The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  This book tells the remarkable story of the Elizabethans who traveled to the Muslim world, what they learned and how their discoveries, and the stories they told, affected life back home. It shows how, for some, there was real enthusiasm for a Protestant-Islamic alliance to oppose the papacy and the Catholic power of Spain, both determined to wipe out all forms of heresy, be it reformed Christianity or “Mahometan” Islam. It reveals how far Elizabethan England had to come in its willingness to perceive Islam as a faith with which it could do business and also shows how the fear, or allure, of converting to Islam, which became known at this time as “turning Turk,” was taken seriously by many men and women who had already experienced one shift in state religion and were thus capable of imagining another. Catholic Europe reacted with horror at the rapprochement between Queen Elizabeth and the sultans of Ottoman Turkey and Morocco, and sought to conflate Protestantism with Islam as two sides of the same heretical coin. In an age when the Ottoman Empire was regarded as the world’s most powerful and successful military machine, the possibility of an Anglo-Ottoman alliance was viewed with genuine alarm in Spain and Italy as a direct threat to Catholic hegemony in Europe.

  The Protestant preacher Thomas Becon voiced many people’s concerns when he wrote in 1542: “Consider how grievously and without all mercy the people of Christ in many places be most cruelly invaded, handled, led captive, miserably entreated, imprisoned, slain, murdered, and all their goods spoiled, brent, and taken away of that most spiteful and Nero-like tyrant the great Turk, that mortal enemy of Christ’s religion, that destroyer of the Christian faith, that perverter of all good order, that adversary of all godliness and pure innocency.”14 For many Christians, Islam was the antithesis of Christianity and an implacable foe. But others took a very different view. These included the influential French political philosopher Jean Bodin, who wrote in 1576 praising Islam, and the Ottomans in particular, as a tolerant and meritocratic society whose success was based on a belief in civic welfare, social justice, military discipline and charity. Bodin ridiculed the suggestion that the Spanish Empire could maintain the imperial mantle of ancient Rome, arguing that “if there is anywhere in the world any majesty of empire and of true monarchy, it must radiate from the [Ottoman] sultan. He owns the richest parts of Asia, Africa and Europe, and he rules far and wide over the entire Mediterranean.”15 Bodin knew that history offered many examples of Christian states forging alliances with the Ottomans. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Venetians agreed to mutually beneficial commercial treaties with Sultan Mehmed II, and in 1536 the French king Francis I forged a formal alliance with Sultan Süleyman I to confront their common enemy Charles V. Polemics like Becon’s have tended to drown out more considered voices like Bodin’s in most histories of Christianity’s relations with Islam. One of the purposes of this book is to show how Elizabethan England performed a delicate balancing act between the two that was unique in Europe.

  The English responded to the Muslim powers in a number of ways: as a force that might just save England from Catholicism, as a military empire that could overrun all of Christianity and as an international commercial power capable of enriching those who worked with it. The thousands of English merchants, diplomats, sailors, soldiers, preachers, artisans and servants who spent time in Muslim countries from North Africa to Persia each offered his own perspective. Among them were some remarkable characters like Anthony Jenkinson, a merchant who from the 1560s met the Ottoman sultan, the Russian tsar and the Persian shah, and almost single-handedly opened up England’s trade with Asia; William Harborne, England’s first official ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; the merchant Samson Rowlie, who was captured, castrated, converted and lived the rest of his life as chief eunuch and treasurer of Algiers under the name Hassan Aga; and Sir Anthony Sherley, a renegade, recusant and opportunist who traveled all the way to Persia, where he befriended Shah Abbas I and “went native,” becoming the shah’s personal envoy, touring Europe’s capitals dressed as a Persian and extolling the virtues of a Euro-Persian military alliance against the Turks. Each one traveled with his own particular agenda and expectations, which all fed into the diverse and often contradictory body of experiences that collectively made up Elizabethan approaches to Islam.

  The story of how Elizabethan men and women engaged with the Muslim world has never been part of the Tudor historians’ view, whichhas always assumed that Shakespeare’s England, “this sceptred isle,” existed in splendid isolation from much of the rest of the world and encountered Turks, Saracens and Mahometans only at the furthest limits of its literary imagination. This was far from being the case. Queen Elizabeth was a minor player on the margins of a geopolitical world dominated by the empires of Persia, the Ottomans, the Habsburgs and Spain, who at various moments openly acknowledged the superiority of the Muslim powers with which she repeatedly put England on friendly terms. This does not mean that England under Elizabeth was a halcyon world where Christians and Muslims happily coexisted in an atmosphere of religious toleration and acceptance of each other’s cultural differences. The relationship was often based on mutual suspicion, misunderstanding and ambivalence. Its consequences were various and sometimes contradictory. Those involved were mostly driven by self-interest and did not believe they were playing out some profound clash between civilizations. It is a subtle and complicated history that illuminates the Elizabethan period, and also our own.

  1

  Conquering Tunis

  Unseasonably stormy weather greeted Prince Philip as he sailed up the English Channel in June 1554. Under the terms of his imminent marriage to Mary Tudor, the future King of Spain and Portugal and ruler of much of the New World was about to become King of England and Ireland jure uxoris—by right of marriage. This alliance would have a lasting effect upon the subsequent history of Tudor England. At the age of six, Mary, the eldest child of King Henry VIII, by his first wife, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon, had been betrothed to her mother’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, but Charles found better prospects closer to home and Mary would eventually be offered to his son. Before Henry VIII’s decision to separate the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, an alliance between Spain and England would have been regarded as a convenient formality between royal cousins, but the Reformation changed everything. By the time Mary’s sickly and childless younger brother, Edward, died in 1553, leaving his sister to inherit the throne, England and Spain were on opposite sides of a deep religious divide.

  Just five days before the marriage, Philip landed at Southampton in a Spanish flotilla escorted into harbor by a fleet of twenty-eight English vessels. As he stepped onto English soil, the lord steward, Francis Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, ceremonially presented the twenty-seven-year-old Spanish prince with the Order of the Garter, the highest chivalric honor an English monarch can bestow. Philip’s Spanish advisers were on their best behavior, but they remained suspicious of a country that for five years had broadly embraced Calvinism as the official religion of the state. The English, as one Spaniard privately noted, were “a barbarian and highly heretical people” who murdered monks and were contemptuous of God and his saints. Simon Renard, Spain’s resident ambassador, fully anticipated the difficulty of selling the marriage to a deeply divided country. Many Englishmen and -women feared they were “going to be enslaved, for the queen is a Spanish woman at heart and thinks nothing of Englishmen, but only of Spaniards and bishops. Her idea, they say, is to have the King crowned by force and deprive the Lady Elizabeth of her right, making the operation of the law subject to her own will.”1

  Philip was told to avoid alienating his hosts and to tread carefully. He spent three days in Southampton recovering from his journey before riding to Winchester with a magnificent retinue of two thousand English and Spanish nobles on horseback. The lord chancellor and Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, met him at Winchester Cathedral with an English audience of five other prominent English bishops, who lavished
him with “as much love as one could say.”2

  That evening, Philip met his future wife for the first time. Mary was immediately taken with her young fiancé. He was, in the words of one observer, a “well-favored” youth with “a broad forehead, and gray eyes, straight-nosed and manly countenance.”3 Philip and his entourage were less flattering about Mary. Although she was described as “a perfect saint” (“who dresses badly”), the first meeting with the thirty-eight-year-old queen led one of his advisers to observe drily that she was “older than we were led to believe.” Others were less diplomatic, finding her “small, and rather flabby.” Publicly the encounter was reported as a great success, as the two “pleasantly talked and communed together under the cloth of estate.”4 Philip spoke Spanish, and Mary, who understood her mother’s tongue but spoke it poorly, replied in French.

  Whatever the public rhetoric, this was a marriage of expediency, undertaken on the orders of Philip’s father, Charles V. Ruy Gómez, the prince’s adviser and confidant, brusquely explained the reasons. “The king,” he wrote, “understands that this marriage was effected not for the flesh but for the restoration of this realm and the conservation of those states [in Flanders]”5: that is, the marriage would bring England back under papal jurisdiction and would give Charles greater leverage over his troublesome Protestant dominions in the Low Countries, who bridled at the authority of their distant Catholic king. It would draw England into an alliance against his imperial rival, the French king Francis I, who had by this point allied himself with the Habsburgs’ other great adversary, the Ottoman Empire and its sultan, Süleyman I.

  For Mary, the marriage offered the personal and political stability that had eluded her for most of her life. When she was just seventeen, her father had married Anne Boleyn and nullified his marriage to her mother, pronouncing Mary illegitimate. Mary remained devoutly committed to her mother’s Catholic faith and was thus barred from inheriting the crown by her brother, Edward. At his death, she led a successful rebellion to depose Edward’s chosen successor, his first cousin the Protestant Lady Jane Grey. Once crowned queen, Mary faced further opposition when she announced her intentions to marry Philip. In January 1554 Sir Thomas Wyatt led a rebellion against the proposed alliance with Spain. Although it was quickly suppressed and Wyatt was executed, the rebellion captured the mood of a country polarized between those who supported the English Reformation and opposed the Spanish match, and those who remained loyal to papal authority and welcomed the marriage as signaling the end of a twenty-year religious aberration.

  Mary and Philip were married by Bishop Gardiner in front of a packed congregation in Winchester Cathedral on Wednesday, July 25, 1554, the Feast Day of St. James, or “Matamoros,” the patron saint of Spain. A raised scaffold was erected for the procession of the bride and groom, the walls were lined with rich tapestries and cloth of gold, and two wooden stages or “mounts” were built near the altar, “her Majesty standing on the right side of the said mount, and the king on the left side.”6 Mary and her advisers ensured that it was she, not Philip, who stood on the right, the dominant position usually reserved for kings. Philip assumed the supplicant position of a queen, to the left, a decision that was not lost on either Spanish or English observers. Before the service began the Spanish presented Gardiner with a patent designating Philip King of Naples, a title relinquished by Charles V and given to his son, ensuring that Mary was marrying a king and an equal. The nuptials concluded, heralds pronounced the newlyweds’ titles in Latin, French and English (though not Spanish). They were now King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith; Princes of Spain and Sicily; Archdukes of Austria; Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant; Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol.

  To ease any potential qualms about the marriage, the English circulated celebratory verses reminding everyone that Philip was descended from King Edward III and so was, as one writer put it, an “English Philip.” They “tell us that he is English and not Spanish,” wrote one of Philip’s advisers, while noting with equal satisfaction that Mary was of course Spanish through her maternal line. On July 31 the newlyweds left for London on a tide of public goodwill. Philip stopped at Windsor on August 3 to be installed officially as a Knight of the Garter, and on the eighteenth they made their triumphant entry into London. The gallows erected to execute supporters of the Wyatt Rebellion were taken down and replaced with stages hastily erected to display pageants and tableaux celebrating the union. Philip admired the elaborate displays created in his honor, boasting that throughout the city he was greeted “with universal signs of joy and love.”7

  The procession ended at Whitehall, where the couple entered the privy apartments to find one of the most astonishing of all wedding presents from Philip’s father. Hanging from the walls were twelve enormous tapestries, woven from the finest gold, silver and silk thread. Each one was over fifteen feet high, ranging in width from twenty-three to forty feet, a physically overwhelming presence even in such grand chambers. They were, in the words of one onlooker, a woven account of Charles V’s “proceedings and victories against the Turks.”8 Known today as the Conquest of Tunis tapestries, the cycle, now hanging in the Palacio Real in Madrid, provides a blow-by-blow account of one of the sixteenth century’s greatest clashes between Islam and Christianity: Charles V’s military expedition to Tunis in the summer of 1535 to crush the Turkish pasha and grand admiral of the Ottoman fleet, Kheir ed-Din, known to westerners as Barbarossa.

  “Barbarossa” means red beard in Italian, though by conflation with “barbarous” the name was also an acknowledgment of Kheir ed-Din’s fearsome reputation for raiding Christian towns and destroying Christian ships across the Mediterranean. In 1534 Süleyman the Magnificent appointed Kheir ed-Din head of the Ottoman fleet, encouraging him to plunder the Italian and North African coasts, an assault that culminated in his capture of the strategically important city of Tunis in August. Kheir ed-Din had deposed the city’s king, the tyrannical Mulay Hassan, a vassal of the Habsburg emperor. Worse still for Charles, Barbarossa was supplied with arms by Francis I, whose growing alliance with the Ottomans threatened Spanish influence in the Mediterranean basin.

  Charles felt he needed to respond decisively. The prospect of a latter-day crusade against the infidel in North Africa appealed to him, as he saw himself as “Defender of the Faith.” In 1269 the French king Louis IX had died of dysentery while unsuccessfully besieging Tunis—an unfortunate ending that led to his canonization. Charles had his eye not only on succeeding where Louis had failed, but also on achieving sainthood. In the autumn of 1534 he began assembling a huge armada. He financed the expedition in part with gold sent back to Spain by conquistadors to be used, as one put it, “in the holy enterprise of war against the Turk, Luther and other enemies of the faith.”9

  A combined fleet of more than four hundred ships carrying 30,000 Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Flemish and German soldiers set sail on June 14, 1535, and reached Tunis later that month. After a punishing siege and ferocious battle on the city’s outskirts that left an estimated 30,000 dead, Kheir ed-Din fled and Tunis fell to Charles’s forces on July 21. Habsburg dispatches claimed that around 20,000 Christian slaves were freed, although many more Muslims were slaughtered in the three-day sack and pillage of the city, and some 10,000 more (it is estimated) were sold into slavery.10

  Charles was so confident of victory that he took the Flemish artist Jan Vermeyen with him to record events in meticulous detail. He then commissioned William de Pannemaker, Brussels’s finest tapestry maker, to weave twelve enormous tapestries based on Vermeyen’s drawings. The series began with a panoramic map of the Mediterranean theater of operations and followed key moments in the campaign, culminating in the final graphic scenes of the fall and sack of Tunis. It took forty-two weavers many years to complete the set, at the enormous cost of fifteen thousand Flemish pounds. When the tapestries were finally completed in Brussels in the summer of 1554, th
ey were packed up immediately and sent to London, where they were unveiled for the first time to celebrate the union of Mary and Philip.

  Each tapestry emphasized the awesome military might and financial power of the Habsburg Empire. For the English and Spanish entourage admiring them that August, the message was clear: the Spanish king would go to any lengths to protect his religious and imperial interests. For many of the English gazing up at these beautiful but intimidating scenes, the tapestries provided the first eyewitness depictions of Muslims in such realistic detail. For generations of Englishmen and -women, Muslims were distant and exotic people, glimpsed on the edges of hazy world maps or in literary romances. Suddenly Mary’s court was confronted with images of life-size turbaned Turkish and Berber soldiers bearing down on their victims, whose women and children were slaughtered and sold into slavery. This vivid image of the crushing of the “infidel” provided a stark warning to English Protestants that the heretical break with Rome would not be endured. Islam and Protestantism were both heresies, to be eradicated where possible by political unions, or, if necessary, by direct military assault.