The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (25 page)

This plan was not solely of al-Mansur’s making. It was in fact part of a much larger anti-Spanish axis, developed by Elizabeth and her advisers in the immediate aftermath of their victory, that became known as the Portugal Expedition. In September 1588 plans were being drawn up to launch a bold counterstrike against Spain, with Sir Francis Drake appointed admiral and Sir John Norris as general. Elizabeth approved a military campaign to capture Lisbon, which it was hoped would trigger a popular uprising to put Don António on the throne, and to strike at Seville and establish a naval base in the Azores to attack the remnants of the Spanish fleet. Elizabeth’s problem was that she was virtually bankrupt. Drake and Norris therefore proposed that the expedition be financed as a joint-stock operation: Elizabeth would contribute £20,000, and £40,000 would be raised from London merchants, who would see a return on their investment in booty. The Dutch Calvinists were further asked to provide troops, ships and supplies to the value of £10,000.
²
When Elizabeth learned that al-Mansur was prepared to pay 150,000 ducats toward the costs of the expedition—at sixteenth-century exchange rates, that was approximately £70,000, or the campaign’s entire budget—the possibility of an alliance must have been extremely attractive.

With Francis Walsingham ailing and unable to fulfill his role on the Privy Council (he would die in April 1590), it was left to Lord Burghley to lead the negotiations with Bilqasim. He proceeded with his usual caution, worrying as to how Elizabeth should advise Don António to respond, the exact nature of Moroccan military support and “when the money shall be paid.” He also expressed concern that Elizabeth would risk losing her newfound prestige by throwing in her lot with a Muslim ruler, writing, “Her majesty is loath to hazard the honor achieved last year.” Eventually Elizabeth agreed to al-Mansur’s offer, albeit with some reservations, being “most ready to requite the same, so far forth as may stand with her honor and conscience.”
³
In January 1589, as Bilqasim settled into his London residence, Drake and Norris were in the Low Countries recruiting Calvinist troops to join their fleet and sail for Lisbon the following month.

Bilqasim was secure enough in his diplomatic role to lodge a series of further requests with Elizabeth’s advisers. He asked that, should al-Mansur need to defend his realm against other Muslim states while attacking Spain, he be permitted “to hire for his money certain ships and mariners within this realm,” as well as carpenters, shipwrights and “such provision and commodities” as he required. Bilqasim also requested that Elizabeth “bestow her reward on the poor man of Bristol, who brought him out of Ireland and had his ship cast away in the voyage.” This seems to be a reference to the unfortunate Henry Roberts, England’s first ambassador to Morocco, who was now reduced to receiving royal handouts. Roberts’s fall from grace was all the more humiliating for his having spent more than a year embroiled in an undignified and ultimately unsuccessful squabble with the Barbary Company’s directors over outstanding pay.
⁴

A silver “Geuzen” (“revolt”) medal coined during the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt, with the inscriptions “Rather Turkish than Papist” (
left
) and “In spite of the Mass” (
right
), dated 1574.

Had the Moroccan ambassador taken time out that winter from his political negotiations, he could have done what so many diplomats have done in London ever since and gone to the theater. What he would have seen might have startled him, as the city’s commercial playhouses were in the grip of a fascination for staging scenes and characters from Islamic history with which Bilqasim would have been very familiar, though he might not have recognized their version of events.

•   •   •

London’s most fashionable and popular play at this time was
Tamburlaine,
a play in two parts first performed in late 1587 by the Admiral’s Men (named after their patron, the lord high admiral Charles Howard of Effingham) at the Rose, the open-air playhouse built by Philip Henslowe. The play’s full title was
Tamburlaine the Great, who, from a Scythian shepherd, by his rare and wonderful conquests, became a most puissant and mighty monarch, and (for his tyranny and terror in war) was termed the scourge of God
. It was written by a precocious young playwright barely out of Cambridge by the name of Christopher Marlowe.

Variously accused in his short yet brilliant life (1564–1593) of being a spy, an atheist, a sodomite and (worst of all) addicted to tobacco, Marlowe quickly saw the limitations of plays like Robert Wilson’s
Three Ladies of London,
with their heavy-handed morality and abstract characters who bore little relation to the dynamic and exciting world that he saw around him. His response, in subject matter and language, would change the entire direction of Elizabethan drama. Marlowe’s inspired choice for his hero was Timur, a Turkic-Mongol warlord and founder of the Timurid dynasty. In just over thirty years at the end of the fourteenth century, Timur led a series of spectacularly successful and brutal campaigns, laying waste to central Asia, conquering Persia, invading Russia and capturing the Delhi sultanate. In 1402 he marched into Syria, defeating the Egyptian Mamluks and taking Aleppo and Damascus before overcoming and capturing the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara in 1402. Timur’s imperial aspirations were ended only by a fever that killed him in February 1405 as he marched on Ming China.

Timur provided Marlowe with a violent yet seductive hero, bestriding a vast global panorama of the postclassical world in which rival Tatar, Persian, Turkish and Christian empires contended for global sovereignty. In Marlowe’s hands much of Tamburlaine’s life is fictional (including his name, which Marlowe adopted from the Latin sources he had read, unaware that “Tamburlaine” was originally a contemptuous nickname referring to the warlord’s lameness from a youthful injury, a disability he lacks in Marlowe’s play). He is transformed into a lowly Scythian shepherd, a brilliant orator and charismatic overreacher who delights in humbling the mighty, whatever their beliefs. Tamburlaine’s ceaseless and apparently amoral appetite for conquest simultaneously appalled and enthralled Elizabethan audiences.

Marlowe’s play dramatizes the extraordinary ambition and will to power of its hero. In the opening scene, Tamburlaine is threatened by the Persian emperor Mycetes, but he is shown quickly seducing, fighting, commanding and conquering his way to lead one of the most powerful empires in history. Marlowe wanted to create a heroic character in which his audience could believe. Despite the challenge of staging a play with such a vast geographical range (from Persepolis through Africa to Damascus),
Tamburlaine
succeeds due to the unprecedented force of its hero’s language. Here is an utterly captivating orator who can perform terrible acts of cruelty and violence while simultaneously persuading the audience of his love for his wife and his absolute commitment to imperial success. In Part Two, finally conquering Babylon and hanging its governor from the city walls, Tamburlaine performs his most audacious and controversial act and burns the Qur’an, claiming to be greater than any god. He falls ill shortly after and commands his sons to conquer what is left of the world before he dies.

Marlowe’s riveting drama hinged on an innovative combination of language and action. Before him, most English poets and dramatists wrote rhyming verse whose structure was dictated by the number of syllables in each line. Marlowe’s great innovation was to transform one such rhythmic technique, iambic pentameter, previously used in stiff and repetitive rhyming couplets, into a vehicle for creative expression. In
The Three Ladies of London,
Wilson had used what is known as “Poulter’s measure,” rhyming couplets alternating between twelve and fourteen syllables. The resulting lines in the “Prolog” sound flat and trite:

To sit on honor’s seat, it is a lofty reach,

To seek for praise by making brags, oft times doth get a breach.
⁵

Marlowe chose to use unrhymed iambic pentameter, what we now call blank verse. From the very first lines of
Tamburlaine,
the difference was electrifying:

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

We’ll lead you to the stately tent of War,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms

And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

View but his picture in this tragic glass

And then applaud his fortunes as you please.
⁶

It sounds like a manifesto, which is what Marlowe intended. He tells his audience audaciously to forget the artificial “jigging” rhymes of clowning of plays, leading them halfway across the world into the heart of battle, where the hypnotic beat of the blank verse allows them to “hear” Tamburlaine declaiming in “astounding terms” how he will match his words with deeds.

Ben Jonson captured the power and originality of Marlowe’s verse when he wrote of “Marlowe’s mighty line,” but he also mocked Tamburlaine’s “scenicall strutting and furious vociferation,” vulgar entertainment that did no more than pander to the playhouse’s poorly educated audience.
⁷
Thomas Nashe ridiculed Marlowe’s innovations as “the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse,” dismissing his new technique as “the spacious volubility of a drumming decasillabon.”
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Marlowe’s great rival Robert Greene went even further, complaining that Marlowe’s innovation was putting him out of business, “for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bow-Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine.”
⁹

Tamburlaine’s grand, declamatory style was notorious for its theatrical impact and the provocative views it conveyed. It allowed Marlowe to question some of his audience’s most cherished beliefs—including their attachment to religion. As the classical writers of ancient Greece and Rome had shown, the ability to persuade was one of the most highly regarded attributes of public figures. Marlowe was as skillful an orator as Cicero but as dangerous as Satan, who had shown in the book of Genesis that artful persuasion could change the fate of mankind. Is Tamburlaine the brave hero who conquers the Turkish, Persian and Egyptian enemies of Christianity in Part One, or the tyrannical atheist who will even march against heaven in Part Two?

In Part One, as Tamburlaine prepares to go into battle with the Ottoman sultan Bajazeth (Bayezid I), he congratulates his lieutenant Theridamas for his rousing anti-Turkish rhetoric:

Well said Theridamas! Speak in that mood,

For “will” and “shall” best fitteth Tamburlaine,

Whose smiling stars give him assurèd hope

Of martial triumph ere he meet his foes.

I that am term’d the scourge and wrath of God,

The only fear and terror of the world,

Will first subdue the Turk, and then enlarge

Those Christian captives which you keep as slaves.
¹⁰

Tamburlaine sounds and acts like a Christian agent sent to vanquish the Ottoman Turks, promising to release the captives enslaved in Turkish galleys. Just as Marlowe was writing, William Harborne was struggling to free Christian galley slaves, albeit using more peaceable methods. Within two scenes Tamburlaine defeats Bajazeth and imprisons him in a cage, adding to his humiliation by using him as a footstool to step onto his throne. Bajazeth asks in vain that the “holy priests of heavenly Mahomet”
¹¹
poison Tamburlaine, who responds by declaring,

let the majesty of heaven behold

Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
¹²

The moral ambiguity of Tamburlaine made him a captivating hero: simultaneously tormentor and savior. Marlowe had created a man who was more than a type—he made a character.

Trampling an enemy underfoot held powerful and immediate religious associations for Marlowe’s audience, who would have heard in Marlowe’s lines the verse from the Psalms, where God says, “Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool” (Psalms 110:1). The 1583 edition of John Foxe’s hugely popular
Acts and Monuments
gave a particularly English twist to this concept with a woodcut showing Henry VIII in the guise of Solomon, using Pope Clement VII as a footstool. Marlowe knew that many Protestant theologians—including Foxe—conflated the pope with the Turk as two incarnations of the Antichrist, but Tamburlaine was no reformed Christian. At every turn Marlowe confounds his audience’s expectations as to where their sympathies should lie, by creating a hero who is simultaneously antagonistic toward Christianity and a liberator of Christians.