Bible and Sword (16 page)

Naval supremacy did not, however, stay with the victors long. Venice, whose monopoly of the spice trade had been
broken by the Portuguese, was already on the descent from the peak of her mercantile and maritime greatness. Within the next decade Spain’s haughty Armada was to be scattered and sunk by the English. In that event the hindsight of history recognizes the passing of control of the seas to the Protestant countries, with results that Lecky, in a burst of conscious righteousness, called “an almost unmingled benefit to mankind.” Of course the shift in power did not take place overnight. Spain remained a power to be reckoned with for some time; but the loss of the best part of her fleet, following a similar loss to the Turks and coinciding with the decline of Venice, served to open England’s sea road to the Middle East.

England’s merchants had not waited for Drake’s smashing blow at the “Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.” Already the victory at Lepanto had awakened them to opportunities in the Levant. Two rich merchants of London were soon busy assembling men, money, and ships for a collective assault on the “Turkie trade.” One was Edward Osborne, a leading member of the Clothworkers’ Company, and the other was Richard Staper, whose tombstone describes him as “the greatest merchant in his tyme; the chiefest actor in the discoverie of the trades of Turkey and East India.” Behind them was Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s astute treasurer, whose eye was fixed on the gold that would accrue to the Crown when the Mediterranean trade winds should fill English sails. By 1579 Osborne and Staper had organized a group ready to invest in the new venture, and in that year, as their first act, they sent an agent to Constantinople to secure trading privileges from the Sultan.

William Harborne, an M.P. for Great Yarmouth who two years earlier had visited Turkey and returned with a letter from the Sultan inviting the friendship of the Queen of England, was the man selected for the mission. It was an inspired choice. England’s whole future in the Middle East, and with it the future of Palestine, was touched by the diplomatic genius, the grit, the superb Elizabethan
self-confidence of the first English envoy to the Porte. Off he went to a virtually hostile country and to a court of sinister reputation. Although the Sultan had once been gracious, the moods of Amurath III were notoriously unreliable. Access to him was guarded by jealous viziers and trigger-fingered janissaries. Other European envoys already established at the court were all inimical to Harborne’s purpose and certain to intrigue against him. Yet within a year he was home bringing a full treaty of twenty-two articles empowering the English subjects to trade in Turkish dominions. Later he served six years in Constantinople as ambassador. He “firmly laid,” says A. C. Wood, historian of the Levant Company, “the foundations of his country’s influence in the Near East and never again was it in any real danger of extinction by rival influence.”

With Marborne’s treaty in their pockets Staper and Osborne petitioned the Crown for incorporation as a chartered company that would give them exclusive trade rights in the Levant. They pointed out the advantages to the state that would result from increased customs and an increased navy. In support of their petition Secretary Walsingham drew up a memorandum entitled “A Consideration of the Trade into Turkey,” in which he spelled out for the Queen the reasons why the project should receive official backing. “First,” he wrote, “you shall set the great number of your greatest ships in work whereby your navy shall be maintained, one of the principallest strengths and defence of this realm, which otherwise were like to decay.” In addition, he continued, an English company would eliminate middlemen from the carrying trade so that “you shall vend your own commodities with most profit which before did fall into strangers’ hands.” For that very reason moreover it might be worth using the Levant trade to incline the Sultan toward England and away from his uneasy alliance with King Philip of Spain.

Convinced of the political advantages to be secured, and lured by the profits to be expected, Elizabeth on September
1, 1581 duly granted to Staper and Osborne and ten other merchants a charter as “The Company of Merchants of the Levant.” According to its terms only members of the company, by virtue of their having “found out and opened a trade in Turkey not known in the memory of any man now living to be frequented by our progenitors,” were thereafter permitted to enter the Turkey trade. Osborne was named governor and the membership limited to twenty. The company’s ships were to fly the royal ensign and their ordnance and crew to be under supervision of the Admiralty. In return for the monopoly conferred by the charter the company was to pay the Crown a yearly tribute of £500.

More than a year’s delay followed while the Queen and the company quarreled over who was to pay the ambassador’s expenses. Beside salary and handsome presents for the Sultan he would also have to be provided with what is nowadays inelegantly called a slush fund. It was too much for Elizabeth’s unconquerable parsimony, and she flatly refused to accredit an ambassador unless his expenses were paid by the company. Osborne and his fellows refused in their turn to lay out another shilling.

Finally the merchants, with their capital tied up in the waiting ships loaded with good wool cloth, gave in and decided to send Harborne at their own expense. In January 1583 the
Great Susan
set sail for Constantinople with Harborne on board and, as gifts for the Sultan, three mastiffs, three spaniels, two bloodhounds, “two little dogs in coats of silk,” two silver popinjays, a jeweled clock valued at £500, and other ornamental objects and rare treasures. Elizabeth stingily contributed a knighthood and letters of credential to the new ambassador.

Once arrived, Harborne again justified the merchants’ faith. By his persuasiveness, his presents, and his craft in circumventing the machinations of his rivals he not only regained the Sultan’s favor and a restoration of the trade treaty, which had been canceled in his absence, but also secured terms more favorable than those enjoyed by the
other Europeans and a reduction in export duties as well. “The mercurial breasted Mr. Harborne,” wrote the journalist playwright Tom Nash, “so noised the name of our island among the Turks that not an infant of the cur-tailed, skin-clipping pagans but talk of London as frequently as of their prophet’s tomb at Mecca.”

Such fame was good for business as well as for diplomatic bargaining. The “Turkie merchants,” in their first five years of operation, made twenty-seven voyages to ten Levant ports, realizing on some shipments a 300- or 400- per-cent profit and paying to the Crown a total of £11,359 in customs duties. Osborne, governor of the Company, was knighted and elected Lord Mayor of London. The charter was renewed twice, the second time at a profit to the Crown of 800 per cent. A consulate was opened at Aleppo to handle the commerce of Aleppo, Damascus, Aman, Tripolis, Jerusalem, and “all other parts whatever in the provinces of Syria, Palestine and Jurie [Jewry].” To such estate had the Holy Land fallen—one of half a dozen trading posts lumped together equally under a consul’s jurisdiction.

Not every voyage was a triumph. Pirates and “the dreadful touch of merchant-marring rocks” that ruined the Merchant of Venice and put him in bond to Shylock fell upon the English as well. Of three Levant Company ships that set sail in 1591 only one returned. Another under Captain Benjamin Wood, bound for Cathay with a letter from Elizabeth to the emperor of China, never was heard of again. How anxiously must Staper and Osborne have awaited word of the safe arrival of their ships! How often must they have paced the wharves scanning the horizon for the first distant glimmer of incoming sails! But if their ships did escape shipwreck and storm, plunder by Turks and corsairs, ambush by Spaniards or Venetians, and made home port safely, then their return ensured lush profits to the Turkey merchants. One argosy brought a cargo of “Rawe silks, Indico Bleue, all sorts of spices, all sorts of poticary druggs, grograynes, cotton yarns, cotton wooll, some Turkye
Carpitts, cotton clothe and Gawles [jewels],” according to the same report made to Cecil. “Her Majestie’s custome,” the company added, “will amount to, at the least, for soe wee dare adventure to give for the same, the sum of £3,500.”

Particularly important to England’s future was raw cotton, a strange new plant fiber which the Turkey merchants found for sale at Acre and Sidon. According to a contemporary account, “divers people in this kingdom, but chiefly in the county of Lancaster have found out the trade of making fustians, made of a kind of bombast or down, being a fruit of the earth growing upon little shrubs or bushes brought into the kingdom by the Turkey merchants.” Such were the beginnings of Lancashire cotton weaving, which in the day of spinning jenny and power loom was to become England’s leading industry.

From Persia by way of the Levant the company brought plants, rare then, a commonplace now in everyone’s garden: lilies, irises, crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils, and laurel. One commodity that was to become famous in English life, which the Turkey merchants unaccountably passed up, was coffee. Agents of the company noted it as a popular drink among the Turks. They sit chatting most of the day, wrote the traveler Sandys, sipping it “as hot as they can suffer it; black as soote and tasting not much unlike it.” But the English coffeehouse had to wait until the East India Company, a later offshoot of the Levant Company, began importing the coffee bean in quantity.

The East India Company, destined to transform England into an empire with vital effect on the fate of Palestine, was founded by the Levant Company merchants in an effort to break into the Far Eastern trade. The Dutch and Portuguese monopolized this trade. The fabulously profitable spices of the Indies, the silks of China, the muslins and jewels of India were shipped across the Indian Ocean and thence by caravan overland to the Levant cities, where English merchants could pick them up. But not an
ounce of pepper or a single emerald could be transshipped by the Levant Company without paying handsome profits into foreign pockets. Already the price of pepper had doubled under the Dutch monopoly. The English determined to break open their own routes to the East. In 1601 the Turkey merchants founded the new company as a separate enterprise to develop the direct sea trade with India and the Indies.

The history of the East India Company so far as it determined England’s policy in the Middle East belongs to a later chapter. In the meantime the affairs of the Levant Company brought England into more or less formal diplomatic relations with Turkey. Elizabeth, despite her miserly reluctance to pay an ambassador, made full use of Harborne and his successor, Sir Edward Barton, to try to win over the Grand Senior to England’s side against Spain. “The Queen of England is exerting herself,” wrote the Venetian ambassador at Constantinople in a dispatch of 1590, “by making large promises to persuade the Sultan to attack the King of Spain.…” He goes on to report signs of great preparations, much shipbuilding, and almost daily conferences between the Grand Vizier and the English ambassador. Intrigues were rife among the rival European diplomats, each trying to shift Turkey’s weight this way and that in the uneasy balance of Continental alliances. On one occasion the French ambassador was struck accidentally by a snowball thrown in the course of a game among some Greeks. “He fell into a great choler,” reports the English ambassador, Barton, and, “supposing it to be done by one of my servants,” he went home, armed his retinue, and set them upon the English with daggers, staves, and swords, “manifesting his great fury and malice against our nation.”

In spite or perhaps because of incidents like
l’affaire snowball
Barton, who had become ambassador after Harborne’s death in 1568, equaled and even improved on his predecessor’s success with the mercurial tyrant of the Sublime
Porte. Although the Sultan was regularly reminded by the other European ambassadors that their English colleague was a mere “stipendiary of merchants,” being still a paid agent of the Levant Company, this status did not prevent his being held in “extraordinary esteme” by the Sultan. He even left his post to accompany Mahomet III, the fratricidal successor of Amurath III, on one of his local wars. In fact, so far did Barton adapt himself to the life of the Sublime Porte that reports reached home complaining that the English embassy had taken on the character of a Turkish harem in which the staff “plied their whores, that at one time was rumoured to be in the house 17; but the ambassador caused all to depart except his owne, with whome and alchemy he waisted his alowance.”

The lax-moraled Sir Edward Barton seems to have been the only person who actually enjoyed his stay at “this happy Porte,” as he called it. To his countrymen at home the Ottoman Empire was looked upon as the “present terror of the world,” in the words of Knolles. The Turks were “a most wicked people,” thought the merchant Staper. The general attitude of the English toward the despotism that had succeeded that of the Saracens was one of fascinated horror, a mixture of fear, hate, and awe, in some part a hangover from the Crusades but augmented by reports of cruel and lascivious iniquities unheard of before. The zeal with which Mohamet III, on his accession in 1595, carried out the heir apparent’s customary elimination of possible rivals to the throne by murdering all nineteen of his brothers caused thrills of horror in Europe. A flood of eyewitness accounts from ambassadors fresh from scenes of throat-slit bodies tumbled on bloody marble stairs spread through the Western capitals and echoed for years afterward with a steady accretion of gory detail in plays and verse. Spine-chilling villainies were always the role of characters impersonating Souleiman the Magnificent or Bajazet or Selim the Grim or various Janissaries, Mamelukes, and eunuchs who strode across the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages
exhibiting every variety of wickedness and lust.

The stereotype of the “terrible Turk” that developed during this period remained fixed in British minds for long after. It is relevant to our story, for the real Turk was the temporal ruler of Palestine for some four hundred years. The sixteenth-century alliance made in the days of Ottoman glory and power when Britain was just beginning her overseas career and challenging the dominance of Spain was not necessarily useful in the nineteenth century, when Turkey and Spain had both sunk into second-rate powers. But through sheer force of habit Britain persisted in it through the long agony of Turkey’s decline and decay, committed to the support of a decrepit potentate despite every argument of changed circumstance and historical logic. The policy that made sense in Harborne’s and Barton’s time made no sense at all when Turkey had become the Sick Man of Europe; but the less workable it became, the more desperately the Foreign Office clung to it, until at last the Turks themselves deserted the alliance in 1914. Then at last Britain found herself, almost against her will, aiding and abetting the demise of the empire that she had so long been propping up, and ultimately replacing Turkish rule by her own in the crucial area from Syria to Suez, which included the long-smothered “vilayet” of Palestine.