The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  Fortunately, Jenkinson was saved by the intervention of Abdullah-Khan and his son, Shah Ali Murza, who persuaded the shah that “if he used me evil, there would few strangers resort into his country,” which would adversely affect trade. With the Ottoman delegation gone, Shah Tahmasp agreed, and on March 20, 1563, “he sent me a rich garment of cloth of gold, and so dismissed me without any harm.” Jenkinson immediately headed back to Shirvan and the relative safety of Abdullah-Khan’s court. The governor explained that had it not been for Ali Murza’s intervention on Jenkinson’s behalf, he would have “been utterly cast away and sent to the great Turk.” He also claimed that Shah Tahmasp would have granted him trading concessions “had not the peace and league fortuned to have been concluded between them and the great Turk.”32 For once in his short but charmed career, Jenkinson had been the victim of monumentally bad timing.

  Extracting trading privileges from the ever hospitable Abdullah-Khan was better than nothing, and in May Jenkinson cut his losses and set off on the long journey back to Moscow. He arrived there in August 1563, presenting Ivan with a cache of silk and jewels, as well as “the apparel given unto me by the Sophy.” In return he received enhanced trading privileges from the tsar. He wintered in Moscow before heading north to the White Sea, which he reached in July 1564. Embarking for England, Jenkinson faced what he described almost casually as “great and extreme dangers of loss of ship, goods and life” before finally arriving back in London on September 28, 1564, almost three and a half years after he had left.33

  Over ten remarkable years, Jenkinson had traveled farther and achieved more than any other Tudor adventurer. He had met three of Asia’s most powerful and terrifying rulers, survived to tell the tale, opened up trade with Russia and Persia and gained unprecedented insights into the region’s Sunni-Shi’a conflict. Eventually, the commercial alliance he had cultivated with the Ottomans in the early 1550s carried no weight in his attempts to establish trade with Persia a decade later, as he stepped into a world of religious and ethnic complexity that he barely understood, and which nearly cost him his life. He probably owed his survival to Süleyman’s and Tahmasp’s utter indifference to Elizabethan England. They did not seem to know even where it was, dismissing it (if they ever thought about it at all) as a peripheral player on the world stage.

  Over the next two decades, five more expeditions followed. In the late 1560s Jenkinson’s immediate successor, Arthur Edwards, spent far longer at the Safavid court than he had, obtaining the prized trading privileges that had eluded his predecessor. Shares in the Muscovy Company, which had originally cost £25, now cost £200, but the trade failed to yield a consistent profit. The journey was too far, the returns too meager and the local conditions too volatile, with repeated skirmishes among Turks, Persians and Tatars leading to the kidnap, ransom, robbery and even murder of successive unfortunate English merchants working in the region.34

  Jenkinson returned to Russia twice, in 1566 and for the last time in 1571. On both occasions his tact and skill were required to restore amicable trade agreements with Ivan, who took the opportunity of seeing his old friend again to propose a most unlikely marriage with Queen Elizabeth. The queen’s court retained one further tangible legacy of Jenkinson’s Persian adventure. Records from 1564 detailing Elizabeth’s domestic servants describe “our dear and well beloved woman Ippolyta the Tartarian,” who wore dresses made of Granadan silk and introduced the queen to the fashion of wearing Spanish leather shoes. Ippolyta is presumably “Aura Soltana,” the “young Tartar girl” presented to Elizabeth by Jenkinson in 1560.35 In the late 1570s Jenkinson returned to England, never to leave again, content to pursue his interests in commerce and property in Northamptonshire, where he died a very wealthy man in 1610.

  Over three extraordinary decades, Anthony Jenkinson had met an Ottoman sultan, been sent out to travel to China, settled for Russia where he befriended a tsar, and ended up at the court of the Shah of Persia. Such was the nature of sixteenth-century travel and discovery. Jenkinson’s success justified the connection of Russia with Persia in the minds of London’s political and commercial elite and paved the way for further and even closer alliances with Muslims over the next four decades. Thanks to Jenkinson, the Islamic world had come just a little closer to England. In 1586 the poet William Warner issued a new edition of his celebrated history Albion’s England, in which Jenkinson was extolled as one of England’s greatest explorers, responsible for transforming the country’s place in the world under Elizabeth’s rule and within Warner’s lifetime:

  But where shall we begin his laudes to tell,

  In Europe, Asia, Affrick? For these all he saw, in all

  Employed for England’s common good: nor my rejoicing small,

  That from Elizabeth to reign, and I to live begun,

  Hath happened that commerce and fame he to his natives won.36

  Such high praise might have endured, but even as these verses were being written, England’s Persian trade was already a thing of the rapidly receding past, and with it Jenkinson’s fame. Elizabeth and her merchants were looking closer to home for profitable alliances beyond Catholic Europe. The moment had come to turn their attention south. It was time to do business with the Moors from Barbary.

  3

  The Battle for Barbary

  In the second edition of his Principal Navigations, Richard Hakluyt claimed that England’s “first voyage for traffic into the kingdom of Morocco in Barbary” took place as early as 1551.1 “Barbary” entered the English language from the amalgamation of Greek and Latin for “land of barbarians” and the Arabic word “Berber.” The Elizabethans’ vague geography understood Barbary as either the Moroccan kingdom or more usually the entire North African coast as far south as Guinea. What English merchants based in Spain knew was that shipping merchandise directly by sea down the Atlantic coastline, from one port (like Bristol) to another (usually Agadir) in relatively clement conditions at a distance of around eighteen hundred miles, was relatively easy.

  From the late fifteenth century the Berber Wattasid dynasty ruled most of northern Morocco, but it was unable to oppose Portuguese incursions into its coastal regions. In the early sixteenth century a new dynasty emerged to the south. The Sa’adians, of Arab descent, claimed Marrakesh as their capital, defeating the Portuguese at Agadir in 1537 and finally overthrowing the Wattasids in 1554.

  In 1551, as Wattasid control began to collapse, a group of English merchants financed Thomas Wyndham to sail to Morocco’s southern ports, trading English linen, wool and “diverse other things well accepted by the Moors” in exchange for almonds, dates and the Moroccan sugar that would play such havoc with Elizabeth’s teeth.2 Most of Wyndham’s backers regarded Barbary as a natural extension of their established business in Spain, though many also wanted to explore more distant eastern markets (four supporters of Wyndham’s voyage soon became charter members of the Muscovy Company).

  Not everyone was impressed by England’s arrival. “The Portuguese were much offended with this our new trade into Barbary,” admitted one English trader in 1552. The Portuguese still held Tangier, Mazagan near Casablanca, and El Mina in modern-day Ghana. Their claims to a trading monopoly on the three thousand miles of coastline in between seemed unrealistic, but this did not stop them from protesting at the English encroachment. The Spanish were also alarmed, their diplomats reporting that the first ships were loaded not just with linen and wool but also “pikes and armor,” and that a subsequent expedition was “laden with all sorts of munitions of war.”3 The Protestant Edward VI and his regents were predictably uninterested in allaying Portuguese and Spanish anxieties that English weapons were arming their Moroccan adversaries, but with the marriage of Mary and Philip in 1554, the English crown agreed to Portuguese demands for a cessation of trade.

  Elizabeth had few such qualms about trading with Morocco, and in 1559 her first Parliament drew up a series of economic reforms bracing the
country for imminent international isolation by restricting imports, but encouraging overseas exports and a stronger navy based on “new navigations” into regions including “those to Guinea, to Barbary, to Muscovy.” Within a decade England was importing 250 tons of Moroccan sugar each year, valued at £18,000, with imports overall worth over £28,000, nearly 25 percent more than the entire revenue for trade with Portugal.4

  In 1562, as Portuguese warships and English merchant fleets began clashing off the African coast, the Portuguese ambassador protested to Elizabeth that her merchants were once again selling arms enabling the Moroccans to wage war on Portugal. Elizabeth replied airily in a memorandum drafted by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, her secretary of state, that “the more Christian people that shall resort to the Gentiles and Saracens, the more shall the faith increase,” and that she “cannot allow that more regard should be had to the enriching of any particular person by monopolies and private navigations than to the public utility of the whole body of Christendom.”5 It was a wonderfully disingenuous answer, especially as it came precisely at the moment when Moroccan forces were besieging the Portuguese in Mazagan. Apart from Elizabeth’s studiedly obtuse comment, the English hardly ever mentioned religion directly when pressed on their commercial incursion into Morocco. It was a sign of the trade’s profitability—and Elizabeth’s growing confidence—that when pressed by the Portuguese to ban it in 1571, she refused on the grounds that Morocco was not a Portuguese possession, and was therefore free to trade with whomever it wished.

  There was good reason for Elizabeth to resist such political pressure. The Moroccan trade was becoming very profitable, and it involved over thirty of London’s most powerful merchants, some acting alone, others in partnerships. In nearly every case, regardless of the commodities involved, the trade was conducted almost exclusively through Jewish intermediaries upon whom the new Sa’adian dynasty came to rely for everything from ransoming Christian captives to running the country’s lucrative sugar farms. One of the most powerful of all the Jewish sugar barons in Morocco was Isaac Cabeça. Isaac and his brother Abraham came from a Sephardic family who had fled forced conversion in Spain for Morocco, where they reverted to Judaism and flourished under their Muslim patrons, first as translators and interpreters, then as merchants and bankers. By the late 1560s Isaac was selling sugar and buying cloth from a consortium of six English merchants led by Sir William Garrard. One of London’s most influential cloth merchants, Garrard had been trading in Morocco since 1552, as well as supporting slaving voyages to west Africa and Richard Chancellor’s ill-fated Russian voyage, which led to his appointment as one of the Muscovy Company’s founding consuls.6

  In 1568 Cabeça was pronounced bankrupt and was imprisoned by Sultan Abdullah al-Ghalib for unpaid rents of 50,000 ounces of silver owed on three royal sugar farms. Garrard’s consortium was appalled: Cabeça owed them more than £1,000 for cloth bought on credit, a standard practice whereby payment—often with interest—was settled in either bills of exchange or sugar. As he had neither, the English merchants’ factors struck a bargain with the insolvent Cabeça that “if he would promise unto them to discharge the old debt” of £1,000 and supplied the consortium with £16,000 of sugar, they would intercede on his behalf with the sultan.7 They employed “a certain Moor being chief there about” called Tangarffe to petition Abdullah al-Ghalib to release Cabeça. But first Tangarffe insisted that the English factors had to “promise to become bound to him” for whatever costs he incurred in settling Cabeça’s debts. Two of the English factors agreed, and Cabeça was released, but in the convoluted chains of debts and credits binding Christians, Jews and Muslims together, it became so difficult to establish who owed what that the English merchants began suing one another first in the High Court of Admiralty and then in Chancery in a series of tortuous and inconclusive cases that dragged on throughout the 1570s. It is symptomatic of these exchanges that in the depositions undertaken in his absence Cabeça was only ever referred to as “a famous and jolly merchant,” whose religion was largely irrelevant to the financial machinations that threatened to engulf him.8

  While English merchants traded with Muslims and Jews in Morocco, events thousands of miles away in London and Rome were about to transform England’s position within Europe, and with it the country’s relations with the Islamic world. In the early hours of May 24, 1570, John Felton, a well-known Catholic sympathizer living in Bermondsey, just south of the Thames, crossed London Bridge and nailed a printed document to the door of the Bishop of London’s palace near St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a copy of a papal bull issued in Rome on February 25 by Pope Pius V, entitled Regnans in Excelsis (“Reigning on High”), declaring the excommunication of Elizabeth I.9 The bull (so called after its lead seal, or bulla), named after its opening words, condemned “Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England” for “having seized on the kingdom and monstrously usurped the place of Supreme Head of the Church in all England,” reducing “the said kingdom into a miserable and ruinous condition, which was so lately reclaimed to the Catholic faith” under Mary and Philip. It cataloged a litany of perceived sins, based on Elizabeth’s legislation of the late 1550s, including the abolition of “Catholic rites and ceremonies,” the introduction of prayer books “to be read through the whole realm containing manifest heresy,” and other “impious rites and institutions, by herself entertained and observed according to the prescript of Calvin.” It concluded: “We do out of the fullness of our Apostolic power declare the aforesaid Elizabeth as being a heretic and a favourer of heretics, and her adherents in the matters aforesaid, to have incurred the sentence of excommunication, and to be cut off from the unity of the Body of Christ. And moreover We do declare her to be deprived of her pretended title to the kingdom aforesaid.” The bull issued one last particularly divisive edict: “We do command and charge all and every noblemen, subjects, people, and others aforesaid that they presume not to obey her or her orders, mandates, and laws.”10

  For England’s Catholics, the bull created a terrible dilemma, compelling them to choose between religion and country. For Felton, it proved fatal in the most gruesome manner. Within days of posting the bull he was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate, where he declared that Elizabeth “ought not to be the queen of England.” Such treasonous statements landed him in the Tower of London, where he was put on the rack and became the first Englishman to be tortured by the state for his Catholic beliefs. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered at the scene of his crime, in St. Paul’s churchyard. On August 8 he addressed a hostile crowd and a hangman named Bull (a joke not lost on many Protestant observers), insisting that he had done nothing wrong other than promote a solemn papal edict. Refusing the ministrations of attendant Protestant clergy, Felton was hanged, cut down before losing consciousness, and then disemboweled; as the hangman pulled out his still beating heart he is said to have cried out “once or twice, ‘Jesus,’” before he finally expired.11

  There are several reasons it took the pope more than a decade to excommunicate Elizabeth. For starters her brother-in-law and former suitor King Philip II of Spain believed he knew England better than most, and he vetoed repeated attempts at excommunication, anxious to avoid pushing Elizabeth into the arms of the Calvinists in the Low Countries who were already causing him difficulties. So long as Elizabeth avoided persecuting English Catholics, Spain was reluctant to intervene. However, after the introduction of the Oath of Supremacy in 1559, which required public officials to swear allegiance to the queen as supreme governor of the Church of England, the country’s religious reformers began to formulate a series of political and theological attacks on Catholicism. Defending the oath in 1566, Robert Horne, Bishop of Winchester, wrote that “the Pope is a more perilous enemy unto Christ, than the Turk: and Popery more idolatrous, than Turkery.”12

  As the religious rhetoric escalated and Europe started to divide along sectarian lines, Elizabeth found it increasingly d
ifficult to remain neutral. In 1562 she began providing military support to the French Protestant Huguenots, and, though this venture failed, by 1566 she was also funding Calvinist rebels fighting Spanish rule in the Low Countries. Both policies soon ran into trouble. By the late 1560s the Catholic Guise faction in France appeared to be gaining the upper hand over the Huguenots. The Spanish finally lost patience with English privateers raiding Spain’s American fleet and with Elizabeth’s support for the Dutch Calvinist rebels, and in 1568 they impounded English goods in the economically vital port of Antwerp. That same year, Elizabeth’s first cousin Mary Stuart, “Queen of Scots,” fled the civil wars engulfing Scotland and sought refuge in England, where she became the focus of English Catholic hopes as a potential successor to Elizabeth. Within a year she was the catalyst for the Northern Rebellion, an uprising led by the powerful Catholic earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, who vowed to depose Elizabeth and enthrone Mary. Although the uprising was crushed, it finally galvanized Pius V to move against Elizabeth.

  The pope’s decision backfired almost immediately. He had neglected to consult an infuriated Philip, the only ruler with sufficient military might to enforce the bull’s demand for Elizabeth’s deposition. In England, the bull divided Catholics while strengthening patriotic support for Elizabeth and pushed her toward more aggressive Protestant policies at home and abroad. English suspicions of an international Catholic conspiracy seemed to be confirmed when the House of Guise carried out the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on August 24, 1572, slaughtering more than three thousand Huguenots on the streets of Paris and thousands more in the rest of France. The news sent shock waves through Europe: Elizabeth’s court went into mourning and condemned the “cruel murderers of such innocents.” Rome openly rejoiced, and the usually phlegmatic Philip II announced that the massacre “was one of the greatest joys of my life.”13