The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  Hogan’s obviously partial report read more like Lutheran propaganda than the theological confessions of a Muslim ruler avidly reading the New Testament and embracing the “true” Protestant faith. Just as the Shi’a Safavids were cast by the Portuguese and Venetians as saintly crusaders akin to early Christian warriors, so Protestant English merchants refashioned the Moroccan king in their own theological image to assuage any qualms they may have felt about doing business with him.

  After this apparent revelation of al-Malik’s Protestant beliefs, Hogan went on to explain that the sultan was prepared to use his influence among the Ottomans to ensure that “all English ships that shall pass along his coast of Barbary, and through the straits [of Gibraltar] into the Levant seas” would be granted “safe conduct that the said ships and merchants with their goods might pass into the Levant seas, and so to the Turk’s dominions.” As far as Hogan was concerned, he was now dealing with a quasi-Protestant Moroccan ruler offering him free trade across his kingdom, and unfettered access to Ottoman dominions and markets even farther east. It was an assumption that sustained trade for the moment, but one that would not stand up to close scrutiny, or survive subsequent cataclysmic events in Morocco.

  Hogan concluded his account by writing that “touching the private affairs entreated upon betwixt her Majesty and the Emperor, I had letters from him to satisfy her highness.” It is most unlikely that Hogan would have left Morocco with a substantial consignment of saltpeter without exchanging it for the arms that the sultan craved, whose export Burghley, Walsingham and Gresham had already sanctioned. There is a long, undistinguished history of states, whatever their religious or ideological beliefs, being economical with the truth when it comes to selling arms to apparent adversaries, and the Elizabethans were no different. Formal written instructions are sometimes far from reliable guides to the truth, and it seems that Elizabeth, fearing that her letter to Hogan might be intercepted by Portuguese or Spanish spies, produced a set of written instructions elaborately condemning arms deals, while her verbal instructions authorized them.

  When Hogan returned to London in late July, he carried letters for Elizabeth from al-Malik that acceded to all of Elizabeth’s demands and proposed an exchange of ambassadors to formalize their new alliance. The Portuguese ambassador in London, Francisco Giraldi, was outraged and certainly believed that Hogan had exchanged English munitions for saltpeter during his visit. His formal complaint to Walsingham on August 9, 1577, provides insight into just how much Londoners knew about the Anglo-Moroccan trade. “I wish respectfully to inform you,” he wrote tartly, “that this city is full of the reception given by that tyrant the Shereef [a corruption of the Arabic for “noble”] to her Majesty’s ambassador; how he went to meet him, and honored him with this name by word of mouth, as has been more fully related to me by a Portuguese who came in the ship which brought the news. Also the thousands of stores and arms which that Ughens [Hogan] has taken in the galleon and in two other smaller vessels, which I am certain was little to the taste of the King, my master.”30 Elizabeth had to tread carefully. She wrote back to al-Malik in September saying she was happy to receive his ambassador, but would need great secrecy in the matter. A formal Anglo-Moroccan commercial and military alliance might be only a matter of months away.

  • • •

  Hogan’s insistence that Morocco could provide access to the Ottoman markets had revived Walsingham’s long-standing interest in establishing trade with Constantinople. He believed that Christian reports of the Ottomans’ demise after the defeat at Lepanto were greatly exaggerated. The Holy League rapidly disintegrated as Pius died in May 1572 and Venice, desperate to reestablish commercial relations with the Ottomans, signed a peace treaty in March 1573 acknowledging Selim’s sovereignty over Cyprus and even paying him a financial tribute. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the Ottoman grand vizier (in effect, the prime minister), conducted a massive naval rebuilding program and boasted that the “Ottoman state is so powerful, if an order was issued to cast anchors from silver, to make rigging from silk, and to cut the sails from satin, it could be carried out for the entire fleet.”31 As the Ottomans rebuilt, the Habsburgs seized Tunis in 1573. A year later a new Turkish fleet, now even larger than before Lepanto, retook the city and restored Ottoman domination of the eastern Mediterranean.

  So far as Walsingham could tell, the Ottomans were more powerful than ever and they appeared likely to control access to Asia via the Mediterranean for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, there were uncertainties: Selim died suddenly in December 1574 and was succeeded by his weak and capricious son Murad III, who retreated into his imperial palace and showed little appetite for taking on the might of Habsburg Spain. Undaunted, Walsingham was determined to foster an alliance.

  The new sultan’s first act was to have his five younger brothers strangled to prevent challenges to his accession. He notoriously allowed his haseki, or consort, Safiye Sultan, to exercise unprecedented political power from within the protected space of the Topkapi Palace’s harem. Safiye, one of Ottoman history’s most enigmatic figures, was believed to be of Albanian origin and had been presented to Murad as a teenager after being captured by Ottoman forces. Murad also gave his mother, Nurbanu Sultan, a Venetian noblewoman enslaved within the imperial household, the opportunity to adopt the role of queen mother and dictate rival policies to those of Sokollu Mehmed, with disastrous consequences.

  One policy that particularly interested Murad was the desire to woo Protestants by stressing the commonalities between their faith and that of Islam. In an extraordinary letter written with Murad’s approval by the Ottoman Chancery in 1574 and addressed to “the members of the Lutheran sect in Flanders and Spain,” the Protestant reformers were praised because:

  you, for your part, do not worship idols, you have banished the idols and portraits, and bells from churches, and declared your faith by stating that God Almighty is One and Holy Jesus is His Prophet and Servant, and now, with heart and soul, are seeking and desirous of the true faith; but the faithless one they call Papa [the pope] does not recognize his Creator as One, ascribing divinity to Holy Jesus (upon him be peace!), and worshipping idols and pictures which he has made with his own hands, thus casting doubt upon the Oneness of God and instigating how many servants of God to that path of error.32

  Rather like Hogan’s fantasy of al-Malik being “nearly” Protestant, in the Ottoman appeal Lutherans become almost Muslim, apparently sharing their rejection of intercession and their belief that Jesus was a prophet, though not a divinity, a belief ascribed solely to the “faithless,” misguided Trinitarian Catholic pope. Whether this was a calculated or an accidental misunderstanding of Protestant belief, its aim was clear: the Turks were eager to exploit the political divisions between Catholicism and what they referred to as the “Luterān mezhebi” (“Lutheran sect”).

  While Hogan was busy negotiating in Morocco, the Ottomans’ attention was drawn away from Catholics and Lutherans back to the troublesome Shi’a dynasty in Persia. Wishing to exploit the internal turmoil following Shah Tahmasp’s death the previous year, Murad declared war, beginning a long and attritional conflict that would define his reign. At a stroke the Turkish invasion of the Caucasus brought the Muscovy Company’s faltering Persian trade to an abrupt halt. As far as Walsingham was concerned, the response required from England’s merchants was obvious. The Ottomans were a powerful empire sympathetic to Protestants that needed to arm and clothe its armies. They were obviously crying out for two of England’s staple commodities: cloth and guns.

  Two of London’s biggest commercial companies and their leading merchants had come to the same conclusion. In 1575 Edward Osborne and his trading partner Richard Staper, both members of the Clothworkers’ Company, with extensive business interests in Spain, Portugal, Brazil and the Low Countries, proposed to open up Turkish trade through Poland. According to Richard Hakluyt, “about the year 1575 the foresaid right worthy merchants at their c
harges and expenses sent John Wright and Joseph Clements by the way of Poland to Constantinople, where the said Joseph remained 18 months to procure a safe conduct from the Grand Signor [the phrase used by the English to describe the Ottoman sultan] for Mr. William Harborne, then factor for Sir Edward Osborne, to have free access into his dominions, and obtained the same.”33 Hakluyt’s praise was understandable, as he was in the pay of Osborne and Staper. They were instrumental in granting him a Clothworkers’ scholarship at Oxford, which they continued to fund after he left. This was probably why Hakluyt omitted to mention that the rival Mercers’ Company had financed an earlier Turkish venture, this time by sea.

  In June 1577, because Clements was in Constantinople, Thomas Cordell of the Mercers’ Company obtained an Ottoman license (or firman) ensuring safe-conduct to trade cloth, tin, lead and steel for a voyage bound for Tripoli, Alexandria and Constantinople. One of the ships that was then prepared for the voyage was the Pelican, a 120-ton galleon that did not in the end make it but was instead renamed the Golden Hind and became Sir Francis Drake’s flagship when he left Plymouth in November 1577 on the first English circumnavigation of the globe. Cordell had probably obtained the license from French merchants trading under the Franco-Ottoman Capitulations, which had been ratified in 1569. Under the terms of the trade agreement the Ottomans regarded Christian merchants as harbis, alien non-Muslims, protected by an aman, or temporary license. They were then tolerated as musta ‘min, a status similar to that of a dhimmi, a licensed non-Muslim, but they were exempt from paying taxes for one year.34 There are no surviving records showing whether Cordell reached Constantinople, or how Clements obtained his precious license, but we do know that by the spring of 1578 the English were ready to do business with the Ottomans. Then, in July, news from Morocco sent shock waves throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.

  Ever since al-Malik’s accession in 1576, the ousted Abdallah Muhammad had been marooned in exile in Portuguese-occupied Ceuta. During his brief reign Abdallah Muhammad had been notorious for his hostility toward Christians, but now in extremis he made Sebastian a remarkable offer. If the young Portuguese king invaded Morocco, deposed al-Malik and restored him as ruler, Abdallah Muhammad promised to rule the kingdom as a Portuguese vassal state. Any experienced Christian ruler should have dismissed such a cynical proposal without a second thought, but to the astonishment of his counselors, the pious and naive Sebastian, desperate for an excuse to prove his mettle, could not resist. One of the sixteenth century’s more misguided monarchs, Sebastian was both pompous and impulsive and had the great misfortune to succeed his grandfather, King John III, when he was just three, following the sudden death of his father, Prince John Manuel, two weeks before his birth. Under King John, the Portuguese Empire had reached its zenith, monopolizing the Far Eastern spice trade, colonizing Brazil and reaching China and Japan. But by the 1570s, after Sebastian reached his majority, the empire was already in decline, in direct contrast to the neighboring Spanish Empire ruled by his cousin Philip. The young Portuguese king’s religious devotion and obsession with leading a crusade to rid Africa of the Moors blinded him to the folly of attacking, with a far smaller force and little backing from the rest of Christendom, a Moroccan army that had the tacit support of the Ottomans. By the spring of 1578 Sebastian began assembling a ragtag army of Portuguese conscripts, Moroccans loyal to Abdallah Muhammad, German Calvinist mercenaries and Castilian adventurers. Their number also included one of England’s most notorious renegades, Thomas Stukeley—soldier, spy, pirate and informer.35

  “Of this man,” wrote Burghley, “might be written whole volumes.” Even by the swashbuckling standards of Elizabethan England, Stukeley had an extravagant career. Rumored to be the illegitimate son of Henry VIII, he had fled England before he turned thirty to escape arrest for sedition and fraud. He fought with great bravery and distinction on the continent throughout the 1550s, before returning to England and gaining Elizabeth’s favor as a privateer attacking Spanish and French shipping. In 1568 he was arrested on suspicion of treason and collusion with the Catholic Irish rebels. Having denounced Elizabeth, claiming scandalously that he “set not a fart for her, whore, nor yet for her office,”36 he fled, first to Spain and then to Rome, arriving in the wake of the papal bull of excommunication. Loyal Elizabethans were appalled by Stukeley’s behavior. Holinshed castigated him as “a defamed person almost through all Christendom, and a faithless beast,” while the historian William Camden condemned him grandly as “a ruffian, a riotous spendthrift and a vapourer [boastful bully].”37 Preaching open rebellion against Elizabeth, Stukeley encouraged first King Philip II and then Pope Pius V to finance his personal invasion of Ireland. In 1571 he captained Spanish galleys at the Battle of Lepanto, and by 1578 he finally obtained Pope Gregory XIII’s begrudging support for his Irish adventure, receiving just one ship and 600 Italian soldiers.

  When Stukeley arrived in Lisbon in May en route to Ireland, Sebastian was still desperately short of soldiers. He implored the Englishman to abandon his Irish adventure and join him on his equally improbable expedition into Africa. The king wrote to Rome with typical sententiousness, explaining that he had bigger plans for Stukeley, and that he “understood the business better than the pope, or any of us, or anyone else in the world, and in fine it was best not to go [to Ireland] at present.” With characteristic opportunism (and the unattractive alternative of sailing on with a leaky boat and mutinous soldiers), Stukeley agreed, abandoning the papacy and Ireland, which he now claimed would have brought him only “hunger and lice.” Throughout the summer of 1578 the English renegade watched as Sebastian assembled his fractious army of 16,000 soldiers, who were quickly outnumbered by an extraordinary array of noncombatants, described by one commentator as “an unsavory company of baggage” that included bishops, priests and “an infinite number of drudges, slaves, negroes, mulattoes, horse boys, laundresses, and those sweet wenches that the Frenchmen do merrily call the daughters of delight.”38 Finally, in late June, the fleet was ready. Sebastian was wisely advised that midsummer was no time to lead an army of armor-clad knights into a battle with an experienced standing army in the sweltering Moroccan heat. As ever, the impetuous king refused to listen, and on June 26 his armada of hundreds of ships left Lisbon.

  On July 12, the fleet made a chaotic landing at Asilah, on Morocco’s northwest coast. Rather than reembarking and sailing down the coast to his chosen landing site of Larache, Sebastian chose a suicidal weeklong forced march inland to reach his objective. “A perilous overland march of some thirty-five miles to reach a point only twenty safe miles away by sea,” observes one modern historian, was “an attraction which the scatter-brained youth could not resist.”39 On August 3, the exhausted and demoralized army, debilitated by marching for days on end in full armor in midday temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and running low on rations, reached the Mekhazen River on a plain north of the town known locally as El-Ksar el-Kebir (in Portuguese, Alcácer-Quibir). There they met and were quickly encircled by al-Malik’s formidable army of at least 60,000 experienced Berbers, Arabs, Turks and Moriscos, four times the size of Sebastian’s pitiful force. Even worse, it soon became clear that Sebastian’s decision to favor infantry with pikes over cavalry and arquebusiers (soldiers equipped with wheel-lock firearms) was a fatal mistake as they confronted al-Malik’s 30,000 horse and 3,000 crack Morisco arquebusiers, many of whom were probably armed with English munitions. Facing almost certain annihilation, Sebastian’s advisers gathered on the night of August 4, in a council of war. The consensus was to avoid disaster and beat a dignified retreat to the coast. Sebastian scorned this advice and ordered an engagement early the next day, in the hope of exploiting the element of surprise.

  The following day, “the [fifth] day of August, which was Monday, in the year of our salutation 1578, the battle was begun between the two kings about twelve of the clocke.” Once again Sebastian managed to disable his army, choosing to fight at the hottest time
of the day and riding into the blinding sun. What he did not realize was that his adversary, al-Malik, was mortally ill even before he reached the battlefield. Those close to the ailing king suspected he had been poisoned by disaffected Turkish supporters, others feared the plague; but, whatever the cause, by the time he addressed his troops that morning he had only hours to live. The Moroccan artillery fired first, briefly halting the advance of Sebastian’s infantry. Almost immediately “the arquebusiers on foot on both sides discharged as thick as hail, with such a horrible, furious, and terrible tempest, that the cracking and roaring of the guns did make the earth so to tremble, as though it would have sunk down to hell.” The fighting quickly descended into hand-to-hand combat: Sebastian’s German and Spanish regiments fought with such ferocity that they broke through the opposition, followed by the Portuguese cavalry. As the Moroccans buckled, al-Malik mounted his horse to rally his troops, but the effort was too much. He collapsed onto his litter and died within the hour. If the news had reached the rest of the battlefield, Sebastian might have won a most unlikely victory, but instead “his death was subtly dissembled” by the Moroccans and their troops rallied.

  As the fighting raged on, a second king fell. Abdallah Muhammad had led an unsuccessful cavalry charge and seen the way the battle was going. He tried to escape across the Mekhazen, but he was thrown by his horse “and being unskilful to swim, was drowned and perished.” Stukeley also suffered an ignoble end: having deserted his Italian troops at the Moors’ first assault, “there came a piece of artillery that took off both his legs; and so he ended his days.”40 He might not have given a fart about Elizabeth, but it may have been one of her cannon balls that killed him. Finally, as the waves of Moorish infantry mowed down the last groups of exhausted soldiers, the third king fell on the battlefield. Sebastian had made every mistake possible in pursuing his dream of a crusade against the infidel, but at the last he proved a courageous, even inspirational warrior, who “forsaketh not his people: thinking it dishonorable to seek safety by flight, and with those few that followed him, behaved himself valiantly. He slew so many, he sent so many to hell, that many called him the lightning.” He was last seen, even as all was clearly lost, charging once more into the heat of the battle, where he was cut down. He was probably unknown to his killers as the last undisputed king of the Portuguese House of Avis, which had ruled Portugal since 1385.