The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  For Harborne the Capitulations were the triumphant conclusion to nearly three years of tireless trade, diplomacy and bribery. For the French, they were a calamity. The English agreement was closely modeled on the Franco-Ottoman Capitulations of 1569, which had not been renewed since Murad’s accession in 1574. Now the English had trading rights, the Ottomans were in league with the Spanish, and it was the French, preoccupied with their own internal religious strife, who were left politically and commercially isolated. Just weeks after signing the English Capitulations, Murad sent a terse letter to Henry III, rejecting any suggestion that Ottoman alliances with countries such as England violated prior agreements with France, assuring him somewhat disingenuously that “there is absolutely no refusing or repulsing to the coming and going of anybody,” and “nothing whatsoever to preoccupy you concerning the ancient friendship with you and in the matters of precedence and pre-eminence over the other kings.”25 As European rulers of various theological persuasions queued up to court Murad, the French risked losing their long-standing influence at the Porte.

  As the French floundered, Harborne prospered. From his residence in Galata, he exploited the Capitulations to consolidate a thriving commercial network across the Mediterranean. With the financial backing of Osborne and Staper, he traded with merchants as far north as Poland and the Baltic, as far west as Algiers, stretching all the way to Syria in the east, as well as with Turks, Egyptians, Greeks and Italians. He bought cotton, yarn and carpets from Turkey, flax from Egypt and the Black Sea, wine, oil and currants from Crete and Zante, all the time extending his trade in the ubiquitous English kerseys, lead, tin and copper. He was escorted everywhere by two Janissaries, a sign of the esteem in which the sultan held a man widely recognized, as one observer put it, as “the Queen’s agent at the court of the great Turk, by whom he is held in the greatest credit.”26 Harborne even used this “credit” to visit Ottoman-controlled Jerusalem on a pilgrimage that was probably as good for business as it was for his soul.

  Just as it seemed that Harborne had achieved more than anyone in London could have hoped, disaster struck again. In September 1580, the Bark Roe, a merchant vessel carrying a cargo worth over £1,000 of kerseys, tin, brazilwood, madder, lead and broken “bell metal” from English Catholic churches, left London for the eastern Mediterranean. The ship’s captain was Peter Baker, a servant of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (one of Elizabeth’s closest advisers and the man an eccentric minority still believe wrote Shakespeare’s plays). Baker was already known in London merchant circles as a “greedy” and “evil man” with a reputation for robbing Christians, having seized a ship in the Mediterranean five years earlier laden with salt. He was responsible for a crew of around seventy, including two merchants, and a ship of 160 tons armed with twenty-four cannon. The crew would report much later that Baker had announced they were traveling “as merchants, though at sea the captain armed himself as a man-of-war,” announcing that “we were sailing for Turkey to act as pirates.” By January 1581, another crew member recalled, they were “laden with broken bells from England, and when we went to Malta” they made arrangements to sell the metal stripped from English churches to the Maltese Knights of St. John. After fifteen days anchored off Malta, Baker “summoned us on deck. It was bright moonlight; we had not yet unloaded any goods, and he informed us that he wanted to engage in cruising at a venture, plundering the Turks.” The crew was divided, but one member admitted that “having unloaded the metal of the bells, we had to sail as corsairs.”27 It was a foolish decision that exposed their inexperience and cupidity—and threatened to wreck the Anglo-Turkish trade just as it began to flourish.

  The following month the Bark Roe reached the island of Chios, which the Ottomans had taken from the Genoese in 1566. There by pure chance they met Harborne, en route to the Holy Land with a group of French and Flemish merchants. Fresh from his triumph in obtaining the English Capitulations, Harborne was oblivious to Baker’s piratical plans. Instead he swaggered around the island, boasting of the terms of the Capitulations, much to the confusion of local Ottoman officials, who assumed that the new agreement ended English merchants’ rights to trade under the lapsed French privileges. As the Bark Roe prepared to leave in early March 1581, Harborne reported that “the Jew customer of that port, alleging it unlawful for our nation to use of that [French] country banner and privilege coveted [tried] to embargo and detain” Baker’s ship until he received clarification from his masters in Constantinople. Harborne hastily produced the new Capitulations, “not ever before showed,” and the Jewish customs official allowed the ship to leave the island free of any charges.28

  Having sold all his cargo, and possibly aggrieved at being detained on Chios, Baker bade farewell to Harborne and set off southward in pursuit of whatever bounty he could find. He chased Turkish and Greek vessels off Rhodes, then sailed westward across the Aegean, attacking two ships off Methóni in the Peloponnese at the end of March. “The ships we thought were Turkish,” confessed one crew member, “but when we captured them we found out they were Greek and that they were carrying a cargo of camlets [woven fabric made of camel or goat hair] and raw silk.”29 To make matters worse, the cargo was owned by a consortium of Greek and Venetian merchants, and the ships’ passengers included Greek Orthodox priests from Patmos, which lay under Ottoman jurisdiction, a jurisdiction that Baker had now violated.

  In one foolish act Baker had brought the wrath of the Turkish, Greek and Venetian authorities down upon the English, confirming all their worst suspicions about these gauche interlopers. Seemingly unaware of the diplomatic crisis he was igniting, Baker quarreled violently with his crew over the spoils. They insisted that “he had no authority to take or rob any Christian,” and forced him “to re-enter Malta to try for justice for fear that piracy would be laid to our charge.”30 By April 22 the Bark Roe, its crew and the two Greek ships were back in Malta, where they were imprisoned in Valletta by Monsignor Federico Cefalotto, the Maltese representative of the Roman Inquisition.

  Over the next four months the Maltese authorities began building a case against Baker around claims made by the Greeks (who wanted their cargo back) and the Venetians (who demanded 12,000 ducats to cover their losses). Even worse, the captured Greek priests from Patmos lay within the jurisdiction of the Turkish admiral Qilich Ali Pasha, who was still smarting from having had to surrender English galley slaves to Harborne just two years earlier. The admiral immediately blamed the fiasco on the unsuspecting Englishman, condemning him as a spy and a pirate and demanding that the sultan imprison him and fine him 40,000 ducats and revoke the Capitulations. Horrified, Harborne rushed back to Constantinople to try to clear his name with the Ottoman authorities, from where he sent a letter to Lord Burghley on June 9, 1581, explaining the situation.

  As he wrote, Harborne knew that the future of the Anglo-Ottoman alliance hung in the balance. For the first time in nearly three years, his usually cool and urbane demeanor gave way to fear and self-pity. “Behold,” he wrote to Burghley, “in what pit of perplexity and snares of unluckiness (almost inevitable) I am entangled through the unchristian and detestable dealings of Peter Baker.” Baker’s actions had unleashed “the slanderous and hellish barking of the maliciously disposed Admiral,” who threatened to ruin not only “our English traffic” in the region but also Harborne’s personal reputation in “disgorging his long hidden poison against me.” Baker’s stupidity had driven Harborne to the brink of despair. “The intolerable grief of mind which these pirates have caused me, I cannot utter,” he wrote. His greatest fear was how Sultan Murad would respond, and he invited Burghley to reflect on how such accusations would prejudice “this heathen prince against me, a worm.”31 Shorn of the usual honorific flourishes and verbose rhetoric that characterized Anglo-Ottoman correspondence, in this moment of extreme peril Harborne’s veil slipped, and he was left calling Murad a heathen and seeing himself as little more than a parasite.

  Harborne had good
reason to panic. Arrested by the Ottoman authorities and subjected to relentless interrogation, he now admitted to Burghley that he had used credit to buy merchandise and send it back to London, but that as a result of Baker’s piracy all his assets had been frozen and he had no money to settle his debts. To add to his humiliation, he had to beg the French ambassador to act as surety, which Germigny did with grace and, one imagines, some satisfaction, informing Henry III of the remarkable turn of events and noting that Baker’s and Harborne’s behavior “gives a very bad smell to the said English here.”32 Harborne’s pleading with the Ottomans was futile. Murad revoked the English Capitulations and signed new ones with the French. By July 1581 France was once again in control of European trade into Turkey, and Harborne’s mission seemed in ruins.

  In Malta, things were going from bad to worse. Baker and his crew were put on trial by the Maltese Inquisition. It focused, as usual, on heresy—an apparently straightforward issue when confronted with English Protestants—and the settlement of commercial debts was quickly subsumed by darker fears of plots and conspiracies involving those suspected of harboring reformist religious beliefs. Baker’s arrest had coincided with a political crisis on Malta. Cefalotto had been appointed grand inquisitor by Pope Gregory XIII in late 1580 and immediately used his newfound power to accuse French members of the island’s Knights of St. John of Huguenot sympathies. The crisis was compounded by the decision of a group of Knights in July 1581 to oust the octogenarian grand master Jean de la Cassière, just as Baker was being arraigned. Cefalotto’s subsequent report to his superiors in Rome the following spring claimed to have uncovered not just an isolated case of piracy but a vast anti-Catholic conspiracy. “The plot of the capture of Malta was conceived,” he wrote, “by the English Queen, the Duke of Alençon and the Turks through their intermediary, Peter Baker, who was captain of the English ship Roe.” Cefalotto made lurid accusations that French Huguenots and English Protestants were in league with Muslim Turks to destroy what he called “the Catholic Commonwealth” and claimed he had uncovered letters proposing an Anglo-Ottoman invasion of Malta that would transform the political balance of power in the Mediterranean. He ordered that Baker and eight other Englishmen be dispatched to Rome, where they would stand trial for heresy.33

  When the news reached London, Burghley advised Elizabeth to sacrifice Baker and apologize to Murad in a bid to salvage something of the imperiled Anglo-Ottoman trade. On June 26, 1581, she sent a letter to the sultan regretting “this unfortunate hap.” Scrupulously avoiding specific names or details, she apologized for the “most injurious and grievous wrong which of late came unto our understanding . . . done unto certain of your subjects by certain of our subjects, as yet not apprehended.” Choosing her words with care, Elizabeth regretted that Baker’s actions “doth infringe the credit of our faith, violate the force of our authority, and impeach the estimation of our word faithfully given unto your imperial dignity.” She implored Murad to “not withdraw your gracious favor from us . . . to hinder the traffic of our subjects.”34 Elizabeth must have been furious at having to grovel in this way to Harborne’s “heathen prince,” but unless she did so there seemed little chance that the Anglo-Turkish alliance would be renewed.

  Even as Elizabeth wrote her letter, Harborne was battling to save his reputation, not to mention his liberty, in Constantinople. He accepted the humiliation of French diplomatic security to help contest the fines levied against him, and he used his dragoman, Mustafa Beg, to open communications with the current grand vizier, an unimpressed Koca Sinan Pasha. To his delight Mustafa reported that the Ottomans, perhaps in response to Elizabeth’s letter, were prepared to do a deal. They would restore the English privileges on condition that the queen formalize trade and diplomatic relations and appoint an official ambassador to the Porte. Harborne decided to cut his losses, and on July 17 he fled Constantinople. He had spent three arduous and expensive years building up the Anglo-Ottoman alliance from nothing. Now Walsingham’s “apt man” was returning to London hounded and impoverished.

  5

  Unholy Alliances

  By the summer of 1581, events had conspired to frustrate Elizabeth’s attempts to establish formal alliances with Muslim rulers in Morocco and Turkey. The death of Abd al-Malik at the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir had robbed Elizabethan merchants of one of their staunchest allies, and it was unclear whether his successor, Ahmad al-Mansur, would prove as receptive to English trade. Peter Baker’s clumsy piracy seemed to have ended hopes of a commercial alliance with the Ottomans. At their trial before the Roman Inquisition, Baker and his crew were found guilty of heresy, for which most were consigned to the horror of the galleys, although it was reported that Baker had escaped before reaching Rome and was never heard of again, just another renegade who disappeared into the vastness of the Mediterranean. William Harborne, meanwhile, faced the likelihood, upon his return to London, of public disgrace and humiliation at his handling of the Bark Roe incident.

  The unregulated nature of trade with Morocco had left the English merchants particularly vulnerable to sudden regime change, and Harborne’s lack of diplomatic accreditation had always limited his ability to negotiate with both the Ottomans and the resident Christian emissaries. The Ottoman demand that Elizabeth appoint an official resident ambassador to the Porte if relations were to continue was the catalyst for a radical change in policy. Walsingham and Burghley had long favored tacit support for regulated trading companies without committing the state to full responsibility for their actions, primarily because they lacked the resources, but such a policy wasn’t working in Russia, Persia, Morocco or—so it now seemed—Turkey.

  Protests against unregulated commerce had been going on since the late 1560s, when the Muscovy Company had asked for a monopoly on trade in the northern region, asserting that “this Russian trade will be destroyed as the trade of Barbary is . . . through the greediness of the subjects of this realm carrying thither more of this country’s commodities than that country was able to consume, and by that means also causing the Barbary commodities to rise excessively.”1

  In 1601, John Wheeler, the secretary of the Merchant Adventurers Company, published his Treatise of Commerce arguing in favor of joint-stock companies, and claiming that most of London’s merchants believed that “it is most profitable both for the prince and the country to use a governed company, and not to permit a promiscuous, straggling and dispersed trade.”2 This may have been a self-interested view that lacked unanimity throughout the City, but it seemed to make sense when trading with particularly remote markets like those in Russia, Persia and the eastern Mediterranean. By the time Wheeler’s book came out, London’s mercantile community had proposed a series of initiatives to regulate trade in Muslim lands, from the joint-stock model pioneered by the Muscovy Company to regulated companies given exclusive trading rights by government charter in return for a percentage of customs duties on imports.

  The shift in government policy precipitated by the Bark Roe crisis affected the Turkish trade especially: on September 11, 1581, the crown issued “The Letters Patents, or Privileges Granted by Her Majesty to Sir Edward Osborne, Master Richard Staper, and certain other Merchants of London for their trade into the dominions of the Great Turk.” Under its terms Osborne was appointed governor of the proposed joint-stock company in recognition both of his “great adventure and industry” and of the “great costs and charges” incurred in establishing the Turkish trade. His knowledge of the cloth trade as well as his familiarity with markets as diverse as Brazil, Portugal and the Baltics made him an obvious choice. He would lead a team of merchants tasked with nominating up to twelve others who would be allowed “during the term of seven years from the date of these patents, freely [to] trade, traffic and use feats [transactions] of merchandise into, and from the dominions of the said Grand Signior.”3 The company was empowered to create its own internal regulations in return for agreeing to pay £500 of customs duties per annum into the E
xchequer. It would call itself the Turkey Company. How its members could inveigle themselves back into the trust of the Ottoman Porte following the Bark Roe debacle and Harborne’s departure was unclear.

  • • •

  After three decades of trading with Muslim powers, Elizabethans were beginning to express increased interest—and some unease—at what was happening in Morocco and Turkey. One outlet for such interests was London’s theater. Ever since the first commercial playhouses had opened in 1576, the stage had quickly become a touchstone for popular hopes and fears concerning everything from witchcraft to adultery and cross-dressing. Throughout the 1580s and 1590s new theaters were being built across London, and, alongside other arenas for public spectacle such as executions, floggings and royal progresses, the Elizabethan public were learning to enjoy their leisure time in the rich and fascinating world of contemporary drama. The various theater companies running the playhouses boasted some of the country’s most powerful aristocrats as their patrons, and their plays were regularly performed at Elizabeth’s court. Yet public drama was also regarded with suspicion by London’s civic and religious authorities. Preachers condemned theaters as breeding idleness, lust and vanity, and worried that, as institutions driven by profit, and as places where hundreds of people met regularly, they offered a potentially subversive alternative to the church. Writing in 1579, Stephen Gosson, a former playwright and one of the theater’s earliest and sharpest critics, attacked what he saw as its alien and worthless commercial nature, arguing that “were not we so foolish to taste every drug, and buy every trifle, players would shut in their shops, and carry their trash to some other country.”4 Gosson, who was also a failed actor, condemned theater as “the invention of the devil, the offerings of idolatry, the pomp of worldlings, the blossoms of vanity, the root of apostasy, the food of iniquity, riot and adultery.”5