The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (14 page)

Characteristic in its attention to detail and unrivaled grasp of reasons of state, Walsingham’s memo sought to justify the trade and to anticipate every eventuality. The English experience in Russia, Persia and more recently Morocco had taught him that it was vital to establish a trading presence before developing more formal political alliances, so he began by outlining “the profit that may ensue by trade into the Turk’s dominions.” He argued that it would strengthen the navy’s role in national defense and international commerce, allow merchants to export English goods directly into Turkish markets rather than through costly middlemen, and enable the importation of duty-free Turkish goods, which could then be sold across Europe. The obstacles were manifold: Walsingham understood that all the great Catholic powers with an interest in Mediterranean commerce would attempt to stop the trade, “by finesse and by force.” He observed drily that Spain, “being not the best effected toward us,” would undoubtedly concoct a strategic diplomatic and naval alliance with the French and Venetians to prevent the English trade. The difficulties would be all the greater once, as Walsingham correctly predicted, Philip “is possessed of the kingdom of Portugal.”

Walsingham’s solution was to “make choice of some apt man to be sent with her Majesty’s letters unto the Turk to procure an ample safe-conduct, who is always to remain there at the charge of the merchants.” It was a shrewd proposal. Whoever was chosen would exploit the blurred line between trade and politics, traveling under royal warrant but paid for by London’s merchants, giving the queen maximum diplomatic returns on a minimum financial investment. He would remain in Constantinople indefinitely to thwart attempts by resident Venetian, French and Spanish merchants or diplomats to disrupt the English trade.

Walsingham stressed that the first visit was “to be handled with great secrecy” and undertaken overland initially to prevent news of a seaborne departure from London reaching the ears of Constantinople’s resident ambassadors. The ambitious long-term plan was for twenty English ships to sail annually through the Mediterranean during the winter months, with sufficient commodities to turn a profit in Turkey. But Walsingham worried: Could the English supply enough cloth to load twenty ships? Would such a flotilla flood the Turkish market and cause prices to crash? He also wondered “whether there shall be that vent” or sale “of our kerseys during the wars between the said Turk and Sophy” at the same levels of profit that existed prior to the conflict. Finally, he took up Edmund Hogan’s plan for connecting the Moroccan trade with Constantinople, believing that it would be vital “to procure the Turk’s letters to the King of Barbary and the rest of the princes of Africa that the ports there may be free for our merchants.”
¹
Walsingham was clearly nervous about the Moroccan royal succession following al-Malik’s death and hoped—rather optimistically—that he could use Ottoman leverage to ensure unimpeded English commerce through the region.

As Richard Hakluyt observed in his
Principal Navigations,
the “apt man” chosen to lead England’s hazardous foray into the Turkish trade was William Harborne. Born in Great Yarmouth into a family of minor gentry, Harborne began traveling abroad as a factor in 1559. In 1577, with plans for a Turkish adventure already being mooted, he was named as one of the principal members of the newly formed Spanish Company, alongside Edward Osborne, Richard Staper and Anthony Jenkinson. Jenkinson’s days of traveling to Russia and Persia were over by then, but if he and Harborne met during this period, the older man would surely have seen a kindred spirit in the younger. They certainly shared many of the attributes required to undertake such grueling and dangerous long-distance travels into the Islamic world. Both men were charismatic, tenacious and resourceful, both dedicated mercers and both loyal servants of their Protestant queen. Neither was above speaking his mind, even when such frankness threatened his career or his life.

Like many English merchants of his time, Harborne was employed as a government spy before departing for Turkey, which suggests that his selection for the job resulted from the combined efforts of Osborne, Staper and Walsingham. Whatever the discussions behind his appointment, in early August 1578, just before the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir, Harborne was several weeks into a four-month overland journey to Constantinople, accompanied by Joseph Clements and just one servant. They traveled through Germany to Poland, where Harborne met his brother-in-law in Lvov (possibly the English factor John Wright), together with an Ottoman dragoman (a diplomatic translator and envoy) known as Mustafa Beg. It was his good fortune to arrive just at the moment when an Ottoman diplomatic delegation had come to renew a peace treaty between Poland and the new Turkish sultan, Murad III. Harborne joined Mustafa’s diplomatic caravan as it headed back to Constantinople, taking a route advocated by Jenkinson back in 1561 through Moldavia, Romania and Bulgaria. He arrived in the Ottoman capital on October 28, 1578.
²

What Harborne made of his arrival is not recorded, but as a Protestant English merchant from Norfolk he must have experienced some combination of exhilaration and trepidation. Constantinople, one of the world’s greatest imperial capitals, had changed beyond all recognition since it had fallen to Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. The new city of Istanbul, from the Greek for “to the city,” was also referred to in official Ottoman business for centuries as Kostantiniyye, or, as Christians would continue to call it, Constantinople, the name I have used in this book. The Ottomans had transformed a Byzantine city in decline with a population of just 50,000 into the capital of the Islamic world, a vibrant multiethnic and multidenominational city. By the time Harborne arrived its population was estimated at 300,000 to 500,000, much larger than London (200,000), Paris (220,000), Naples (280,000) or Venice (160,000). From sheer political and commercial necessity, Mehmed and his successors (including Murad) had made Constantinople into a cosmopolitan capital, repopulating it through the forced resettlement of merchants and craftsmen from various ethnic and religious backgrounds. Only 58 percent of the city was Muslim, with 32 percent Christian and 10 percent “Jews,” a category that included Greeks, Armenians and various communities deported from the recently conquered Balkans.
³

To Harborne, the city’s skyline must have appeared alien and intimidating. At Mehmed’s command, the iconic Greek Orthodox cathedral of Hagia Sophia had been transformed into a mosque, and an ambitious program of public building had begun. A new imperial palace, the Topkapi Sarayi, had been built overlooking the Golden Horn, as well as the Fatih Mosque and Külliye (a complex of buildings of characteristic Ottoman architecture) and a commercial district dominated by a
bedestan
(the marketplace known today as the Grand Bazaar) and a series of
khans
(urban caravanserais). On the northern side of the Golden Horn, Mehmed had repopulated Galata—still identified by its imposing Genoese tower—with Jewish and Christian merchants, and this is where Harborne lived during his time in Constantinople. Under Mehmed 190 mosques, 24 madrasas (schools), 32
hamams
(bathhouses) and 12 markets were erected, transforming the city from a Greek Orthodox polis into a Muslim capital. Under Mehmed’s grandson Sultan Süleyman, the urban transformation was even more pronounced, thanks primarily to the extraordinary achievements of the architect Mimar Sinan, who built some 120 buildings in Constantinople, many of which Harborne would have seen. Foremost among these were the Şehzade Mosque and the monumental Süleymaniye Mosque and Külliye, completed twenty years before Harborne’s arrival.

Since his recent accession, in 1574, the young and pious new sultan Murad III had confined himself to proposing architectural projects outside his imperial capital. He commissioned a magnificent mosque in his birthplace of Manisa, but this would not be completed for another eight years. Perhaps befitting his mystical beliefs, he was more interested in leaving his mark on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. He built a new arcade around the revered Ka’ba in Mecca, remodeled the Prophet’s mosque in Medina and commissioned a range of new buildings in both cities, including madrasas, hospices and lodges for his beloved Sufi dervishes. Harborne could be forgiven for seeing little or no trace of the sultan he had come to court in Constantinople. Once installed as sultan, Murad rarely left his palace in Constantinople, surrounding himself with scores of advisers, mystics, astrologers, poets, calligraphers and musicians.
⁴

Harborne’s initial encounters with this intensely hierarchical and labyrinthine Ottoman political bureaucracy must have been completely bewildering. The first problem was one of communication. Harborne corresponded with his Ottoman counterparts in Latin or Italian (in which he appears to have been fluent), which was then translated into Turkish, leaving much room (as we have seen) for creative license and strategic misunderstanding. Then there was the difficulty of gaining appropriate formal access to the Ottoman court.

The French had developed the concept of the “Sublime Porte” or “High Gate” (in Turkish
Bâbıâli
), through which foreign dignitaries were allowed to enter the Ottoman state buildings in an elaborate and carefully orchestrated procession. Any breach of etiquette could prove disastrous. Once within the imperial complex, centered on the Topkapi Palace, visitors had to navigate through the many layers of the sultan’s court.

The Inner Service, dominated by the harem, was responsible for the sultan’s welfare. It included his wives, concubines and slaves. At the time of Harborne’s arrival, the Inner Service was also, through the power granted to Murad’s long-term lover or consort Safiye Sultan, exercising considerable influence over imperial policy. Fiscal and diplomatic responsibilities were delegated to the Outer Service and the so-called Scribal Institution, both of which were controlled by the grand vizier. The grand vizier, appointed by the sultan, held executive powers over an imperial advisory council (the
divan
) composed of viziers and pashas. The
divan
had in turn to compete with the demands of various social and economic ministries known as “institutions.” These included the Religious Institution and the Military Institution, the latter controlling the sultan’s feared and unpredictable fighting corps, the Janissaries. To make matters even more confusing, the Ottoman ruling administration was divided between the Turkish nobility and the
devşirme
(abducted Christian youths), forcible converts to Islam who were loyal to the sultan’s administrative or military institutions. Both groups claimed the title “Osmanli” or “Ottoman” to signify their membership in the state’s ruling class, although in times of conflict each exploited the other’s weaknesses for political gain. The sultans had adopted the
devşirme
system as a deliberate method of divide and rule, to play each group off the other, but it was a volatile setup that baffled outsiders.

Harborne’s first task was to establish a dialog with Murad’s grand vizier, the seventy-three-year-old Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. Bosnian by birth, the wily Sokollu Mehmed was a
devşirme
who had risen rapidly through the Ottoman ranks before being appointed grand vizier by Süleyman in 1565. It was testament to his consummate political skill that Sokollu Mehmed had not only survived but prospered in that role for fourteen years under three different sultans; however, at the time of Harborne’s arrival he was locked in a bitter power struggle with Murad’s consort, Safiye Sultan.

Harborne’s disastrous start to his time in Constantinople was described in graphic detail in his earliest surviving correspondence, a petition submitted to Sokollu Mehmed, the first ever written to a grand vizier by a foreigner. Harborne submitted his petition, written in Italian, via a dragoman to the Ottoman Chancery, where it was translated into Turkish with all the formal conventions (it was customary for the plaintiff to write in the third person). Harborne complained that not long after his arrival he had ordered the goods and money left in Lvov to be sent to him by one of his servants, only for the servant to be “assassinated by thieves within one day’s journey of this famous city, and they robbed him of his goods and money to the sum of 4000 ducats,” which was around £1,300.
⁵
Considering that an average English ship’s cargo was worth around £7,000, this was a substantial loss. The poor servant who lost his life remained anonymous, and was never mentioned again.

The goods involved were the ubiquitous coarse woolen kersey cloths, as well as tin and lead, a flagrant violation of the papal ban on the trade of all such merchandise with Muslims. Harborne complained that the grand vizier knew the whereabouts of his servant’s assassins as well as of his goods, but his
chiauses
(Turkish sergeants) “have made no effort at all—they did not even wish to go to find the merchandise where the thieves confessed that it was but, rather, wasted their time.” Despite the apparent delicacy of the situation, Harborne managed to end his petition with a request for safe-conducts to trade throughout the Ottoman-controlled eastern Mediterranean, and for permission to export surplus lead.

Neither Harborne’s subsequent letters nor Ottoman Chancery records reveal if he received compensation for his losses, but he is unlikely to have been able to continue trading without some indemnity. Hakluyt certainly believed that Harborne turned his loss into broader profit, describing the canny Englishman as having “behaved himself so wisely and discreetly that within a few months after he obtained himself not only the great Turk’s large and ample privilege for himself . . . but also procured his honorable and friendly letters unto her Majesty.”
⁶
This was a very bland account of what really happened.