The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (2 page)

Introduction

Toward the end of September 1579, a letter arrived in London addressed to Queen Elizabeth I of England. Wrapped in a satin bag and fastened with a silver capsule, the letter was an object of exquisite beauty, unlike any other diplomatic correspondence the queen had ever received. It was written on a large parchment roll dusted with gold and dominated by an elaborate calligraphic monogram and emblazoned with a flourish across the top. The letter was composed in Ottoman Turkish, a stylized Arabic script that was used in all formal correspondence by its sender, the thirty-three-year-old Ottoman sultan Murad III. This was the very first communication between a Turkish sultan and an English ruler. It was written in response to the arrival in Constantinople that spring of an English merchant, William Harborne, who had requested commercial privileges for his country superior to those that had thus far been awarded to any other Christian nation by the Ottomans.

It had taken six months for the letter to make its way from Constantinople to London, where it was presented to the queen alongside a Latin translation prepared by an imperial scribe. The letter followed the standard conventions of an Ottoman
hukum,
a written order to a subject, and was addressed as a direct “Command to Elzābet, who is the queen of the domain of Anletār.” Murad told Elizabeth that he had been informed of the arrival of her “traders and merchants of those parts coming to our divinely-protected dominions and carrying on trade.” He issued an edict that if “her agents and merchants shall come from the domain of Anletār by sea with their barks and with their ships, let no one interfere.” As long as this queen from a faraway country was prepared to accept Murad’s superiority and to function as his subject, he would be happy to protect her merchants.

•   •   •

Elizabeth responded quickly. The opening of her letter, dated October 25, 1579, was as revealing as Murad’s. The queen began by describing herself as:

Elizabeth by the grace of the most mighty God, the only Creator of heaven and earth, of England, France and Ireland Queen, the most invincible and most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries, of all that live among the Christians, and falsely profess the name of Christ, unto the most imperial and most invincible prince, Zuldan Murad Chan, the most mighty ruler of the kingdom of Turkey, sole and above all, the most sovereign monarch of the East Empire, greeting, and many happy and fortunate years.
¹

Elizabeth was eager to boast of her own imperial aspirations—although it was stretching credulity to suggest she was queen of France—and to assure Murad that she shared his antipathy toward Catholic “idolatry” and those “falsely” professing Christ. But her main interest was in establishing a commercial relationship with the Ottomans, even if it meant having to write from a position of subjection:

Most Imperial and most invincible Emperor, we have received the letters of your mighty highness written to us from Constantinople the fifteenth day of March this present year, whereby we understand how graciously, and how favorably the humble petitions of one William Harborne a subject of ours, resident in the Imperial city of your highness presented unto your Majesty for the obtaining of access for him and two other merchants, more of his company our merchants also, to come with merchandizes both by sea & land, to the countries and territories subject to your government, and from thence again to return home with good leave and liberty, were accepted of your most invincible Imperial highness.
²

This was the start of a cordial seventeen-year-long correspondence between the sultan and the queen that marked the beginning of one of history’s more unlikely alliances. For the wily Protestant queen who had already held on to her crown for twenty-one years in the face of implacable Catholic opposition to her rule, it was yet another shrewd move designed to ensure her political survival.

Ever since Elizabeth’s excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570, Europe’s Catholic powers had offered English merchants only limited commercial access to their ports and cities. In response to the growing economic crisis that ensued, a group of merchants came together and proposed to explore, with the queen’s blessing, the possibility of direct trade with the fabled lands to the east. The Venetians and Spaniards had long acted as middlemen in the eastern trade, and most of the coveted spices and fine silks from Persia and the Indies came through their ports, but a handful of enterprising English traders came up with a new business model that would help them raise capital while minimizing their own personal risk.

Shortly before writing her first letter to Murad, Elizabeth had authorized the creation of England’s first joint-stock company, known as the Muscovy Company, a model that would be replicated in Turkey and, much later, in the colonization of India and America. The idea was simple enough: given the expense and uncertainty of setting off on long expeditions to the east, the merchants contracted to share both the costs and the potential profits in relation to their investment of capital. It was the unwitting conception of a new model for conducting business, one that was to have revolutionary long-term consequences.

•   •   •

For the young and inexperienced Ottoman sultan, the alliance with the Sultana of Anletār was a small part of a much larger geopolitical world picture. Thirteen years younger than Elizabeth, Murad had ascended to the throne of the four-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire at its height, when it still ruled vast swaths of North Africa, central Asia, the Middle East and the Balkans. He faced challenges on multiple fronts: protracted wars with the Safavid dynasty of Persia to the east, revolts against Ottoman rule in the Balkans, challenges from Spain and the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, as well as domestic factionalism within the ruling court in Constantinople. Pious, fragile, sedentary and prone to epilepsy, Murad was far more absorbed by his domestic situation within the walls of the Topkapi Palace than by the administration of his empire, which he largely delegated to his viziers and provincial governors.
³
He allowed his chief consort, the Albanian-born Safiye Sultan, to exercise unprecedented political power from within the p
rotected space of his fabled harem and gave his mother, Nurbanu Sultan, free rein to dictate rival policies to those of his mistress, with disastrous consequences.
⁴
It was probably fortuitous for Elizabeth that the sultan was more interested in inviting Sufi mystics to interpret his dreams than in administering his extensive empire. Murad’s court was complacent enough to claim that the alliance with England was so complete that all that was required for her merchants to become Muslim was to raise their forefinger and recite the confession of faith.
⁵

England’s fascination with the Islamic world went back even further than this first exchange of letters between the sultan and the queen. English merchants had begun doing business in Morocco and Syria as early as the 1550s. Henry VIII often appeared at festivities “appareled after Turkey fashion,” dressed in silk and velvet and sporting a turban and a scimitar. His merchants imported rich silks, intricate textiles and exotic commodities such as rhubarb, currants and sweet wines from the east—as well as the Moroccan sugar that his daughter Elizabeth consumed in such copious quantities it blackened her teeth.
⁶
His daughter increased the tempo of exchange and embarked on a new policy of outreach to the Muslim world. The trade reached such a level that by the end of Elizabeth’s reign thousands of her subjects were to be found in the Islamic world, some working in trade and diplomacy, others as pirates or adventurers, and many forced to convert and live as slaves. They traveled through and lived in places like Aleppo, Raqqa, Fallujah, Baghdad, Tripoli and Algiers.

The merchants and adventurers who left England to travel in the east returned with new commodities and new ideas that transformed culture and society at home. Few prosperous Elizabethan homes were without “Turkey carpets,” elaborately knotted floor and wall coverings with Islamic motifs made by Anatolian, Egyptian, Syrian or Persian weavers, as well as silk quilts or embroidered tapestries. Even the language of sixteenth-century England was replete with terms drawn from commercial exchanges with Islamic countries. “Sugar,” “candy,” “crimson” (from the Turkish
kirmiz
), “turquoise” (or “Turkey stone”), “indigo,” “tulip” (from the Turkish pronunciation of Persian
dulband,
or “turban”) and “zero” all entered the language and took on their modern associations during this period, primarily thanks to Anglo-Islamic trade.
⁷

•   •   •

Despite the extensive nature of such exchanges, Elizabeth and her subjects would not have recognized the term “Muslim,” which was first used in English in 1615, defined as “one that is instructed in the belief of the Mohammetanes.”
⁸
The first mention in English of “Islam” appears in 1625, when the travel writer Samuel Purchas quoted a Javanese prince as saying that the “religion of Islam doth not agree with the Christian Religion.”
⁹
Various terms were used by the Elizabethans instead: “Mahometans,” “Ottomites,” “Saracens,” “Persians,” “Moors,” “Pagans” and “Turks”—a catchall term for anyone who would be recognized today as a Muslim. These terms conjured a range of beliefs and assumptions, from horror and disgust to wonder and curiosity. Few people attempted to understand Islam on its own theological terms at the time. Instead, throughout the Tudor period a powerful set of misrepresentations, misconceptions and misunderstandings developed that defined relations between the two faiths. The amicable relationship that prospered under Elizabeth arose not from a principle of tolerance but as a result of political expediency. Nevertheless, the exchanges that ensued gave rise to a variety of encounters and transactions between Muslims and English Protestants, which have largely been ignored in most histories of the Elizabethan era.

•   •   •

England still likes to regard itself as a world power, but in the sixteenth century it was a country that lay on the fringes of the known world, and the Ottoman sultan, whose empire stretched from Egypt to central Europe, was widely recognized as a far more powerful and important player on the world stage. As exchanges with the Islamic world increased throughout Elizabeth’s reign, English scholars made some attempt to try to understand the scale and power of the Ottoman Empire. In 1603 Richard Knolles, a grammar-school teacher from Kent, published a monumental twelve-hundred-page survey,
The General Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie,
the first chronicle of the Ottoman Empire written in English. Drawing on continental European accounts describing the rise of the Turks in minute detail, Knolles’s book became the standard authority on the Ottomans, whom he described as “the glorious empire of the Turks, the present terror of the world.”
¹⁰

Curiosity for all things from the Orient gripped Elizabethan England and inevitably reached its theaters. In early August 1601 the great theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe recorded in his diary that he had paid ten shillings and four pence for a new play about the Prophet Muhammad that included “apparel for Mahewmet,” and “the making of crowns and other things for Mahewmet.” Three weeks later he paid forty shillings to the actor Edward Alleyn for “the book of Mahemett,” a reference on this occasion to a play, since lost. Famed for his grand declamatory style, Alleyn portrayed most of Christopher Marlowe’s lead characters, including Tamburlaine, who, at the climax of Part II, curses Muhammad and burns the Qur’an onstage, an act notoriously censored when
Tamburlaine
was performed at London’s Barbican theater in 2005 following the London bombings. Henslowe’s diary contains numerous references to props, apparel and payments relating to plays that featured and named “Mohammed,” including an item listed on March 1598 as “old Mahemetes head.”

•   •   •

This fascination intensified in 1600, when the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur sent a delegation led by his ambassador Muhammad al-Annuri to London to meet with Queen Elizabeth and propose a military alliance against Catholic Spain. The Muslims had only recently been expelled from southern Spain, and al-Mansur was eager to recapture these lands. Elizabeth was equally eager to deflect the Spanish navy from heading north (as it had tried on many occasions since the first failed armada, of 1588) to topple her government and bring England into the Catholic fold. The embassy was the culmination of more than twenty years of cordial correspondence between Elizabeth and the Moroccans, and it succeeded in establishing an alliance similar to the one made between the queen and Sultan Murad III. It forged a broad anti-Spanish alliance between Protestant England and Muslim Morocco, and led to the creation of the Barbary Company in 1585. This enabled English merchants to sell wool and munitions to the Moroccans, and in return they imported saltpeter (to make gunpowder), silk, cotton, spices, gold and the ubiquitous sugar. Elizabeth’s friendly relations with the Moors of Morocco were tempered only by her fear, not of Christian censure, but of the damaging effect they might have on her friendship with the Ottomans, who were at this time adversaries of al-Mansur’s Moroccan kingdom vying for political control of North Africa.

Toward the end of 1601, some months after the arrival in London of the Moroccan ambassador, William Shakespeare began
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
. Produced at the height of his dramatic powers,
Othello
stands alongside Shakespeare’s other great tragedies,
Hamlet,
Macbeth
and
King Lear,
all written during a period of intense creativity stretching from 1599 (when he began
Hamlet
) to 1606 (generally agreed to be the year in which
Macbeth
and
King Lear
were written). In contrast to these other plays with their northern European settings,
Othello
is set in the Mediterranean and is a largely sympathetic portrayal of the tragic downfall of a soldier from North Africa destroyed by his adopted Christian community. Retracing his movements across London over the six months of his stay, it is possible to discern some of the topical raw material on which Shakespeare may have drawn for his portrayal of the “noble Moor.”