The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (43 page)

Elizabeth would not countenance a full military alliance with the Barbary kingdom, but she would consider doing what her sailors did best and raid the Spanish fleet in the Caribbean, if al-Mansur would keep his promise to cover the costs. Agreeing to such a plan was evidently beyond al-Annuri’s authority, and by January 1601 negotiations seemed to have stalled just as public hostility toward the Moroccans grew more pronounced.

One of Cecil’s spies, Philip Honeyman, provided one possible explanation for this hostility, with the claim that al-Annuri’s mission was “to learn here how merchandise went, and what gain we made of their sugars, that he might raise the prices accordingly. The merchants took little pleasure in his being here.”
²⁴
John Stow offered yet another perspective:

Notwithstanding all this kindness shown them together with their diet and all other provisions for six months space wholly at the queen’s charges, yet such was their inveterate hate unto our Christian religion and estate as they could not endure to give any manner of alms, charity or relief, either in money or broken meet, unto any English poor, but reserved their fragments and sold the same unto such poor as would give most for them. They killed all their own meat within their house, as sheep, lambs, poultry and such like, and they turn their faces eastward when they kill any thing; they use beads, and pray to Saints.
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Having scorned the Moroccans’ religious practices, Stow went on to doubt the sincerity of their commercial activity:

Whereas the chief pretense of their embassy was to require continuance of her majesty’s special favor toward their king, with like entreaty of her naval aid, for sundry especial uses, chiefly to secure his treasure from the parts of Guinea, yet the English merchants held it otherwise, by reason that during their half year’s abode in London they have used all subtlety and diligence to know the prices, weights, measures and all kinds of differences of such commodities, as either their country sent hither, or England transported thither.
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After nearly six months the diplomatic, religious and commercial tensions that arose from the Moorish embassy’s presence finally brought it to an end. With no military or diplomatic agreement in sight, and London’s Barbary and Levant merchants increasingly unhappy about the commercially sensitive intelligence they believed al-Annuri was gathering, it was time for them to leave.

As they began to plan their departure, events conspired to hasten it. In late January, Elizabeth issued a proclamation with a direct bearing on al-Annuri’s retinue. It read:

Whereas the Queen’s majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects, greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great number of negroes and blackamoors which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain; who are fostered and powered here, to the great annoyance of her own liege people that which covet the relief which these people consume, as also for that the most of them are infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel: hath given a special commandment that the said kind of people shall be with all speed avoided and discharged out of this her majesty’s realms.
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The proclamation was a sign of the deteriorating political situation in England. The country was in a state of famine due to poor harvests and the devastating impact of enclosures. Elizabeth’s grip on power was slipping, and her immediate response was that of political leaders since time immemorial when faced with a crisis: attack economic immigrants, refugees fleeing religious persecution and “aliens,” even though in this case it made little sense considering the commercial benefits of her long-standing alliance with Morocco. Nor were the proclamation’s proposed deportations of blacks and Moors quite what they seemed. Elizabeth had “appointed Casper van Zenden, merchant of Lubeck, for their speedy transportation.” Van Zenden was a particularly unscrupulous character who four years earlier had hit on the idea of deporting black slaves and selling them in Spain. It was none other than a bankrupt Sir Thomas Sherley the elder who, spotting a lucrative business opportunity, petitioned Cecil to grant van Zenden the license in 1601, presumably in return for a percentage of the unsavory profits.
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Whether or not Elizabeth’s proclamation had any bearing on al-Annuri’s decision to go, within weeks of its publication he and his retinue had slipped quietly away. By February 27, 1601, they were back in Morocco. Al-Mansur’s subsequent letters to Elizabeth reveal that al-Annuri’s loyalty to him remained unshakable and also clarified the confusion over his origins. Al-Mansur wrote in May explaining that “the Andalusian came before our high Porte and relayed to us all your intentions and plans which you had discussed with him and conveyed to him. We listened with attentive ears until we understood them all, and became alert to all you had plotted.” Confirming that al-Annuri was a Morisco (or “Andalusian”), al-Mansur explained with obvious satisfaction that he knew all about Elizabeth’s covert scheme to recruit the Spanish-born Muslims in the ambassadorial party for a separate English-led attack on Spain. He would not countenance any Anglo-Morisco alliance because, as he explained to Elizabeth, he feared that the Moriscos might revert back to Christianity, or as he put it, “we fear that they may be swayed [against us] by the enemy,” the Spanish.
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Nevertheless, al-Mansur hoped Elizabeth might still agree to a joint venture against the Spanish in the Americas. He reminded her, “You say the fleet to be employed in that action shall need treasure for the charge to the value of £100,000, and that we should assist you therewith in secret, that the Spaniard may not come to the knowledge thereof.” He told her that the money “is ready and provided”; all she needed to do was send “a strong and tall ship, and some person of account” to collect it. His other concern was the Muslim colonization of the Americas. “For our intent,” he wrote blithely, “is not only to enter upon the land to sack it and leave it, but to possess it and that it remain under our dominion for ever and—by the help of God—to join it to our estate and yours.” He concluded grandly, “If your power and command shall be seen there with our army, all the Moors will join and confederate themselves—by the help of God—with us and you.”
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This was the first and last time that a Protestant-Muslim confederation was proposed to rule Latin America.

Elizabeth was sufficiently interested in using al-Mansur’s forces to threaten Spain to praise al-Annuri for his “utmost discretion,” and send her agent Henry Prannell to continue negotiations in Morocco.
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But any real hopes for an attack on Spain had died with Essex: the political will and much of the queen’s personal strength were gone. The court’s interest in a Moroccan alliance for political and commercial reasons seemed to have reached an impasse.

•   •   •

Despite the receding enthusiasm for an Anglo-Moroccan alliance at the highest political levels, interest in the Moroccan delegation beyond Elizabeth’s innermost circle was intense. Writers continued to publish histories and translations of Christianity’s fraught relationship with Islam, while dramatists exploited the combustible mix of politics, religion and espionage generated by Elizabeth’s Muslim alliances.

In the spring of 1600, a lawyer named Ralph Carr published
The Mahumetane or Turkish Historie,
a translation of various French and Italian accounts of the origins and rise to power of the Ottomans. It ranged across Islamic history, beginning with the Prophet Muhammad—described as “a gentile and very idolater”—and culminating in lengthy descriptions of the recent conflict in Malta and “the war of Cyprus, held betwixt the Turk and Venetians, some thirty years ago.”
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Carr reflected at some length on the religious schism within Islam, describing how Muhammad’s cousin ’Ali ibn Abi Talib, whom he called “Haly,” “changed, or rather annulled” Muhammad’s religious edicts “and made new of his own invention, through which innovation of religion, or rather superstition, the Saracens became marvelously divided” between Sunni and Shi’a. He concluded that “albeit the Turks and Persians also are in effect very Mahometists, yet differ they so in ceremonies, and other contraries of opinion, that the one do account the other very heretics.”
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Carr’s account was typical of the equivocal Elizabethan responses to the rise of the Ottomans. At one moment, he argued, “You shall find them in my conceit not inferior but superior far in every thing which hath given estimation to former ages”; at another, he warned his audience in terms reminiscent of Erasmus that it was a story “telling of ensuing danger, not much divided from our own doors, when daily we lamentably see our neighbors’ houses not far off flaming.”
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The excitement and danger created by English relations with the Moroccans and Ottomans continued to inspire plays that reveled in the audience’s compulsive fascination with the east. Within months of the publication of Carr’s book, sometime in late 1600 or early 1601, a play appeared entitled
Lust’s Dominion; or The Lascivious Queen
(also known as
The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy
), most likely written by Shakespeare’s associate Thomas Dekker, with the collaboration at various points of several other playwrights.
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It is a nasty, bloody drama, a throwback to the “Turk” and “Moor” plays of Peele, Greene, Kyd and Marlowe (to whom it was attributed until the early nineteenth century), yet it added a new and topical twist, showing the Moors literally in bed with the Spanish.

At the center of the dramatic action is Eleazer, a Moor and Prince of Fez and Barbary, who is married to Maria, a Spanish noblewoman. Although admired for his military prowess, Eleazer lives as a royal prisoner after his father’s defeat at the Spaniards’ hands left him “captive to a Spanish tyrant.” Although he is described variously as a “devil,” a “slave of Barbary,” a “dog” and a “black fiend”
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(the word “black” appears in the play twenty-eight times), Eleazer boasts that his blood is “as red and royal as the best / And proudest in Spain.”
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Unlike previous Moors onstage, Eleazer is a noble character accepted as part of a Christian community.

The play’s opening is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus,
with Eleazer revealed as the “minion” and lover of the “lascivious queen,” wife of the cuckolded and dying Spanish king Philip. The king’s subsequent death splits his court into rival factions; one tries to expel Eleazer, but he sidesteps banishment and vows to avenge his humiliating captivity and his father’s defeat at the hands of the Spanish. The uncontrollable passion and “lust” of both Spaniards and Moors leads to civil war as Eleazer plots the murder of his rivals and sacrifices both the queen and his wife in a spree of gleeful villainy that culminates in his usurping “the imperial chair of Spain.”
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Eleazer’s brief reign of terror is ended only when the king’s son Philip (modeled loosely on the Spanish king Philip III) disguises himself as a Moor by painting his face “with the oil of hell” and stabs the Moor. Like Aaron and Barabas, Eleazer dies unrepentant, shouting at the devils that come to claim him that he will “Out-act you all in perfect villainy.”
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As Philip assumes the throne, he closes the play by announcing:

And for this Barbarous Moor, and his black train,

Let all the Moors be banished from Spain!
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The play was performed as Elizabeth’s proclamation demanding the expulsion of “blackamoors” from England was being circulated; later, in 1609, Philip III would formally decree that all Moriscos should be expelled from Spain.
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The play could be seen as offering a solemn comment on the Moorish policies of Elizabeth I and Philip III. Yet Dekker’s drama was more ambiguous than this. It ends with a Spanish king still dressed and painted as a Moor, with his “lascivious” mother halfheartedly forgiven for her affair with Eleazer. Rather than aiming to offer solemn diplomatic advice about the dangers of England’s prospective alliance with a Moorish ruler,
Lust’s Dominion
revels in a dramatic fantasy where Spanish Catholics and Moorish Muslims are shown as two facets of the same apostasy. The English Protestant audience could gape and laugh at all of the ensuing violence, lascivious passion, tyranny and crime, appalled and delighted in equal measure by the play’s antihero Eleazer, a Moor who could be admired when causing chaos in the Spanish court, but was probably not to be trusted by the English.

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In late 1601 or early 1602, Shakespeare began work on a new play drawing on Muslim characters, close in its outlook to Dekker’s play, which he may have read or seen. It was set in the Mediterranean world of Ottomans, Venetians and Moors that was so familiar to a generation of Levant and Barbary Company employees and London theatergoers. Its tragic hero would contain elements of the exotic, bombastic characters in Marlowe’s and Peele’s plays and the more recent black Moors associated with Spain in plays like
Lust’s Dominion
. He was another ambivalent warrior with suspect allegiances required to combat a powerful enemy, pushed to his physical and emotional limits, who marries outside his community. The play begins in Venice, and invited its audience to consider what might have happened if the valiant Prince of Morocco had guessed correctly and married the noble Portia. It was called
The Tragedy of Othello
.