The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  Things went wrong almost immediately. Despite Elizabeth’s orders to attack the Spanish fleet at Santander, Drake and Norris plundered La Coruña on the northwestern Spanish coast instead, wasting valuable time and manpower and alerting the Spanish. Elizabeth was furious, complaining bitterly that “they went to places more for profit than for service,” but she was powerless to change their course.32 By the time the fleet reached Lisbon in May, the city was heavily defended. The promised revolt in support of Don António never materialized and the siege soon turned into a fiasco, as the English forces dwindled to just 6,000 in the face of sickness and desertion. In late June the English withdrew and made their way home, having failed to achieve any of their objectives after losing a huge number of men (an estimated 11,000 died) and a great deal of money. Drake and Norris were in deep disgrace and Don António returned to England yet again, his last opportunity to regain the Portuguese throne apparently gone, while Bilqasim exploited the chaos to discard his Portuguese outfit and slip away to Marrakesh.

  Elizabeth’s best chance of ending the Spanish military threat for a generation failed, lost in the face of mismanagement, greed and mutual recriminations. The queen blamed everyone for the expedition’s ignominious end, including al-Mansur, who was accused of duplicity in failing to support the fleet during the critical attack on Lisbon. In August al-Mansur wrote to Drake and Norris, protesting weakly that he had not been informed of the fleet’s departure from England, and so was unable to help them. The truth was that al-Mansur’s support could not have saved the disastrous campaign and that his sudden withdrawal was not duplicitous but pragmatic, as it transpired that the Moroccan was not the only ruler holding hostages. After the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir, Philip II had taken charge of two Moroccan princes who had fled the fighting: Mulay al-Shaykh, the son of Abu Abdallah Muhammad II, and al-Mansur’s nephew Mulay al-Nasr. As news of the Anglo-Moroccan alliance reached Philip, he moved the princes to Seville, a veiled threat to send them back to Morocco, where they would undoubtedly have unleashed a civil war. In the face of such an imminent challenge to his rule, al-Mansur’s dream of reconquista dissolved almost immediately. To reward him, Philip agreed to return the strategically important towns of Asilah and Larache on the Moroccan coast.33 By the autumn of 1589, Catholic Spain, Protestant England and Muslim Morocco were locked in a three-way power struggle, each side playing off the others in a complex dance of politics, religion, money and military one-upmanship, with the first round going to the wily Philip.

  Still, the English refused to give up on a Moroccan alliance. Faced with the collapse of the Portugal Expedition, Don António had sent an envoy named John de Cardenas (alias “Ciprian”) to Marrakesh in order to plead with al-Mansur to give him money to support his claim to the Portuguese throne. Cardenas was a double agent who was also working for Walsingham, and in October 1589 he wrote a long letter to his English paymaster providing a remarkably frank assessment of the political situation and of al-Mansur’s intentions. He appears to have been made of far sterner stuff than predecessors like Hogan and Roberts. As a spy rather than a merchant or a soldier, he had greater experience of the slipperiness of rulers, although he was not without his own braggadocio.

  Cardenas reported to London that he had been kept waiting nearly a month before meeting al-Mansur, complaining that when the Moroccan sultan finally entered his presence, he was “twice or thrice interrupted in the midst of my tale; which had been clean cut off, if I had not resolutely insisted to be suffered to say what I had to say. I delivered my message to the Moor, urging him, by all the reasons I could, to the performance of his promise” to assist Don António and Elizabeth in their anti-Spanish league. Al-Mansur responded by offering what Cardenas dismissed crisply as “his pretended forward disposition to assist the king of Portugal.” As far as Cardenas was concerned, al-Mansur had failed “to perform what he had promised” and “went about to fill my ears with wind only.”

  Cardenas claimed rather grandly to have issued the Moroccan ruler with an ultimatum: unless he committed to financing another military strike against Portugal by the winter, “I would take his delay thereon for a plain refusal.” Boasting that he had “driven him to the wall,” he extracted al-Mansur’s agreement “to take a final resolution in the matter.” Subsequent events suggest that Cardenas’s bluster had absolutely no effect on al-Mansur. Just days later the frustrated spy reported that the Moroccan’s “former promise made to me was performed only by sending his Jew without unto us,” an unnamed official offering yet more vague assurances of political support.34

  Cardenas then turned on al-Mansur for the way he conducted business. “The Moor,” he protested, “doth rob the Jews” by demanding that they run the sugar mills for hardly any profit, leading them to default on their contracts with English merchants. The English were not exempt from criticism. In a withering attack, Cardenas excoriated the English merchants for having “been the causes of their own harm and spoiling of the trade,” because they had “bred a glut of and discredit of their commodities, and partly also by outbidding one another in the price of Barbary commodities through the envy and malice that reigneth among them.” He took a swipe at Protestant Elizabethan foreign policy by reflecting that it was “to be lamented that Christians should furnish the sworn enemies of Christ with iron, with brimstone, handguns, with firelocks, with swordblades, and such like.”35

  Although Cardenas had been sent to Marrakesh to resurrect the faltering Anglo-Moroccan alliance, he had a cynical view of al-Mansur’s promises. As far as he was concerned, “the Moor doth not purpose the performance of his promise, I judge by his ill usage of me . . . whereunto I may add the natural hatred he beareth to Christians, and his cowardly and extreme covetous disposition.” He denounced al-Mansur for trying to draw Elizabeth into a war in which he never had any intention of participating: “the proof hereof appeareth both by the untruth of some of his promises, which his country cannot perform, and by the consideration of his own estate and disposition: for how can it agree with reason that the cowardliest man in the world, another Sardanapalus in life, a man generally hated of his subjects, should hazard himself and his fortune at home to undertake a needless and endless war abroad?”36 Sardanapalus was a semifictional Assyrian ruler renowned for his licentiousness and indolence—a byword for oriental despotism who could have stepped right out of a scene from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Cardenas’s insistence on calling al-Mansur “the Moor,” and his repeated references to his ability to “perform” his “role,”37 suggest that he had been watching Scythians, Turks and Moors on London’s stages before he left for Marrakesh. What is certain is that by the beginning of the 1590s, the concept of “the Moor” had infused the language not just of Elizabethan theater but of diplomacy too.

  When Cardenas’s report reached London, Elizabeth reacted with a fury born of impotence. In August 1590 she wrote to al-Mansur complaining about his bogus friendship. Not only had he failed to support the English during the disastrous attack on Lisbon, but his promise of money and offer to free English captives had failed to materialize. In an uncharacteristic fit of pique, Elizabeth threatened to go over his head to the Ottoman sultan. “If you would not grant us what we so reasonably ask from you, we will have to pay less attention to your friendship,” she wrote in exasperation. “We know for sure also that the Great Turk, who treats our subjects with great favor and humanity, will not appreciate your maltreatment of them in order to please the Spaniards.”38 Sounding more like a childish taunt than a diplomatic maneuver, it was nevertheless a revealing comment: she assumed that al-Mansur dreaded the Ottomans far more than he feared Spain.

  Elizabeth had in fact already written to Murad, but the wily Moroccan ruler brushed off the threat of an Ottoman intervention, writing back a delightfully patronizing letter mollifying the queen and assuring her of his love and friendship. By January 1591 even Murad was becoming annoyed by al-Mansur’s behavior. In one of his letters to Elizabeth he c
onfided his irritation with the “faithless prince of Fez.”39

  Al-Mansur seemed to be indifferent to such threats. He was far too preoccupied with the fulfillment of a messianic project that had exercised him since his accession: extending his empire into the Muslim kingdom of Songhai, in modern-day Niger. When Elizabeth’s letters reached him in the autumn of 1590, his army of 5,000 soldiers including Moriscos, renegadoes and European mercenaries had already set off to cross two thousand miles of the Saharan desert to march on Gao, on the Niger River. On March 13, 1591, the Moroccan troops, equipped with muskets, massacred 80,000 Songhai warriors armed with only lances and javelins. As the Songhai soldiers fell, they reportedly shouted, to no avail, “We are Muslims, we are your brothers in religion.”40 The Moroccan victory brought al-Mansur vast wealth. He now controlled a key stretch of the trans-Saharan trade route, generating an annual tribute from the Songhai of 1,000 slaves and 100,000 gold pieces.41 European merchants flocked to Marrakesh in droves as gold poured into the imperial capital. Politically and financially, al-Mansur seemed more secure than ever. He wrote to Elizabeth apologizing casually for not having done so earlier, excusing himself due to the small matter of the invasion of Songhai, but promising her that the money rolling into his imperial coffers would help their joint effort to defeat the Spanish. His victory was chronicled by his court historians in terms that illuminated his rivalry with the Ottomans: al-Mansur was now regarded as the Mahdi, the legitimate heir of the caliphate descended from the Prophet Muhammad (unlike the Ottoman sultan), who would unify Islam and lead a holy war against Christianity. If New World gold and silver had enabled Catholic Spain to fight Protestants and Muslims throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, gold from central Africa would be used to confer imperial and religious legitimacy on al-Mansur. The English were of course oblivious to these quasi-spiritual claims, but Elizabeth appreciated that al-Mansur’s success in Songhai, in contrast to her own military failure, meant she needed his support more than ever.

  • • •

  While Elizabeth struggled to impose her will in Marrakesh and made more lasting inroads in Constantinople, London’s printing presses lit up with diplomatic reports, travelers’ tales and sermons chronicling epic military victories and heroic defeats far from home. Stories of gold plundered from fabled African empires, captive princes, ransomed slaves, political skulduggery and apocalyptic claims of universal empires were the raw material that quickly became a recipe for theatrical success in London’s commercial playhouses. A mixture of faith, ambition and exoticism was staple theatrical fodder, as almost every Elizabethan dramatist attached to an acting company began to include despotic sultans, deceitful Moors, renegade Christians, murderous Jews and vulnerable princesses in his plays. An endless variety of pagans, converts, apostates and atheists paraded the power of their beliefs (or lack thereof) onstage, as these formerly marginal characters became a ticket to commercial success.

  Of the more than sixty plays featuring Turks, Moors and Persians performed in London’s public theaters between 1576 and 1603, forty were staged between 1588 and 1599, more than ten of which acknowledge explicit debts to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.42 The line between imitating Marlowe and exploiting the new fascination with the Islamic world became increasingly blurred as playwrights drew on a growing body of diplomatic, commercial and religious writings. Robert Greene, who had suggested that Marlowe was an atheist, now offered up his own play set in the east for the Queen’s Men. The First Part of the Tragicall Reign of Selimus, Sometime Emperor of the Turkes, and Grandfather to Him that now Reigneth (c. 1588–1590) was an explicit attempt to imitate Tamburlaine by envisaging a two-part play chronicling the life and reign of the Ottoman sultan Selim I.43 Selim was the first sultan to get his own play on the English stage. A combination of Tamburlaine (who is mentioned on three separate occasions) and Machiavelli’s prince, he is shown poisoning his father, Bayezid II, and murdering his brothers in pursuit of absolute power. Greene’s Selim has little interest in what he calls “the holy Prophet Mahomet,” the “sacred Alcoran” or “gods, religion, heaven and hell,” which he dismisses as “mere fictions” and “bugbears to keep the world in fear.”44 In keeping with medieval Christian stereotypes, Greene portrays him as a pagan drawn to idolatry. Selim buries his father at the “Temple of Mahomet” as Greene tries every theatrical trick to compete with Tamburlaine’s success, from exotic settings and epic battles to deathbed conversions, poisoning, strangling, the severing of one character’s hands and even a graphic eye-plucking scene that anticipates a similar moment in King Lear (1606). The play ends much like the first part of Tamburlaine, with “victorious Selim” preparing to march against the Egyptian sultan, as Greene’s Chorus angles for a sequel:

  If this first part, gentles, do like you well,

  The second part shall greater murthers tell.45

  Unfortunately, it seems the audience did not like it well at all. Greene lacked Marlowe’s rhetorical flair: he put a murderous and unsympathetic Turk in Tamburlaine’s clothing, with none of his epic allure. There would be no second part.

  Greene tried again with Alphonsus, King of Aragon, which purported to chronicle the life of Alfonso V, King of Aragon and Naples, and his defeat at the hands of a fictional Ottoman sultan, the bombastic Amurack. In a theatrical flourish designed to trump the burning of the Qur’an, the “God Mahomet” is brought onstage as a brass idol, “a brazen head set in the middle of the place behind the stage, out of the which cast flames of fire, drums rumble within.”46 Mahomet’s false prophecy leads to Amurack’s defeat at the hands of Alphonsus. The sultan offers his daughter Iphigina to the Spanish king, promising in a bizarre fantasy of Christians triumphing over the Ottomans that for her dowry he “shall possess the Turkish empery.”47

  Many attempted to outdo Marlowe. They failed not because their audience’s appetite for the exotic had diminished, but because they were unable to reach beyond stereotypes and create believable characters. Writers like Thomas Dekker, Fulke Greville, John Day and William Haughton all tried, each one producing ever more overblown plays featuring despotic characters strutting, stamping, ranting and bellowing their way across the stage as they conquered and murdered their way to power. They wore turbans (also known as “Turkish caps”) or flowing robes, carried ostentatious scimitars and boasted elaborate “moustachios.” The result was an outlandish parade of histrionic orientalism whose affected performance has become an enduring characteristic of English theatrical tradition. This convention first developed when Marlowe’s “mighty line” was yoked to contemporary reports reaching London from merchants and travelers living and working throughout Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Persia and even India.48

  But as Marlowe’s followers churned out ever more lurid imitations of Tamburlaine, the mercurial young playwright followed that work’s success with a complete change of direction: in 1589–1590 he wrote The Jew of Malta. While Tamburlaine was a recognizable figure from world history, this new play was an explosive and unprecedented leap of the imagination. There are no direct (or at least obvious) sources for the play. Its central and wholly unscrupulous character was taken from the Bible, where Matthew tells the story of how Barabbas, a violent mobster, was released from prison by Pilate instead of Jesus (Matthew 27:15–26). Marlowe’s Barabas is one of the most outrageously immoral characters in Elizabethan drama: a wealthy Jewish merchant who relishes the riches of trade and has no qualms about murdering those who threaten it. Out went the epic, restless geographical sweep of Tamburlaine and in came the insular setting of Malta, a Mediterranean island so apparently insignificant that Tamburlaine never even mentioned it in his thundering speeches of imperial conquest. Gone too was Tamburlaine’s mighty rhetoric and military ambition, replaced by a middle-aged Jew who first appears onstage counting his “infinite riches” and confessing that his people “come not to be kings.”49

  Within two scenes the island’s Christian authorities confiscate Barabas’s weal
th to settle the annual tribute demanded by the Ottomans. Barabas embarks on a gleeful rampage of deception and murder to recover his wealth. He buys a Turkish slave called Ithamore and forms a murderous alliance with him based on their shared religious identities. Barabas tells Ithamore, “Both circumcised, we hate Christians both.”50 He proceeds to poison his own daughter Abigail (as well as a convent of nuns) when she converts to Christianity and plays the Maltese Christians and the invading Ottoman army off against each other to ensure his own survival, before they both realize what he is up to and turn on him, boiling him alive in a cauldron as he rails against them:

  had I but escap’d this stratagem

  I would have brought confusion on you all,

  Damn’d Christians, dogs, and Turkish infidels!51

  Marlowe’s play drew on recent events, from the unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565 to the Bark Roe incident of 1581 and the wider role of Jewish merchants as commercial intermediaries between Christian and Islamic interests. What interested him as a dramatist was not the mechanics of trade, but the deeper underlying issues of trust and betrayal, faith and apostasy, conversion and cultural exchange. These were problems that English merchants like Hogan, Harborne and Roberts had been struggling with for decades, but it took Marlowe’s genius to give them voice. Here was a play that put the three religions of the Book onstage, with each found to be more rapacious, duplicitous and hypocritical than the next. In a wonderful declaration of self-confessed villainy, Marlowe set Barabas up to revel in the prejudices of an Elizabethan audience: