The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  Al-Mansur was appalled that such violence should threaten the peace and commercial stability of his capital city, and he immediately arrested the assailants. What happened to de Silva and Heredia is unknown, but Marín would spend the next twenty years in prison. For some of the English merchants, the Armada celebrations had proved fatal, but the Spanish defeat at the hands of the English naval forces had finally convinced al-Mansur of two things: that the mighty Spanish were not as invincible as he believed, and that England and her female ruler could no longer be dismissed as peripheral to the commercial and diplomatic world of the Mediterranean. The Armada’s failure prompted Spain’s enemies to reassess their alliances: suddenly an Anglo-Moroccan alliance seemed like a very real possibility, one that might transform the delicate balance of power in North Africa.

  The shift in al-Mansur’s approach to relations with England is recorded in the writings of his court scribe and historian, Abd al-Aziz al-Fishtali, who provided the earliest known non-European commentary on the English queen. In his account of events, al-Fishtali pitted Elizabeth, whom he called “sultana Isabel,” against Philip, whom he described as “the enemy of religion, the infidel (may God increase his sorrow and weaken his hold), the tyrant [taghiya] of Castile [Qishtala] who is today against Islam and who is the pillar of polytheism [shirk].” According to al-Fishtali, once the Armada approached the English coast, “God sent a sharp wind [reehan sarsaran] against the fleets of the tyrant that broke up their formation and pushed them onto the enemy’s lands, bringing down their flags and banners.”27 Al-Fishtali’s use of the term reehan sarsaran is particularly telling: it is taken from the Qur’an (4:16), where it describes the divine winds sent against the polytheistic people of Aad. God punished the Spanish for their sins just as he punished the people of Aad.28

  The English agreed: the commemorative medal struck to celebrate the English victory bore the similar inscription Afflavit Deus et dissipati sunt (“God blew and they were scattered”).29 Al-Fishtali interpreted the Armada’s defeat as a sign that God was on the side of the English. This provided al-Mansur with a pretext for contemplating a reconquest of Al-Andalus (the Arab name for the mainland of Spain, which had been under Muslim rule for many centuries). “These actions,” continued al-Fishtali, “were, thanks be to God in this dear matter, the harbingers of success and conquest, and a sign for him [al-Mansur] to fulfill his awaited promise, in taking possession, by God’s will, of his [Philip’s] lands and territories, and in confronting him with the victorious soldiers of God on his own turf.”30

  Al-Mansur was now convinced of England’s military capabilities and signaled his willingness to discuss an alliance that would strike against Spain and install Don António on the Portuguese throne. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told Henry Roberts, whose patron, the Earl of Leicester, died suddenly, on September 4, after a short illness, just weeks after marshaling the country’s defenses against the Spanish invasion. Leicester’s death left Elizabeth utterly distraught, and seems to have acted as a catalyst for Roberts’s decision to leave Morocco. The record of Roberts’s time in Morocco was hardly impressive. As well as failing to conclude a political alliance with al-Mansur, he had overseen only small and irregular profits on exported goods, mainly cloth, but a significant loss on imports, primarily of sugar. Roberts was not sufficiently versed or interested in business to avoid falling into the traps of selling English cloth too cheaply and buying Moroccan sugar too expensively. The diplomatic strategy of drawing al-Mansur into an anti-Spanish alliance had failed, and Leicester’s death left Roberts more exposed than ever.

  Having been almost completely ignored by al-Mansur during his time there, Roberts was promptly adopted as a pawn by the canny sultan as soon as the latter learned of the Armada’s defeat. Roberts was staying outside Marrakesh in one of al-Mansur’s garden palaces, presumably oblivious of the attack inflicted on his fellow English merchants in the city’s mellah. On September 14 he left Morocco “at the king’s charges, with forty or fifty shot attending upon me for my guard and safety,” bound for England.31

  In the terse account of his embassy, “written briefly by himself” following his return to London, Roberts recalled that he had left Marrakesh and traveled 150 miles southwest to the port of Agadir. “In this port,” he wrote, “I stayed forty three days, and at length the second of November I embarked myself and one Marshok Reiz [his real name was Ahmad Bilqasim], a captain and a gentleman, which the emperor sent with me upon an ambassage to her majesty.”32 His own embassy at an end, Roberts was now accompanying Morocco’s first-ever ambassador to England. What he did not know was that the embassy was just one element in a carefully choreographed exchange of diplomats destined to lead to an Anglo-Portuguese-Moroccan military axis. As Roberts and Bilqasim sailed for England, the Portuguese pretender Don António had agreed to send his brother Don Cristóbal to al-Mansur’s court as a hostage to secure the sultan’s commitment to a proposed military alliance.

  On November 10, Don Cristóbal left London with four warships and six merchant ships, bound for Morocco. Having passed Roberts and Bilqasim en route, the Portuguese arrived in Marrakesh in January 1589 and immediately petitioned al-Mansur to support Don António in reclaiming his throne. The irony of the situation was not lost on al-Fishtali, who wrote that Don Cristóbal needed “our swords, made triumphant by God, to regain his lost kingship . . . although our imamate swords with their sharp blades had earlier destroyed the edifice of his kingship” at the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir, and “only with our hands would he recover it.”33

  Just as Don Cristóbal arrived in Morocco, Roberts and Bilqasim landed in England. As usual, Roberts made a meal of it, complaining that “after much torment and foul weather at sea, at New Year’s Day I came on land at St. Ives in Cornwall.” From there the two men traveled “by land up toward London.” Roberts reported: “We were met without the city with the chiefest merchants of the Barbary Company, well mounted all on horseback, to the number of forty or fifty horse, and so the ambassador and myself being both in coach, entered the city by torchlight, on Sunday at night the 12 of January 1589.”34 The Moroccan ambassador’s dramatic arrival in London concluded in a suitably theatrical way a turbulent episode in Elizabethan England’s relations with the Islamic world, which had witnessed the success of Harborne’s embassy to Constantinople, the birth of the Barbary Company and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. It set the stage for another to be played out over the next decade, this time in London’s public theaters.

  7

  London Turns Turk

  In the summer of 1588 London was braced for a Spanish invasion that, if successful, would open up the possibility of a victorious Philip II returning in public triumph to the city he had ridden through thirty-four years earlier as consort to the queen. Six months later, with Philip’s armada in ruins, instead of a Catholic conqueror, Londoners watched a Muslim ambassador riding in state through the capital. The sight of Ahmad Bilqasim—or Marshok Reiz, as his English hosts Anglicized his name—entering London at the head of an entourage that included the Barbary Company’s most senior merchants signaled an important shift in Elizabethan foreign policy toward the Islamic world. Both the Moroccan and Ottoman rulers had watched tiny, insignificant England overcome the mighty war machine of “the great tyrant of Castile” and now regarded her queen as an important political player on the international stage. Elizabeth and her advisers understood that a strategic alliance with these Muslim rulers was more important than ever to combat the inevitable attempt by King Philip to recover from his recent humiliation.

  Little documentary evidence remains of where the Moroccan ambassador stayed and whom he met during his time in London, but the official diplomatic correspondence suggests what both sides hoped to achieve from his mission. A remarkable memorandum written by Bilqasim in late January 1589 outlined the scale of al-Mansur’s projected alliance. It proposed:

  To offer unto your majesty not only to employ in
her assistance men, money, victuals and the use of his ports, but also his own person, if your majesty should be pleased to require it; and to desire, for the better withstanding of the common enemy the King of Spain, there might [be] a sound and perfect league between them.

  To let her understand that for the better furtherance of her princely purpose to restore Don António to the kingdom of Portugal, he thought it a good course that the army by sea that she should send with him, should enter into the Straits [of Gibraltar], and there to ship such assistance as he should send; whereby the King of Spain, for the defense of those parts of Spain within the Straits, that coast upon Barbary, should be constrained to withdraw his forces out of Portugal; whereby Don António, finding the country unfurnished of foreign forces, may be better able to recover his country.

  Lastly, to offer, when the 100 ships should come upon the coast of Barbary, whereby he might in his own person go into Spain, he would deliver unto her majesty 150,000 ducats.1

  Acting through Bilqasim, al-Mansur was proposing an audacious joint military campaign against the Spanish that would put Don António on the Portuguese throne and enable him to reconquer the lost Muslim lands of Al-Andalus, in return for which he would pay Elizabeth 150,000 ducats. With his subtle but emotive emphasis on “recover” and “restore,” the sultan offered a “perfect league” between the English and the Moroccan rulers that was as much an ideological as a geographical union of the two countries. In the uncertain aftermath of the Spanish Armada’s defeat, al-Mansur was proposing an extraordinary identification of Muslim aims with Protestant ones.

  This plan was not solely of al-Mansur’s making. It was in fact part of a much larger anti-Spanish axis, developed by Elizabeth and her advisers in the immediate aftermath of their victory, that became known as the Portugal Expedition. In September 1588 plans were being drawn up to launch a bold counterstrike against Spain, with Sir Francis Drake appointed admiral and Sir John Norris as general. Elizabeth approved a military campaign to capture Lisbon, which it was hoped would trigger a popular uprising to put Don António on the throne, and to strike at Seville and establish a naval base in the Azores to attack the remnants of the Spanish fleet. Elizabeth’s problem was that she was virtually bankrupt. Drake and Norris therefore proposed that the expedition be financed as a joint-stock operation: Elizabeth would contribute £20,000, and £40,000 would be raised from London merchants, who would see a return on their investment in booty. The Dutch Calvinists were further asked to provide troops, ships and supplies to the value of £10,000.2 When Elizabeth learned that al-Mansur was prepared to pay 150,000 ducats toward the costs of the expedition—at sixteenth-century exchange rates, that was approximately £70,000, or the campaign’s entire budget—the possibility of an alliance must have been extremely attractive.

  With Francis Walsingham ailing and unable to fulfill his role on the Privy Council (he would die in April 1590), it was left to Lord Burghley to lead the negotiations with Bilqasim. He proceeded with his usual caution, worrying as to how Elizabeth should advise Don António to respond, the exact nature of Moroccan military support and “when the money shall be paid.” He also expressed concern that Elizabeth would risk losing her newfound prestige by throwing in her lot with a Muslim ruler, writing, “Her majesty is loath to hazard the honor achieved last year.” Eventually Elizabeth agreed to al-Mansur’s offer, albeit with some reservations, being “most ready to requite the same, so far forth as may stand with her honor and conscience.”3 In January 1589, as Bilqasim settled into his London residence, Drake and Norris were in the Low Countries recruiting Calvinist troops to join their fleet and sail for Lisbon the following month.

  Bilqasim was secure enough in his diplomatic role to lodge a series of further requests with Elizabeth’s advisers. He asked that, should al-Mansur need to defend his realm against other Muslim states while attacking Spain, he be permitted “to hire for his money certain ships and mariners within this realm,” as well as carpenters, shipwrights and “such provision and commodities” as he required. Bilqasim also requested that Elizabeth “bestow her reward on the poor man of Bristol, who brought him out of Ireland and had his ship cast away in the voyage.” This seems to be a reference to the unfortunate Henry Roberts, England’s first ambassador to Morocco, who was now reduced to receiving royal handouts. Roberts’s fall from grace was all the more humiliating for his having spent more than a year embroiled in an undignified and ultimately unsuccessful squabble with the Barbary Company’s directors over outstanding pay.4

  A silver “Geuzen” (“revolt”) medal coined during the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt, with the inscriptions “Rather Turkish than Papist” (left) and “In spite of the Mass” (right), dated 1574.

  Had the Moroccan ambassador taken time out that winter from his political negotiations, he could have done what so many diplomats have done in London ever since and gone to the theater. What he would have seen might have startled him, as the city’s commercial playhouses were in the grip of a fascination for staging scenes and characters from Islamic history with which Bilqasim would have been very familiar, though he might not have recognized their version of events.

  • • •

  London’s most fashionable and popular play at this time was Tamburlaine, a play in two parts first performed in late 1587 by the Admiral’s Men (named after their patron, the lord high admiral Charles Howard of Effingham) at the Rose, the open-air playhouse built by Philip Henslowe. The play’s full title was Tamburlaine the Great, who, from a Scythian shepherd, by his rare and wonderful conquests, became a most puissant and mighty monarch, and (for his tyranny and terror in war) was termed the scourge of God. It was written by a precocious young playwright barely out of Cambridge by the name of Christopher Marlowe.

  Variously accused in his short yet brilliant life (1564–1593) of being a spy, an atheist, a sodomite and (worst of all) addicted to tobacco, Marlowe quickly saw the limitations of plays like Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London, with their heavy-handed morality and abstract characters who bore little relation to the dynamic and exciting world that he saw around him. His response, in subject matter and language, would change the entire direction of Elizabethan drama. Marlowe’s inspired choice for his hero was Timur, a Turkic-Mongol warlord and founder of the Timurid dynasty. In just over thirty years at the end of the fourteenth century, Timur led a series of spectacularly successful and brutal campaigns, laying waste to central Asia, conquering Persia, invading Russia and capturing the Delhi sultanate. In 1402 he marched into Syria, defeating the Egyptian Mamluks and taking Aleppo and Damascus before overcoming and capturing the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara in 1402. Timur’s imperial aspirations were ended only by a fever that killed him in February 1405 as he marched on Ming China.

  Timur provided Marlowe with a violent yet seductive hero, bestriding a vast global panorama of the postclassical world in which rival Tatar, Persian, Turkish and Christian empires contended for global sovereignty. In Marlowe’s hands much of Tamburlaine’s life is fictional (including his name, which Marlowe adopted from the Latin sources he had read, unaware that “Tamburlaine” was originally a contemptuous nickname referring to the warlord’s lameness from a youthful injury, a disability he lacks in Marlowe’s play). He is transformed into a lowly Scythian shepherd, a brilliant orator and charismatic overreacher who delights in humbling the mighty, whatever their beliefs. Tamburlaine’s ceaseless and apparently amoral appetite for conquest simultaneously appalled and enthralled Elizabethan audiences.

  Marlowe’s play dramatizes the extraordinary ambition and will to power of its hero. In the opening scene, Tamburlaine is threatened by the Persian emperor Mycetes, but he is shown quickly seducing, fighting, commanding and conquering his way to lead one of the most powerful empires in history. Marlowe wanted to create a heroic character in which his audience could believe. Despite the challenge of staging a play with such a vast geographical range (from Persepolis
through Africa to Damascus), Tamburlaine succeeds due to the unprecedented force of its hero’s language. Here is an utterly captivating orator who can perform terrible acts of cruelty and violence while simultaneously persuading the audience of his love for his wife and his absolute commitment to imperial success. In Part Two, finally conquering Babylon and hanging its governor from the city walls, Tamburlaine performs his most audacious and controversial act and burns the Qur’an, claiming to be greater than any god. He falls ill shortly after and commands his sons to conquer what is left of the world before he dies.

  Marlowe’s riveting drama hinged on an innovative combination of language and action. Before him, most English poets and dramatists wrote rhyming verse whose structure was dictated by the number of syllables in each line. Marlowe’s great innovation was to transform one such rhythmic technique, iambic pentameter, previously used in stiff and repetitive rhyming couplets, into a vehicle for creative expression. In The Three Ladies of London, Wilson had used what is known as “Poulter’s measure,” rhyming couplets alternating between twelve and fourteen syllables. The resulting lines in the “Prolog” sound flat and trite:

  To sit on honor’s seat, it is a lofty reach,

  To seek for praise by making brags, oft times doth get a breach.5

  Marlowe chose to use unrhymed iambic pentameter, what we now call blank verse. From the very first lines of Tamburlaine, the difference was electrifying: