The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (6 page)

In the 1550s English cloth exports collapsed due to political instability in the Low Countries as the Spanish authorities came into increasing conflict with many of the Dutch Calvinist provinces. The crown and City were faced with an economic crisis and had to decide “how this mischief might be remedied.” Although it seems mere folly today, many merchants began advocating Thorne’s “new and strange navigation,” a route that would become known as the Northwest Passage.
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In May 1553 Edward VI’s counselors concluded an agreement with London’s merchants and the explorer Sebastian Cabot, issuing “ordinances, instructions and advertisements of and for the direction of the intended voyage to Cathay,” led by Cabot, the governor of the “Mystery and Company of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknown.” It was a grand title for an amorphous organization with only a vague idea of where it wanted to go. The ultimate destination was Cathay—an Anglicization of the name given to China by Marco Polo—but the expedition was driven by a broader desire to discover “places unknown” en route.

The Merchant Adventurers’ ordinances represented the first attempt to formalize the terms of an English joint-stock company, an association jointly owned by shareholders in proportion to the amount of money they invest. The capital is then deployed to a common purpose—such as a commercial voyage—with the profits (or losses) split proportionally among those shareholders. There were medieval examples of guilds coming together across Europe to form joint-stock companies, but never in England. Where the physical distances and financial expenditure were too great for individual merchants, the joint-stock company’s collective capital mitigated the risks. It was also a sign of the growing power and unity of London’s merchant community that it was able to initiate such a project free of royal influence (though with the crown’s tacit assent). A total of 240 subscribers, including many merchants and some of Edward’s closest political advisers, invested £25 each to raise the £6,000 required to outfit Cabot’s Cathay voyage. It was a global initiative aiming to establish Tudor England as a significant player on the sixteenth-century world stage.

When the expedition set out on May 10, 1553, led by Sir Hugh Willoughby (rather than the aged Cabot) and his pilot, Richard Chancellor, it sailed past Greenwich Palace and fired off a salute to the king within. Many on board knew that Edward VI was mortally ill and suspected that, should they manage to successfully negotiate the frozen northern wastes, they would return to find a new monarch on the throne. Striking out for the Norwegian seas, the three ships faced treacherous weather, and Chancellor became separated from Willoughby, who found himself stranded on the Lapland coast. Willoughby was painfully ill equipped for such a climate, and as temperatures dropped down to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit, he and his crew of seventy froze to death in the winter of 1553–1554. Their bodies were recovered the following summer, along with Willoughby’s diary, which ends abruptly, describing search parties sent out to seek help who “returned without finding of people, or any similitude of habitation.”
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Chancellor was luckier, sailing on to the White Sea on Russia’s northwest coast, then continuing to Moscow by sleigh, where he met the Tsar of All the Russias, Ivan IV Vasilyevich, better known as Ivan the Terrible.

Chancellor returned to London in triumph in the summer of 1554 to discover Mary and Philip installed as England’s new monarchs. While Chancellor had gone north to Russia, other members of the Merchant Adventurers had gone south into west Africa, establishing a lucrative trade in gold, pepper, ivory and slaves. Philip had no wish for this enterprise, as it threatened the Spanish monopoly of the Atlantic slave trade and risked antagonizing Portuguese control of west African commerce, so he persuaded Mary to support her merchants’ pursuit of the northern trade routes instead.

On February 26, 1555, the “Charter of the Merchants of Russia, granted upon the discovery of the said country,” was granted “by King Philip and Queen Mary.” Effectively superseding King Edward’s 1553 ordinances, this was the first formal charter for an English joint-stock company, described as “one body and perpetual fellowship and communality.” It would come to be known simply as the Muscovy Company. Its merchants were given a monopoly on “sailing northwards, northeastwards, and northwestwards” to “traffic in and out” of Russia, for the “increase of the revenues of our crown, and general wealth of this and other of our realms.” The monarchs made some gesture toward requiring the merchants to “subdue, possess and occupy all manner of cities, towns, isles and mainlands of infidelity,” but this was primarily a document of trade and exchange, not of plunder and conquest.
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The company’s original aspiration had been to reach Cathay and the Spice Islands by heading north, but it had settled instead on cultivating Ivan the Terrible’s Russia as an intermediate trading partner. In the process, however, another destination had emerged. In 1557 Mary and Philip wrote to Ivan confirming their new commercial alliance and requesting safe passage for the Muscovy Company’s representatives to the neighboring imperial power and commercial powerhouse, the Safavid dynasty of Persia.
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Having begun their reign with the express intention of eradicating the heresy of Protestantism at home, economic and international imperatives pushed Mary and Philip into pursuing tentative relations with one of the great leaders of that other perceived heresy: Islam.

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In August 1555, little more than a year after his wedding, Philip left England for Brussels. His father, weary after nearly four decades of rule, was preparing to abdicate and divide his increasingly unwieldy Habsburg dominions between Philip, who would become ruler of Spain and the Netherlands, and Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand, who would become Holy Roman Emperor. Philip was pleased to escape his troublesome new kingdom, to which he would never return for any significant period of time. Mary was bereft. Knowing her husband’s fondness for maps, she commissioned the Portuguese mapmaker Diogo Homem to create a lavishly decorated atlas for him as a reminder of their personal and political union. Known simply as the Queen Mary Atlas, its nine richly decorated, hand-drawn maps show the world in Mary and Philip’s image. The Habsburg imperial eagle flies over the Americas and northern Europe; French and Portuguese political ambitions are diminished and the threat of Lutheranism is not even acknowledged. One map shows the Mediterranean region in the aftermath of Charles V’s Tunisian and Algerian campaigns. North Africa, adorned with Islamic banners, is labeled “Mahometania”; off the coast a Christian galley flying the flag of St. John engages a Turkish battleship; and to the north the crescent banner of the Ottoman Empire dominates the Balkans. The inference is that only Mary and Philip’s Anglo-Spanish alliance could unify a fractured Christendom and rid it of Muhammad’s heresy.

The map of northern Europe on the previous folio tells a somewhat different story. The largest escutcheon over England depicts the entwined heraldic devices of England and Spain, surmounted by an imperial crown in acknowledgment of Mary and Philip’s union. But on closer inspection it is clear that the Spanish coat of arms has been scratched out from this escutcheon. Having begun work on the atlas in late 1555, Homem labored over its exquisite decoration for three years, completing it too late to present to Mary, who died on November 17, 1558. Philip never saw the atlas, which was presented instead to the new queen. Elizabeth was the only person with the authority to scratch out the Spanish escutcheon from a royally commissioned book.
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Whether or not she herself was the originator of this stroke of political iconoclasm, it symbolized a decisive end to the brief Anglo-Spanish union, terminating Habsburg influence and with it the hopes of returning England to papal jurisdiction.

Mary bequeathed to her half sister a country divided both politically and religiously. Some of its elite had followed the European theological lead and decided that Protestantism was a heresy akin to Islam, an analogy that would come to dominate political discourse for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. Yet that same elite—for strictly pragmatic reasons—had allowed English merchants to reach out to the Muslim world. Elizabeth would exploit this divided legacy to the full as she tried to survive as a Protestant ruler in a predominantly Catholic Europe.

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The Sultan, the Tsar and the Shah

Within days of her accession in November 1558, the new queen Elizabeth began plans for her coronation, which took place in Westminster Abbey on January 15, 1559. Superficially the event bore many similarities to Mary’s coronation just five years earlier, but there were some striking theological differences, as Elizabeth began the delicate task of steering a course between the Protestant reforms of her half brother and the Catholic restitution of her half sister. Breaking with tradition, the coronation mass was read in both the traditional Latin and the English vernacular. Even more controversially, while conducting the mass, George Carew, dean of the Chapel Royal, stuck to the Catholic ritual of performing the elevation of the bread and wine, at which point Elizabeth seems to have followed her reformed principles by silently refusing communion and withdrawing. It was in fact a carefully rehearsed scene that tried to appease both sides of Elizabeth’s divided theological inheritance. As her reign progressed, the religious and dynastic realignments that took place across Europe would conspire to prevent Elizabeth’s attempt to find a godly “middle way” through the period’s sectarian conflict.

With his wife dead less than two months, Philip, now King of Spain and Lord of the Netherlands but ever the political pragmatist, gallantly proposed to his sister-in-law as a noble but rather halfhearted “service to God” to keep England Catholic.
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He was anxious to prevent the pro-French Scottish queen Mary Stuart from claiming the English throne and creating what for the Habsburgs would have been a disastrous Anglo-French alliance. Elizabeth politely declined her brother-in-law’s offer with the argument that he was, well, her brother-in-law. She wanted to end Philip’s influence over English affairs, but she was keen to avoid alienating Spain, which she knew could easily interdict her merchants’ trade with the Low Countries.

Just two months later, on March 3, 1559, Philip and the French king Henry II signed the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, which after decades of conflict united the two kingdoms in peace and concerted opposition to Protestantism. Although the treaty formalized peaceful relations between France and England, no one was fooled. Elizabeth proceeded to reform the Book of Common Prayer and reinstate an oath of supremacy, established by her father, Henry, but repealed under Mary, acknowledging the sovereign as “Supreme Governor of the Church” in England. These initiatives only increased Elizabeth’s isolation from the rest of Catholic Europe, which responded by starting to assemble a loose alliance against her new English brand of Protestantism.

This hostility made it more imperative than ever for the new queen to circumvent the continental powers by pursuing new markets via the Northeast Passage. But Elizabeth and the Muscovy Company, her newly inherited joint-stock company, were faced with a serious shortage of personnel. Hugh Willoughby had frozen to death in Lapland and his lieutenant, Richard Chancellor, who repeated the journey the following year, had again reached the White Sea only to drown in a storm off the Scottish coast on his return voyage in 1556. To make matters worse, Sebastian Cabot, the company’s director and guiding light, died in 1557. Only one man had the experience and credentials to develop the fledgling Elizabethan trade with the east. Unfortunately, as Elizabeth was being crowned queen in January 1559, he was on Muscovy Company business nearly four thousand miles away in Bukhara, a guest of the Islamic khanate’s Shaybanid ruler, Abdullah Khan II. His name was Anthony Jenkinson.

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Although scarcely remembered today, during his lifetime Jenkinson was regarded as one of the great pioneers of Elizabethan travel. Born at Market Harborough in Leicestershire, he trained as a merchant and spent his apprenticeship working with English factors (commercial agents) in the Low Countries and the Levant, where he specialized in textile fabrics. In 1546 he left England and went to Flanders, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain, before traveling across North Africa and the Mediterranean islands and throughout what he called the “holy land.”
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By November 1553, at the ripe age of twenty-four, Jenkinson reached the Syrian city of Aleppo. Together with its neighbor Damascus, Aleppo was one of the oldest cities in the world. It stood at the western end of the Silk Road and, renowned for its trade in Iranian silk and Indian spices, had drawn merchants from east and west for centuries. The city came under the Ottomans’ control following their victory in 1517 over the Mamluks (the ruling Egyptian military caste), and quickly attracted resident communities of Jewish, Armenian and Italian merchants who established permanent trading posts there. By the time Jenkinson arrived, drawn by the volume and quality of silk passing through the city’s fifty-six markets and the colossal central
suq,
it was already displacing Damascus as the region’s premier trading center and was widely regarded as the Islamic world’s equivalent to Venice.

Then, on November 4, a visitor with very different aims came marching into the city. Jenkinson was there as Sultan Süleyman I entered Aleppo at the head of a vast Ottoman army, which was embarking on a campaign against the neighboring Persian Safavid Empire. Jenkinson watched in wonder as one of the sixteenth century’s great armies swept past, led by “the Great Turke himself,” Sultan Süleyman, “with great pomp and magnificence.” Jenkinson’s experience as a mercer ensured that his description of the scene reads more like a fashion show than a military campaign. Watching an estimated 88,000 men march past, he noted that the cavalry were “clothed all in scarlet,” the infantry “all in yellow velvet, with hats of the same, of the Tartary fashion, two foot long, with a great robe of the same color about their foreheads.” The sultan’s elite fighting corps, the Janissaries, were wearing “silk, and apparelled upon their head with a strange form, called
Cuocullucia
.” This was the famed Turkish
bork
hat “in the manner of a French hood,” topped with “a great bush which wavereth up and down most bravely when he marcheth.” Finally, Süleyman himself appeared, “mounted upon a goodly white horse, adorned with a cloth of gold, embroidered most richly with the most precious stones.”