The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  Barton needed to act quickly if he was to retain Ottoman favor. He hoped that by sending Salomon’s letter to London, Burghley would see the wisdom of dispatching a suitable gift to the new sultan to cement his diplomatic position. Unfortunately, the Privy Council was somewhat dilatory in its response. With no present forthcoming, Barton felt obliged to show his support for the new sultan by accompanying him on a military campaign the following year against Archduke Maximilian’s Catholic armies in Hungary.

  Barton set out for Hungary with Mehmed’s army in June 1596, accompanied by a large retinue paid for by the sultan. He observed the Ottoman campaign and even sent Burghley a detailed account of the dramatic victory over the Austrian-Hungarian Habsburg forces at Keresztes, in northern Hungary, in October 1596.5 When news of Barton’s presence spread throughout Europe and Russia, Elizabeth was forced to go on a diplomatic charm offensive, sending embassies as far as Prague and Moscow to deny that she had “incited the most loathsome enemy of the Christian name to wage war on Christian princes.”6

  Nevertheless, the alliance with the Ottoman Porte endured because of its importance. Qualms about the relationship ranged from the obvious religious differences to fears about Ottoman imperial ambitions and distaste for their fratricidal approach to political succession, but none of this was enough to derail it. The partnership had far-reaching consequences both diplomatically and economically. While the sultans acted as a powerful if capricious bulwark against Spain, trade with the Ottoman Empire had a marked impact on England’s domestic economy. In contrast to the uneven profitability of the Barbary Company, the Turkey Company was successful—so much so as to prompt a merger with the Venice Company in 1592. Many of London’s merchants felt that separating the Venetian and Turkish trade made little sense, so when a new charter was proposed most of the Turkey Company’s members petitioned the government for an extension of its jurisdiction to include Venice, as well as expanding membership to fifty-three merchants, with space for more. To acknowledge the geographical expansion of its operation, the organization renamed itself the Levant Company, and in acknowledgment of his achievements in establishing the Ottoman trade, Edward Osborne was appointed its governor. It was an immediate success and by the end of the decade had twenty ships exporting cloth worth £150,000 annually to the Mediterranean.7

  The impact of all this trade could be seen at various levels back home. If printed books are anything to go by, there was a notable surge of interest in the Muslim world toward the end of the sixteenth century. The registers of the Company of Stationers of London reveal that an estimated sixty books were published in Elizabeth’s reign on subjects relating to the Ottomans, over half of them in the 1590s, though the true figures are likely to be much higher.8

  Portraits of the Ottoman sultans could at this point be found in many of England’s great houses.9 The inventories of the art collections of London’s lord mayor Sir Ralph Warren, the Virginia Colony’s governor John West and the Oxford scholar Thomas Key all listed pictures of the “Great Turk.”10 In 1575 the poet, courtier and soldier Sir Philip Sidney had been delighted to receive a Venetian “portrait of Murad the new Emperor of the Turks” from one of his correspondents in Strasbourg.11 This portrait had a significant influence on Sidney’s poetry and prose. Sidney invoked his knowledge of the Ottomans in his Defense of Poesy (1579), in which he argues that in contrast to England, “even Turks and Tartars are delighted with poets.”12

  Elizabethan portraiture reveled in reproducing the growing volume of oriental imports flowing into London. These included opulent fabrics, rugs, carpets, embroideries and even Iznik pottery made in Bursa in Turkey. The pearls, diamonds, sapphires, silks, brocades and damasks that feature in so many Elizabethan paintings—including those of the queen herself—were self-conscious displays of the success of Anglo-Islamic trade. Ownership of “Turkey carpets,” quilts and Anatolian rugs containing Kufic (Arabic) script were also statements of personal wealth and connections to the Islamic world. Robert Dudley the Earl of Leicester’s various household accounts show that at the time of his death in 1588 he had amassed a collection of more than eighty carpets described as either Turkish or Persian, worth hundreds of pounds.13 The inventory of another Elizabethan nobleman, John, Lord Lumley, and his household goods in Nonsuch Palace and Lumley Castle similarly lists more than a hundred “Turkey carpets of silk.” Like many other noblemen, Lumley also owned depictions of the Ottoman capital Constantinople.14

  This luxuriousness was not confined to kings, queens and noblemen. Cotton wool from Turkish merchants stimulated a burgeoning textile industry in Lancashire, and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the manufacture of raw silk from Iran provided employment for hundreds of workers who produced clothes “in the Turkish manner” and household furnishings for middle-class consumption.15 The resulting objects were such a common feature in wealthy Elizabethan homes and domestic life that Shakespeare felt confident enough to make casual references in his comedies written in the 1590s to “Turkey cushions bossed with pearl,” in The Taming of the Shrew,16 and to “Turkish tapestry,” in The Comedy of Errors.17

  The English even began to imitate the textiles they were importing: in 1579 Richard Hakluyt had sent the dyer Morgan Hubblethorne to Persia to find “carpets of coarse thrummed [twisted] wool, the best of the world,” asking him to return with “the art of Turkish carpet making.” It is unclear if Hubblethorne complied, but by the 1590s English craftsmen (and women) were copying Persian and Turkish carpets with cheaper and simpler “Turkey work,” which involved tying woolen knots onto linen or hemp.18

  The Muscovy, Turkey and Barbary imports enabled Elizabethans to wear silk and cotton in new designs, drink sweet wines and incorporate myriad condiments into their diet, including aniseed, nutmeg, mace, turmeric and pistachios. The demand for currants alone from Ottoman-controlled Greek islands was so great that at the height of Elizabeth’s reign 2,300 tons were being imported annually.19 The activities of John Sanderson, a Levant Company merchant working in the Ottoman territories from 1585, suggest how far oriental goods percolated through Elizabethan society. Sanderson gave his sister Grace a wedding present of “a Turkey carpet, more worth than £1.10.0,” and his clergyman brother received “six Turkey painted books” (probably a reference to Ottoman costume books), worth £3, and “Four Turkey carpets” worth over £5.20

  Nor was the display and consumption of objects and artifacts from Muslim lands limited to London. By 1601 Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, better known as Bess of Hardwick, had amassed a collection of oriental embroidery, tapestry and needlework of a quality and size to rival those of Leicester and Lumley, which she displayed in her two great Derbyshire homes, Chatsworth House and Hardwick Hall. It included forty-six “Turkey carpets,” as well as a remarkable set of three large embroidered wall hangings depicting personifications of the cardinal virtues and their opposites dating from the 1580s.21 The first of these showed Hope triumphing over Judas, the second Temperance prevailing over Sardanapalus (to whom Cardenas had compared al-Mansur, as we have seen), while the final hanging shows Faith subduing her contrary, the unfaithful “Mahomet.” All three were based on a series of Dutch engravings of traditional Christian “Virtues and Vices” dated 1576, which had been adapted by the embroiderers to suit the prevailing theology of the day and, more practically, to fit the best bedchamber in Hardwick Hall, where they can still be seen on public display.

  The hanging of Faith and Mahomet shows Faith modeled closely on Queen Elizabeth. She stands in front of a backdrop of ecclesiastical architecture, next to a large crucifix, holding a Bible in her right hand with the word “Faith” picked out on its spine in gold twist, a communion chalice in her left hand, and “Fides” embroidered on her arm. She towers over Muhammad, a turbaned, mustachioed figure crouching down as if in subjection at her feet, resting his face on his hand in a melancholy pose of apparent despair at his faithlessness, with a copy of the Qur’an (“Acoran”) on the
floor in front of him. Above him are what appear to be scenes from the life of Muhammad. In the foreground two groups of turbaned Turks with scimitars are shown in deep discussion, while in the background Muhammad appears again in what seems to be a sixteenth-century English idea of a mosque. He stands holding a book (presumably the Qur’an) in a canopied arch resembling a Gothic church. Angels float above, pulling back the curtains in a moment of religious revelation—surprising for a scene involving the Prophet Muhammad, as such iconography was usually reserved for Catholic images of Christ or the Virgin and Child. Perhaps the embroidery was meant to suggest the idolatry that many Protestants believed united the papacy and the Prophet Muhammad.22

  The Hardwick embroidery captures Protestant English ambivalence toward Islam, and the Ottomans in particular, as the sixteenth century drew to a close. Bess of Hardwick wanted to display her wealth by acquiring expensive and elaborately crafted Turkish rugs and carpets, but she also wanted to show off her Christian piety, offering the faithless Muhammad in the foreground the possibility of salvation through the cross and communion. As with so much of Elizabethan visual art, the embroidery was a carefully crafted delusion. Protestants across North Africa and the Mediterranean like Samson Rowlie were more likely to bow down before the Qur’an and convert to Islam than Muslims were to embrace Christianity. Like many other Elizabethan misrepresentations of Islam, the Hardwick embroidery was a wishful fantasy.

  • • •

  Unlike many of his contemporaries, Shakespeare never put a Turkish character in any of his plays (with one peculiar exception, which we shall discuss later). But throughout the mid-1590s, he wrote a series of plays mainly about English history that are haunted by the specter of the Turk. He refers to Turks in thirteen plays written in this decade, with more than a third of these references appearing in his history plays. Having established his reputation with a first tetralogy about the reigns of Henry VI and Richard III in the early 1590s, in the latter half of the decade he began a second series of four plays dramatizing the lives of Richard II, Henry IV (in two parts) and Henry V. He wrote about this turbulent period of English political history, characterized by conflicts over royal succession, deposition, rebellion and civil war against the backdrop of a new genre of English “war books” dramatizing the conflicts between Christians and Muslims in central Europe, and, in particular, the Ottoman incursions into Hungary. Inevitably the specter that came to Shakespeare’s mind time and again was the tyrannical, fratricidal, faithless yet inscrutable Turk.23

  The second group of plays begins with King Richard II, probably written in 1595. The play culminates in the climactic moment of Richard’s deposition by Henry of Bolingbroke, the future King Henry IV. In the fourth act, as Bolingbroke prepares to accept the crown after forcing Richard to stand down, the Bishop of Carlisle warns his followers of the dire consequences of dethroning a legitimate king. He utters a prophecy that reverberates through the rest of the tetralogy:

  My Lord of Hereford [Bolingbroke] here, whom you call king,

  Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford’s king;

  And, if you crown him, let me prophesy

  The blood of English shall manure the ground,

  And future ages groan for this foul act.

  Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,

  And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars

  Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound.24

  The Bishop of Carlisle condemns Bolingbroke’s attempt to seize the crown as a form of political apostasy, the kind of murderous and illegitimate behavior that was all too familiar to Elizabethan theatergoers who had watched various eastern potentates strutting, murdering and conquering their way across London’s stages throughout the early 1590s. Carlisle’s point is that to depose a king breaks the bonds and laws of nature, defined and decreed by God. He identifies “Turks and infidels” as similarly unnatural: the Turk is political shorthand for a breakdown in the natural order of things.

  Carlisle’s prophecy is ignored. Bolingbroke is crowned and Richard II murdered. Over the two parts of Henry IV, Carlisle’s prediction is fulfilled as the country descends into a series of civil wars. Henry IV, Part 1 (1596) begins with Bolingbroke as the new king bemoaning the way his kingdom is being torn apart by “the intestine shock / And furious close of civil butchery.”25 To atone for his sins, Henry promises to launch a crusade:

  As far as to the sepulcher of Christ—

  Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross

  We are impressed and engaged to fight—

  Forthwith a power of English shall we levy,

  Whose arms were molded in their mother’s womb

  To chase these pagans in those holy fields

  Over whose acres walked those blessed feet

  Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed,

  For our advantage, on the bitter cross.26

  Henry announces himself to be a crusader using the language of Christian righteousness. He is not the least bit convincing, but he conveys Shakespeare’s vision of national identity shaped by faith and belonging. It does not matter that Jesus never actually walked on the “holy fields” through which Henry’s army will chase their enemies: what is important is that the king develops national unity by invoking a shared faith, and a common enemy. Having overthrown Richard and pitched England into a Turkish hell, the new king seems to be acting like a pious Christian prince, trying to exorcise his sins by recovering the Holy Land from what Carlisle had earlier called “black pagans, Turks, and Saracens.” The ending of Richard II had Henry associated with usurping Turkish sultans; now, at the opening of this new play, the first of his reign, he appears to be either the penitent Christian ruler or the scheming prince.

  Shakespeare was becoming increasingly adroit at manipulating contradictory impulses to exploit the audience’s allegiances. He was also beginning to exorcise the ghost of Marlowe. In Part 1 the leader of the rebellion against Henry IV is Henry Percy (nicknamed Hotspur), the Earl of Northumberland’s son. As his nickname suggests, Hotspur is an impetuous warrior who uses the hyperbolic language of Tamburlaine, declaiming before one battle, “we live to tread on kings”27—an explicit reference to Tamburlaine’s treatment of Sultan Bajazeth. But speaking in a tavern in London’s Eastcheap, Hal (Henry IV’s son) mocks Hotspur’s bombastic pretensions, observing drily, “I am not yet of Percy’s mind, the Hotspur of the north; he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife ‘Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.’”28 Viewed from London’s taverns and brothels, Hotspur starts to look like a throwback to an older world of pagan heroes and heroic conquests that has been supplanted by the opportunistic cunning of Henry IV and his even more inscrutable son.

  In both parts of Henry IV Shakespeare moves between the elite courts and London’s murky underworld, the taverns and fleshpots of Eastcheap, where Prince Hal consorts with Sir John Falstaff, Mistress Quickly and their confederates. In Henry IV, Part 2 he goes so far as to parody the vogue for exotic stories and characters. In Act II, scene 4, the cowardly soldier Pistol mangles a series of mock-heroic references to Peele’s Battle of Alcazar and his lost play The Turkish Mahamet and Hiren the Fair Greek. “Have we not Hiren here?” he asks of Doll, before telling Mistress Quickly to “feed and be fat, my Calipolis,” a direct quotation from The Battle of Alcazar.29 Shakespeare was wittily showing Marlowe and Peele the exit, building on their portrayal of Moors and Turks to create his own characters: charismatic but withdrawn, ironic yet violent. In the shape of Hal, he depicts a leader who is unfathomable, perhaps even to himself.

  Toward the end of Henry IV, Part 2, with his father dead and himself about to succeed to the throne, Hal suddenly makes a striking comparison with an Ottoman sultan that has puzzled critics. As he enters Westminster Palace dressed as the new king, he turns to his three brothers and tells them:

  T
his new and gorgeous garment, majesty,

  Sits not so easy on me as you think.

  Brothers, you mix your sadness with some fear.

  This is the English, not the Turkish court;

  Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,

  But Harry Harry.30

  Hal’s first pronouncement as king seems straightforward enough. He assures his brothers that his accession is as strange to him as it is for them and that they have nothing to fear. Hal promises his younger brothers that they will not be murdered like Murad’s five younger brothers or his nineteen sons. But perhaps the prince doth protest too much. The speech’s awkwardness betrays the problem. Hal claims he will imitate his father, not Murad, but the audience has already experienced one version of Henry IV as the calculating pretender whose political usurpation triggers civil war. If young Harry is just the same as old Harry, then perhaps he will reproduce the same sectarian divisions. By trying to erase associations between his family and despotic Turks, Hal succeeds only in reminding us of the comparison. Everyone hopes the reformed son will metamorphose into the perfect Christian prince, but the fear remains that he might still turn Turk.

  The anxiety recurs throughout the final play in the series, Henry V, written in the summer of 1599. For generations of English-speaking readers, the play has represented England’s greatest warrior king, a patriotic celebration of Henry’s plucky English “band of brothers” triumphing over the French at Agincourt in the face of impossible odds. But perceptive critics have identified a more ambivalent side to Henry. The great essayist William Hazlitt saw in Hal “a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant,”31 who preferred brute force over right or wrong. More recently the American critic Norman Rabkin argued that the play points in two different directions: Henry can be seen as the militant Christian warrior, or as the scheming Machiavellian prince.32 Today, in an age when the idea of a crusade is more problematic than ever before, audiences are similarly attuned to Henry’s slipperiness.