The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  For Catholics, this message seemed a blessed salvation from the twin specters of Lutheranism and Islam. But to English Protestants it confirmed their worst fears. As one Protestant commentator observed in July 1555, Mary and Philip’s religious advisers were arguing that “the Turks are one and the same thing as we who embrace the pure doctrine of the Gospel.”11 Mary had already made the connection between Protestantism and the Muslim “heresy” as early as the autumn of 1535, when she took the dramatic step of imploring Charles V to lead a crusade against her father following his divorce from her mother and the split from Rome. “In so doing,” she wrote, he “will perform a service most agreeable to Almighty God, nor will he acquire less fame and glory to himself than in the conquest of Tunis or the whole of Africa.”12

  • • •

  Given Henry’s appalling treatment of his elder daughter, her emotional plea was perhaps not as shocking as it might first appear. Like that of so many Christians in the sixteenth century battling with profound changes to their faith, Mary’s understanding of Muslim Turks had been shaped by misconceptions of Islam that had endured for centuries, and went right back to the religion’s origins in seventh-century Arabia. Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina in AD 632, Christians provided a variety of inconsistent and contradictory responses to Islam, ranging from indifference and bemusement to horror and disgust. The first problem for many Christians was the rapid success of Islam as a religious and political force in the seventh and eighth centuries.

  In direct contrast to Islam’s political strength and theological unity, Christianity had suffered centuries of persecution under the pagan Roman Empire, only to emerge after the fall of Rome divided between an eastern Orthodox church based in Constantinople and a western Latin church led by the pope in Rome.

  Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam traced its origins as a monotheistic faith at least as far back as Abraham. Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus were all regarded as prophets who had imperfectly described the word of God. The Torah, the Psalms and the Gospel were thus acknowledged as holy texts prefiguring the ultimate divine revelation provided by the Prophet Muhammad in the recitation of the Qur’an. Christians claimed that Jesus’ message supplanted that of Moses and the Jewish faith; Muslims now claimed that Muhammad’s prophecies had superseded those of Jesus. Their austere simplicity was based on the five pillars of faith: shahâda, the recitation of the foundational belief; salât, daily prayers and ablutions; zakat, giving alms; sawm, fasting through the month of Ramadan; and hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  Islam rejected sacramental rites and holy intercessors and dismissed the Christian belief in the Holy Trinity. Jesus was regarded as a holy prophet, but he was not crucified, nor was he the son of God. To worship him as God was, as far as Muslims were concerned, a blasphemous error. Nevertheless, as People of the Book, Jews and Christians retained the right to freedom of worship even within the dâr al-Islam (“House of Islam”), where they were known as dhimmi, or protected minorities.

  Most of the theological detail of Islam was lost on early Christian commentators, and for understandable reasons. Access to the culture and language of the Islamic world was difficult: by the mid-sixteenth century the Qur’an had been translated into Latin only three times.13 Then there was the partiality of early Christian responses to Islam. Faced with an expanding, seemingly irresistible Muslim empire, some early Christian communities decided to convert but remained understandably silent about the reasons behind their decision. Those who did not convert sought to offer a persuasive account of the superiority of Christian providential beliefs. The result from the eleventh century and onward was a stream of written apologetics—defenses of Christianity—that made little attempt to understand Islam as an independent faith. Instead, they presented it as a scourge sent by a Christian God to test his followers’ faith. These writings produced a series of insults, caricatures and myths about Islam that laid the foundations for many of today’s stereotypes. Muslims, they claimed, were barbaric, licentious and gluttonous, practicing a bellicose, tyrannical and murderous religion. Muhammad was condemned as a lecherous, drunken, epileptic trickster with deviant sexual tastes, and the Qur’an derided as a fraudulent amalgamation of Jewish and Christian beliefs.14

  As the terms “Islam” and “Muslim” appeared in English only in the seventeenth century, ethnic terms like “Moor” and “Arab” were used instead, though such was the importance of the Ottoman Empire that “Turk” was commonly applied to Muslims of any and all ethnic origins. Where religion was mentioned, it was in relation to the “law of Muhammad.” But the faith’s prominence had to be explained through the Bible in some way, which gave rise to the medieval use of the terms “Saracen,” “Ishmaelite” and “Hagarene,” a cluster of names derived from Abraham’s offspring. In the Old Testament, Ishmael was Abraham’s son, born illegitimately of his wife Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar. Ishmael lived to father twelve princes whom Christian and Jewish writers regarded as founders of the twelve Arab tribes (named in Genesis 25:12–16). For medieval writers these terms—particularly “Saracen”—became synonymous first with Arabs, then with all Muslims.

  By the time of the Crusades, the “Saracens” were regarded primarily as a military threat. Christian misconceptions of the rival faith hardened in two ways. The first was that Islam was perceived as a pagan religion. Saracens were idolatrous perfidi—treacherous or unfaithful, from where we get “infidel”—who worshipped idols, including Apollo and Muhammad. Over time, as Christians began to realize that their adversaries were monotheists rather than pagans, the idea emerged that Islam was just another heresy of the true faith, a confused amalgamation of Christian and Jewish theology that accepted God but rejected the Trinity. Muhammad was ridiculed as the ultimate heresiarch, a fraudulent prophet who had tricked his followers with the promise of a debauched paradise using demonic magic and feigned miracles.

  It was easier to understand Islam as part of Christianity’s more familiar struggles with heretical communities than to provide a meaningful explanation of its beliefs. Describing Saracens as heretics enabled the faithful to accept them as part of God’s plan, a terrifying but necessary prefiguration of the Book of Revelation’s Apocalypse, the Day of Judgment and humanity’s redemption. Even the rise of the Ottomans—thought to be descendants of the Trojans or Scythians—and their conquest of Constantinople in 1453 were regarded as divine punishment for Christianity’s inability to unify its eastern Orthodox and western Latin churches.15 What Christians saw when they looked at Islam was not a rival religion but a distorted image of themselves.

  This perception endured for centuries. Medieval England may have seemed a long way from Arabia, but events involving “Saracens” had already impressed themselves on the medieval Christian imagination throughout Europe.16 The Arabs had only been defeated in France at Tours in 732. They conquered the whole of Spain and by 1187 they had taken Jerusalem. In 1143 the Lincolnshire-born theologian and Arabic scholar Robert of Ketton completed the first-ever translation of the Qur’an into Latin while studying Arabic in Spain. As its title suggested, Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete (“The Religion of Muhammad the Pseudo-prophet”) was designed to show Islam as a Christian heresy—or what Robert calls a “death-dealing” religion—and to convert Muslims to Christianity. Despite drawing on Arabic Qur’anic tafsīrs (commentaries), Robert’s translation was little more than a loose paraphrase of the original and had little or no success in converting Muslims. It survives in twenty-five medieval copies, and remained the standard version of the text in Europe until the mid-seventeenth century.

  In William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman (c. 1360–1387) the Prophet is described as a “Cristene man,” a pseudo-Christian schismatic whose followers can find salvation only if they understand their heretical error in worshipping the “wrong” Messiah (Muhammad), and convert instead to Christ and “oure bileue, Credo in deum patrem” (“our belief, I Believe in God the Father Almighty�
��).17 In contrast to this learned and literary approach to Islam, more popular English traditions continued to draw on older traditions that regarded Muslims as pagans. The mystery-play cycles performed in York and Chester were full of Greek and Roman emperors, as well as Herod and Pontius Pilate, who were all shown worshipping Muhammad as a pagan idol. Heresy, paganism and millenarianism had all defined Christian responses to Islam for generations.

  The religious controversies that followed Luther’s demands in Wittenberg in 1517 had many far-reaching effects, but one of their unintended and often overlooked consequences is in Christianity’s perception of Islam. In 1518 Luther criticized the sale of indulgences to raise money for a new crusade in the Holy Land by arguing provocatively that “to make war on the Turks is to rebel against God, who punishes our sins through them.”18 Like many medieval theologians, Luther saw the “Turk” as another word for ungodliness, a scourge sent by God to punish a wicked, divided Christianity, part of a mysterious but irresistible divine plan.

  Caricature of Luther with seven heads, including that of a turbaned Turk (1529).

  In 1542, the Swiss publisher Johann Herbst was thrown in jail in Basel for printing Robert of Ketton’s translation of the Qur’an in a revised, updated (though still very sketchy) volume produced by Theodore Bibliander, a Protestant reformer, under the title Machumetis Saracenorum principis vita ac doctrina omnis (“Life and Teachings of Muhammad, Prince of the Saracens”).19 Luther intervened, petitioning the Basel authorities to release Herbst and offering to write a preface to the new edition, arguing that it was necessary to understand Islamic theology to refute it. In making this argument in his subsequent preface, Luther described Catholics, Muslims and Jews as all heretical. “Therefore,” he wrote, “as I have written against the idols of the Jews and the papists and will continue to do so to the extent that it is granted to me, so also have I begun to refute the pernicious beliefs of Muhammad.” In his typically blunt manner he went on:

  Accordingly I have wanted to get a look at the complete text of the Qur’an. I do not doubt that the more of the pious and learned persons read these writings, the more the errors of the name of Muhammad will be refuted. For just as the folly, or rather the madness, of the Jews is more easily observed once their hidden secrets have been brought to the open, so once the book of Muhammad has been made public and thoroughly examined in all its parts, all pious persons will more easily comprehend the insanity and wiles of the devil and will more easily refute them.20

  Trying to understand Islam through a twelfth-century paraphrase of the Qur’an was never going to get Luther very far. Besides, his Catholic opponents had pounced on his apparent unwillingness to support a crusade against the Turks as proof of the Lutheran “heresy” (Luther had argued that Christianity should fight its own internal demons before turning on the Turks). When Pope Leo X threatened Luther with excommunication in 1520, his position on the Turks was cited as just one of his many “heretical” teachings. In January 1521 Luther was formally excommunicated in the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem (“It Pleases the Roman Pontiff”) and was himself named a “heretic” and “schismatic.”21

  Luther later changed his mind about waging war on the Turks, arguing that this was the prerogative of rulers, not of clergy. He continued to describe Catholicism, Islam and Judaism as conjoined enemies of the “true” Christian faith, reserving his bitterest polemic for Pope Clement VII and the Ottomans: “as the pope is Antichrist,” he wrote in 1529, “so the Turk is the very devil.”22 Catholics responded by depicting Luther as a divided monster with seven heads, one sporting a Turkish turban. Francesco Chieregato, one of the pope’s advisers at the Diet of Nuremberg (convened to discuss church reform), wrote in January 1523 that he was “occupied with the negotiations for the general war against the Turk, and for that particular war against that nefarious Martin Luther, who is a greater evil to Christendom than the Turk.”23 When Thomas More, author of Utopia and privy councillor to Henry VIII, was asked to respond to the Lutheran challenge, his Dialog Concerning Heresies (1528) referred to “Luther’s sect” as worse than “all the Turks, all the Saracens, all the heretics.”24

  More’s close friend the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam tried to find a middle way between Catholic and Protestant sectarian divisions in his De bello turcico (“On the War Against the Turks”). Erasmus’s treatise was written in 1530 to coincide with the Diet of Augsburg, a general assembly called by Charles V to discuss what he regarded as the two greatest threats facing Christendom: Lutheranism and Islam. Charles’s advisers encouraged him to use the assembly to pursue the policies adopted by his grandparents Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile toward Muslims in Spain: forced conversion or expulsion. “Luther’s diabolical and heretical opinions,” wrote Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, “shall be castigated and punished according to the rule and practice observed in Spain with regard to the Moors.”25 But Luther was only one-half of Charles’s problem: the other was the spectacular rise of the Ottoman Empire, which by 1530 was knocking on the door of Christendom. Having taken Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans had conquered Egypt and Syria and were challenging the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. During the 1520s a series of military campaigns across the Balkans led to the capture of Belgrade and the invasion of Hungary, creating an Islamic empire that spanned three continents and ruled an estimated 15 million people. Just months before Erasmus wrote his treatise, Ottoman imperial expansion into Europe reached its zenith, with an Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna. Süleyman the Magnificent taunted the besieged Christian forces by parading outside the gates wearing an extravagant, bejeweled helmet made for him by Venetian goldsmiths that consciously emulated the Habsburg and papal imperial crowns.26 It had proved almost impossible to unite Christendom against the Ottomans: Venice remained on amicable commercial terms with them, while the French pursued repeated diplomatic and military alliances with Süleyman as a bulwark against the Habsburgs. Worse still, there were rumors that Süleyman, having learned of the threat posed by Luther to his great enemy Charles V, was encouraging his imams in the mosques of Constantinople to pray for Luther’s success.27

  With many of the German states in the grip of Lutheranism on one side and the Ottomans in control of much of eastern Europe on the other, this was a critical moment for Catholicism, and Erasmus knew it. How, he asked, had the Ottomans “reduced our religion from a broad empire to a narrow strip?” The answer reverted to medieval commonplaces about Islamic paganism and heresy. Referring to what he called “this race of barbarians, their very origin obscure,” Erasmus argued that the Ottoman “sect” was “a mixture of Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and the Arian [non-Trinitarian] heresy. They acknowledge Christ—as just one of the prophets.” As was true of his medieval theological predecessors, Erasmus’s interest in Islam was secondary to the assumption that the faith was just a projection of a divided Christianity. “They rule because God is angered,” Erasmus continued; “they fight us without God, they have Mahomet as their champion, and we have Christ—and yet it is obvious how far they have spread their tyranny, while we, stripped of so much power, ejected from much of Europe, are in danger of losing everything.”28

  Erasmus’s solution to the Turkish problem took on far greater significance when set against sixteenth-century Christian divisions. “If we really want to heave the Turks from our neck,” he concluded, “we must first expel from our hearts a more loathsome race of Turks, avarice, ambition, the craving for power, self-satisfaction, impiety, extravagance, the love of pleasure, deceitfulness, anger, hatred, envy.” Writing as a Catholic, but sounding very much like a Lutheran, Erasmus implored his readers to “rediscover a truly Christian spirit and then, if required, march against the flesh-and-blood Turk.”29 Christianity needed reformation, but it also needed unification; otherwise, the Turk buried within the heart of all believers, be they Catholic or Lutheran, would triumph. Trying to please both sides of a divided Christendom, Eras
mus enabled Catholics to castigate Protestants as akin to Turks for dividing the faith, while also enabling Protestants to condemn Catholics as the worst representatives of “Turkish” avarice and impiety.

  Those assembled at Augsburg responded as they usually did to humanist advice and ignored Erasmus’s treatise, which was, for all its theological eloquence, vague in its practical application. The Diet did little other than keep the Habsburgs on a collision course with both Luther and the Turk, although the pressure to confront the Ottoman threat enabled Lutheranism to survive and prosper in these crucial early years of its emergence. Throughout the 1540s Charles V fought the dual “heresy” on two fronts and with mixed success. In 1541 he tried to follow his conquest of Tunis with an attack on Algiers, but the campaign was a complete disaster. By 1545 he was at war with Lutheran forces in Germany, which this time culminated in victory at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547.

  • • •

  The arrival of the Conquest of Tunis tapestries in London in 1554 not only reminded those who saw them of Charles’s earlier victory over Islam but invited inevitable comparisons with the defeat of Lutheranism at Mühlberg. Within weeks of seeing the Tunis tapestries, Mary and Philip set about stamping out the Lutheran “heresy” that had taken hold of England during Edward VI’s reign. Legislation was prepared to restore papal authority in ecclesiastical matters, and in November an act was passed for the “avoiding of heresies which have of late arisen, grown and much increased within this realm.”30 By February 1555 the first public burnings began of “heretical” Lutherans, which would secure the queen’s enduring historical notoriety as “Bloody Mary.”

  History is rarely kind to the losers, and Mary is no exception. Her short-lived restoration of Catholicism would forever pale in comparison with her half sister Elizabeth’s forty-five-year Protestant reign, which became a touchstone of English national identity. For centuries Mary was condemned as a religious zealot who had pursued a murderous crusade against Protestants and prepared to sacrifice her crown to the Spanish Catholics rather than see the Reformation triumph in England. Much of this was due to the Protestant theologian John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a polemical account of the Catholic persecution of Protestants, under what he called “the horrible and bloody time of Queen Mary.”31 More recent evaluations reveal a more complex picture of her reign.32 Although she passed legislation relinquishing her title as head of the church and giving the pope jurisdiction over English ecclesiastical matters, Mary maintained a clear distinction between her religious and secular power. She quietly retained her father’s statutes defining England as an empire over which she, and not the papacy or Philip, exerted plenum dominium (complete ownership) and ensured in all official documentation and on public occasions that she took royal precedence over Philip in their controversial co-monarchy. In a country that remained in most areas predominantly Catholic despite the reformed experiments of Edward VI’s reign, Mary’s marriage to Philip was welcomed by at least as many as opposed it. Eager to guarantee the City’s position at the center of a commercial network that looked to Spain and the Low Countries for much of its export market, London’s merchants were so supportive of the marriage that they designed and paid for the couple’s carefully choreographed entry into London in August 1554.33