The Governor and Company of Merchants of England Trading into the Levant Seas.” Each time it came up for renewal the old dispute was revived, and as shortage of funds was a chronic condition of the Stuarts they could never be got to assume full responsibility for the embassy.

  Whether wholehearted support from the Crown would have many any difference in the eventual decline of the Levant trade is questionable. There is no doubt that the aggressive commercial policy pursued by Colbert, first Minister of the French Crown under Louis XIV, succeeded in drawing much of the Turkey trade from England into French hands. Beginning in the seventeenth century France began to assume the role of England’s rival that had been filled by Spain in the sixteenth century. When England’s new and firmly Protestant king, William of Orange, brought to an end the Stuart century of popish plots, French mistresses, and royal longings for Catholic connections, he inevitably ushered in the period of wars with France that began in the seventeenth century, lasted throughout the eighteenth, and carried over into the nineteenth century, until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. During England’s wars with Louis XIV Turkey was won over as an ally by the French, and in the intervals of peace French goods replaced English. Following the disruption of French trade resulting from the French Revolution, England’s Levant trade enjoyed a brief revival, but its day was past. By now British energy and money, withdrawn from the West since the loss of the American colonies, was fully diverted to India. The theories of free trade proclaimed by Adam Smith marked a new era in which the protected trade of chartered companies was an anachronism. Mercantilism was dead. The century of imperialism had opened. The Levant Company, after a century of half-life in the shadow of its greater scion, the East India Company, languished to a final demise; and in 1825 its charter was terminated.