The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (22 page)

Drake’s return to England that July led the Privy Council to write to the Turkey Company’s directors, asking how “the hundred Turks brought by Sir Francis Drake out of the West Indies (where they served as slaves in the Spanish galleys)” might be “conveyed home and presented by the ambassador [Harborne] unto the Grand Seigneur, whereby their lordships are persuaded that they may both draw on greater favor and liberties unto them selves than they yet enjoy, and also procure the release of some of the captives of the English nation there.”
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Both council and company knew that trading repatriated Turkish slaves for English ones in the Ottoman territories made good diplomatic and financial sense.

Harborne spent much of his time negotiating the release of English galley slaves throughout the Mediterranean, and he later claimed that he had spent £1,203 during his five-year residence in having “redeemed at Constantinople, Algiers, Tripoli in Barbary and other places fifty four of her subjects [Englishmen] from long miserable captivity.”
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Over the next few years, many of the Turks returned home on Turkey Company ships. But some, like Chinano, stayed in London; and within a matter of weeks Chinano had come to Hanmer’s attention.

The motivations and sincerity of his conversion are unclear, but these were of little interest to Hanmer, who seized on the case of what he called “this silly Turk and poor Saracen” as a way of justifying English Protestantism, refuting Islam and stoking the anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish sentiment that was gripping London. “I have purposed by God’s help, to lay before you,” Hanmer proclaimed, “first the original of Mahomet, that false prophet with the nations of Moors, Saracens and Turks; secondly their false doctrine and wicked religion, wherewith they have bewitched infinite souls: with a brief confutation thereof.” What followed was a fairly standard (and very long) denunciation of the Prophet Muhammad and the Islamic faith, riddled with the usual Christian errors, fears, myths, stereotypes and fantasies.

According to Hanmer, the Prophet was born to a “heathen” father and an “Ishmaelite” mother. Ridiculed by Hanmer as a drunken epileptic, Muhammad is described as using magic to “bewitch the people” and spread “the law of Mahomet” throughout Arabia, Persia and North Africa. The minister claimed that Muhammad “patched together his Alcoran of the laws and doctrines of heathens, Indians and Arabians, of superstitious Jews, of Rechabites, of false Christians and heretics,” producing a confused theology that denied the Christian Trinity and Jesus as the son of God but approved of the Gospels. In Hanmer’s mind Muhammad’s beliefs betrayed a devilish confederacy with the Jews, who “continually prick him forward against the Christians.” But the minister reserved his real venom for what he saw as a conflation of Islam and Catholicism. In the “flocking to tombs and sepulchers, worshipping of dead corpses, bones and relics” and other “feigned miracles of Romish idolatry . . . , we need not say it is popish,” railed Hanmer, “nay, it is Turkish and Mahometicall.” While Elizabeth’s merchants and diplomats strategically allied themselves with Muslims in opposition to Catholic power, her preachers took a less flexible position, compounding Islam and Catholicism as two variants of the collective sin of idolatry.

From Hanmer’s perspective, Chinano’s conversion was a chink of light in the theological darkness. When questioned on “what should move him at this present to receive the Christian faith,” Hanmer reported that Chinano identified “his misery and captivity under the Spaniards, his travel hither, and the view of this land, [which] had beaten into him (as he said) the knowledge of the true God. And further he said, that if there were not a God in England, there was none nowhere.” The image of Chinano having knowledge of the “true” Protestant God “beaten into him” suggests that his conversion may not have been the joyful and spontaneous decision that Hanmer would have had his congregation believe. Warming to his theme of Protestant England’s beneficence, the minister identified two further reasons for Chinano’s conversion: “before his coming, the virtue, the modesty, the godliness, the good usage and discreet government of the English Christians, and among others (as he chiefly noted) he was most beholden unto the right worshipful knight, Sir Francis Drake, and that worthy captain W[illiam] Hawkins, terming them most worthy Christians.”

Drake’s and Hawkins’s worthy characters were in fact rather dubious: Drake was a licensed pirate, a “corsair,” and Hawkins a notorious slave trader, whose recent rampage through the Caribbean had brought death, imprisonment and enslavement to countless Spaniards, Native Americans and
renegadoes
. Hanmer seemed unconcerned that Chinano’s conversion may have been coerced, claiming that upon his arrival in England the Turk “saw courtesy, gentleness, friendly salutations of the people, succor for him and his countrymen, pity and compassion of the Englishmen, and withal he learned that the poor, the aged, the impotent, the sick and diseased Christians were provided for, whereas in his country and where he had been in captivity, the poor and sick and diseased were scorned, despised, and accounted of as dogs.” When pressed on why he had never converted to Catholicism in twenty-five years of Spanish servitude, he (or more likely Hanmer) gave the reasons every Elizabethan Protestant wanted to hear: the Spaniard’s “cruelty in shedding of blood, and his idolatry in worshipping of images.”

The rest of the sermon descended into a fantastical celebration of Protestantism and a denunciation of Catholicism. Hanmer maintained that Chinano’s conversion showed that it was only the political might of Catholic Spain and the papacy that prevented Muslims—who “know not the purity of religion in the reformed churches”—from converting en masse to Protestantism. “Let the Church of God be swept then will the heathens, the Jews, the Turks and Saracens the sooner come in,” he declared. Hanmer even used his selective knowledge of the first letters exchanged between Elizabeth and Murad seven years earlier to support his millenarian belief in the mass conversion of Jews and Muslims. He even went so far as to quote one version of the letters from the Turks after describing how they came to England:

Mustafa Beg, secretary to the great Turk of Constantinople that now is writing to the Queen of England as appeareth by his letters bearing date the 15 March, and in the year of great Jesu (so he writeth) 1579 sheweth the great affection his master the Turk together with himself beareth to this land and of our religion as it is interpreted he sayeth thus:

“We know that your sovereign majesty among all the Christians have the most sound religion, and therefore the Christians throughout the world envy your highness.”

Hanmer’s account was a clearly misleading interpretation of Mustafa Beg’s letter, but the preacher had no interest in such subtleties; the political and commercial dimensions of the Anglo-Ottoman rapprochement were of negligible significance when set against what the preacher saw as the Ottoman ruler’s obvious acknowledgment of the theological superiority and inevitable triumph of English Protestantism over Catholicism.

The sermon ended with a moment of pure Elizabethan theater: “the Turk confessed in the Spanish tongue before the face of the congregation,” while from the pulpit Hanmer performed a catechistic dialog with Chinano, “propounding the questions and receiving the answers by skillful interpreters.” Chinano “renounced Mahomet the false prophet of the Moors, Saracens and Turks,” embraced the Trinity and “believeth verily that Jesus Christ was and is the son of God,” and finally “desired he might be received as one of the faithful Christians, and be baptized.” At the conclusion of the service Chinano was led to a table with a basin in the middle of the congregation where he was baptized, having “desired his name might be William,” the Christian name of his liberator, Captain Hawkins.

Throughout Hanmer’s oration, the voice of Chinano (or William) was mediated by others, and once the sermon was finished he would disappear from the historical record. Like many other sixteenth-century converts and
renegadoes
his life flickered into public view suddenly for one reason or another, and disappeared again just as quickly. Chinano presented a justification for Hanmer’s virulent anti-Catholic position at a moment when a Spanish invasion seemed imminent. The sermon does however reveal that a small but visible group of Chinano’s Turkish “countrymen” were moving around London, and that many Londoners knew about the Anglo-Ottoman alliance and their queen’s cordial correspondence with the sultan. While it used Chinano’s conversion as a sign of Protestantism’s growing ability to redeem its rival religions of the Book, it left other concerns about religious conversion unanswered. How genuine was Chinano’s baptism, and what could prevent him from reverting? How sincere and enduring was anyone’s religion in the face of the sheer variety of forced, strategic or spontaneous conversions taking place between various faiths at this time? This included Protestantism, a theology barely seventy years old, now riven with its own factionalism and fighting for its survival in late-sixteenth-century Europe.

Such anxieties were compounded by a growing number of cases in which conversion went the other way, with English Protestants embracing Islam—often coerced, at other times strategic and sometimes willing converts. Thomas Sanders’s sensational account in 1584 of how the
Jesus
and its crew had been imprisoned by the ruler of Tripoli and eventually released thanks to Harborne had also described how English cabin boys “voluntarily turned Turk.” As Sanders reported, when the dey’s son tried to persuade two of the
Jesus
’s crew to convert to Islam, he turned to one of his father’s servants, “a son of a yeoman of our Queen’s guard, whom the king’s son had enforced to turn Turk; his name was John Nelson. Him the king caused to be brought to these young men, and then said unto them, ‘Will you not bear this, your countryman, company, and be Turk as he is?’” Sanders and his crew resisted such demands at their peril: several were forcibly circumcised and dressed “in the habit of a Turk,” while others were thrown into the galleys.
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But the case of Nelson and the anonymous cabin boy suggests that there were growing numbers of English converts to Islam.
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Reports of even more visible English converts to Islam were also beginning to reach London. In June 1586, just four months before Hanmer baptized Chinano in St. Katharine’s Church, William Harborne dispatched a letter from Constantinople addressed to “Hassan Aga, Eunuch and Treasurer to Hassan Bassa king of Algier.” Hassan Aga was better known to Harborne as Samson Rowlie, a fellow merchant from Great Yarmouth who had been captured by Turkish pirates off Algiers in the
Swallow
in 1577. Most of the crew had been imprisoned, but Rowlie had been castrated and either willingly or forcibly converted to Islam. Over the next decade he took the name Hassan Aga and rose to become chief eunuch and treasurer of Algiers as well as one of the most trusted advisers to its Ottoman governor, Harborne’s old adversary Qilich Ali Pasha (“Hassan Bassa”).
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Like Rowlie, Ali Pasha was himself a Christian convert to Islam. Born a Catholic in Calabria but captured and enslaved in the 1530s by one of Kheir ed-Din Barbarossa’s captains, he converted and became renowned as “the greatest corsair of them all,” and by 1568 had been appointed Ottoman governor of Algiers.
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Harborne asked Hassan Aga to use his influence to secure the release of the surviving members of the
Swallow
’s crew, still imprisoned in Algiers, many of whom had lived and worked with him in his previous life as Samson Rowlie. In direct contrast to Hanmer’s account of Chinano’s conversion, Harborne acted as though Hassan Aga’s was a calculated act of survival that belied his true and unshakable Protestant faith. He presumed that Rowlie still professed a “fervent faith” in “our lord Jesus Christ, by whose only merits and blood-shedding you together with us and other good Christians shall be saved, and also for your faithful obedience like a true subject of Her Majesty, naturally loving your country and your countrymen.” Harborne believed that his “true” religion would compel him to intercede with Ali Pasha on behalf of the English captives in “procuring their redemption,” which he assured him would “manifest to all the world, especially to her majesty and me her ambassador, your true Christian mind and English heart . . . that notwithstanding your body be subject to Turkish thralldom, yet your virtuous mind [be] free from those vices.”
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A portrait of Samson Rowlie that appeared in a traveler’s book just two years after Harborne wrote his letter offers little to support the ambassador’s conviction that Rowlie’s conversion was a superficial act driven by self-preservation. Dressed in opulent robes and wearing the white turban of a convert, he reclines on a gilt throne, the picture of a confident, prosperous and successful young Muslim. Like many other contemporary Christians who “turned Turk” in the Mediterranean during this period, Rowlie gives the impression that, on balance, a career as a rich and powerful member of the Algerian ruling elite was more appealing than life as a struggling, peripatetic Protestant merchant from Norfolk.

Whether Harborne’s petition for the release of the
Swallow
’s crew was successful is unknown, although his failure to mention it in subsequent correspondence suggests that it was not. What happened to Hassan Aga is also unclear: Harborne’s letter is the last we hear of him. With other matters to attend to, Harborne was unable to act on every single captive, ransom and conversion brought to his attention during his time in Constantinople.

One English traveler who did have Harborne to thank for saving him was Edward Webbe. One of the most colorful of all the Elizabethan adventurers in the eastern Mediterranean, Webbe obtained a degree of fame with the publication of his picaresque memoir
The Rare and Most Wonderful Things Which Edward Webbe an Englishman Born, Hath Seen and Passed in His Troubelsome Travails
(1590). He was born around 1553 near the Tower of London, the son of a master gunner, and by 1566 he was in the service of Anthony Jenkinson. He spent five years traveling throughout Russia with Jenkinson, and in 1571 he was captured and enslaved by Crimean Tatars. After being ransomed, he returned to England and sailed to Alexandria, where his ship was attacked by Turkish galleys. Following a fierce fight in which most of his crew was killed, Webbe described how he and ten survivors were “sent to Constantinople, and committed unto the galleys, where we continued the space of five years.”