The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (7 page)

It was the sultan’s headgear that fascinated Jenkinson. With a mercer’s eye for gauging cloth, he noted that Süleyman wore “upon his head a goodly white tuck [turban], containing in length by estimation fifteen yards, which was of silk and linen woven together, resembling something of Calicut [Indian] cloth, but is much more fine and rich, and in the top of his crown a little pinnach [plume] of white ostrich feathers.”
³
Such dazzling displays of power and panache had earned Süleyman the sobriquet “the Magnificent.” Jenkinson concluded his awed account by observing that Süleyman’s army, “intending to march into Persia, to give battle to the Great Sophie,” Shah Ismail I, would winter in Aleppo.

The title “Sophy” came from the Safavids’ founder, Safi ad-din Ardabili, and his self-proclaimed designation
çafī-ud-dīn
or guardian of “purity of religion.” But it was also combined in the Christian Renaissance imagination with the Greek word
sophia,
wisdom, which led many scholars to regard the Persian rulers mistakenly as venerable magi. Little did Jenkinson know that what he was witnessing was a chapter in a conflict between the Ottoman and Persian empires that would have a profound bearing on subsequent Anglo-Islamic relations. It was a conflict that bore an uncanny resemblance to the religious Reformation then convulsing Christendom. This was the Ottomans’ third military campaign against the Persian Safavids, arising out of the centuries-old enmity between the Sunni (Ottoman) and Shi’a (Persian) branches of Islam, whose origins can be traced right back to the struggle for political control of the
umma,
the Muslim community, after Muhammad’s death in 632.

The issue revolved around the title of “Khalifat Rasul Allah,” or “the successor to the messenger of God”—that is, the caliph. The question that consumed Islam throughout this period was whether the caliph should be appointed by the community or follow Muhammad’s direct line of descent. As tensions mounted and factions hardened, the
umma
descended into a period of civil wars, known as
fitna
(“strife”). In 656 ’Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and the husband of his daughter Fatimah, claimed the caliphate as his hereditary right, but he was immediately challenged by Mu’awiyah, the governor of Damascus and part of the Umayya clan, who was not directly related to Muhammad. When ’Ali was assassinated by one of his own hard-line former followers in Al-Kufa, south of Baghdad, in 661, Mu’awiyah became the uncontested caliph, and the first of the Umayyad dynasty based in Damascus, shifting the center of Muslim imperial power away from the Arabian Peninsula for the first time in its short, turbulent history.

The majority of Muslims, those who accepted Mu’awiyah’s leadership, became known as Sunnis, taking their name from “Sunnah”—the traditional teachings of Muhammad. However, a significant minority, the “Shī’atu ’Ali” or “the party of ’Ali,” rejected the elective succession of the subsequent Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman caliphates. Their political objections over the succession gradually hardened into a theological schism dividing the followers of ’Ali from the Sunnis after ’Ali’s son, Husayn, was killed by the Umayyads at the Battle of Karbala in present-day Iraq in 681. To the Shi’a, as these minority believers became known, Husayn was a Christlike figure who had martyred himself in anticipation of a final, divine revelation that would fulfill the prophecies of Abraham, Muhammad and ’Ali. In contrast to Sunnis, the Shi’a invested absolute authority in a line of imams descended from Muhammad through his daughter Fatimah and endowed with divine and infallible knowledge. When ’Ali’s line disappeared in the ninth century, the largest branch of Shi’a, known as “Twelvers,” developed a belief that God had hidden the twelfth, “lost” imam, who would one day reveal himself as the Mahdi (“divine guide”), or messiah, and unify Islam in its millenarial triumph over all other religions. Sunni theologians condemned these messianic beliefs as
bid’a,
or religious innovation, schismatic and heretical beliefs in salvation. Their condemnations were strikingly similar to the language with which sixteenth-century Catholics condemned Protestants.

Having rejected the authority of the caliphate, the Shi’a regarded with suspicion any form of political governance before the return of the hidden imam. The fragmentation of Persia under the Timurid dynasty in the late fifteenth century encouraged the rise of various Shi’ite rulers espousing Sufism (a mystical dimension of Islam), the most militant of whom were the Safavids from Ardabil in northwest Persia. In 1501 their fourteen-year-old spiritual and political leader, Sheik Ismail Safavi, completed a victorious campaign throughout Azerbaijan and Iran, proclaiming himself the first shah of Persia and founding the Safavid Empire in his newly conquered imperial capital, Tabriz. In a defining moment in Iran’s history, Ismail proclaimed Shi’ism the empire’s official religion, and announced himself as the long-lost Mahdi. His followers worshipped him as a god, and he immediately launched a jihad against his neighboring Sunni rivals, the Ottomans, marching into Anatolia and Syria, conquering Baghdad and destroying Sunni holy sites wherever he found them. Persian chroniclers described how, when Ismail conquered Tabriz, he commanded “that Abu Bakr, Umar and Usman [Sunni caliphs] should be cursed in the bazaars, on pain of death to him who refused. In those days men knew not . . . of the rules of the twelve Imams [but] . . . day by day the sun of the Shi’a faith rose higher.”
⁴

In response the alarmed Ottoman sultan, Selim I, declared war on the Safavids as the biggest political and religious threat to his commercial power and title of “Protector of the Holy Cities” of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. As Islam officially forbade war between Muslims, Selim was required to issue a fatwa against Ismail’s Shi’a followers, condemning them as “infidels and heretics” and asserting that “to kill them and to destroy their communities is an implicit and essential obligation for all Muslims.”
⁵

As news of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict reached Europe’s capitals in late 1501, Venice, France, Portugal and even the papacy began corresponding with Shah Ismail in an attempt to build an anti-Ottoman alliance. Venetian merchants in Damascus wrote to the city’s senators following Ismail’s accession, advising them that it was an “opportune moment to form an alliance among the Christian princes and Persia to engage in the most holy war to throw the Turk out of Europe.”
⁶
A mixture of political expediency and a garbled understanding of Shi’a beliefs led others to justify such an alliance by mythologizing Ismail as a warrior saint who led his pious warriors into battle against “infidel” Sunni Muslims, not unlike crusading Christians.

In 1502 the Venetian spy Constantino Laschari returned from an encounter with Ismail and reported to the city’s senate that the shah’s “Sophi [Sufi] religion has always fought against the Ottoman royal house because the Ottomans are heretics and usurpers of the territories of many Muslims.” Turning to the shah himself, he concluded, “Ismail is considered a prophet, rich, just, generous, and divinely inspired. He is much beloved of his sect which is a certain religion—Catholic in their way.”
⁷
Venice saw the advantages of securing its eastern Mediterranean trade against Ottoman aggression by allying with Ismail, and the Portuguese sought his favor in their naval battles with the Ottomans in the Indian Ocean. None of Ismail’s Christian suitors was concerned to inquire too deeply into the exact nature of his Shi’a faith. One Venetian thought him “more Christian than otherwise,” an erroneous but expedient assumption: as one historian has argued, “a political alliance with a Sufi saint was easier to justify than one with a Muslim king.”
⁸

When a vastly superior Ottoman army equipped with artillery defeated Ismail at the Battle of Chaldiran (in modern-day eastern Turkey) in 1514, the shah’s divine invincibility was shattered. His capital was soon overrun by the Ottomans, and Ismail retreated eastward, taking refuge in hunting and drinking (known in Persian poetry as
bazm u razm
), never to regain sufficient authority to challenge the Ottomans seriously. After his death in 1524 he was succeeded by his son, Shah Tahmasp I, who was faced with a series of attempted Ottoman invasions throughout the 1530s and 1540s. In the late 1550s Tahmasp responded with incursions into eastern Anatolia. Süleyman replied by mobilizing his army in 1558 and marching toward Aleppo. But the sultan was not free from his own domestic problems. In his early sixties, he was beset with illness and domestic squabbles among various wives and eight politically ambitious sons, and he was particularly suspicious of his youngest, Prince Mustafa. Just weeks before Jenkinson marveled at his forces marching into Aleppo, Süleyman camped in Konya, central Anatolia, and called Mustafa into his tent, where the sultan’s eunuchs strangled the young prince with a bowstring as his father looked on.

There is no evidence to suggest that Jenkinson knew much about any of these theological and political machinations, which makes it all the more remarkable that within weeks of watching Süleyman entering Aleppo he not only had engineered an audience with the sultan but had come away from it with the kind of formal trading privileges usually granted only to heads of state, signed by Süleyman himself. Without any diplomatic training or credentials and no history of English relations with the Ottomans, Jenkinson had secured virtually unprecedented rights to “lade and unlade his merchandise wheresoever it shall seem good unto him” throughout the Ottoman Empire, free from “any other custom or toll whatsoever.” Even the sultan’s long-standing commercial allies France and Venice (one of which probably provided Jenkinson with safe passage into Aleppo) were told not “to intermeddle or hinder his affairs.”
⁹

One wonders what Süleyman and his advisers made of this precocious (some might say foolhardy) young Christian mercer from a small, peripheral Christian island standing in front of them, with no diplomatic credentials and unable to speak Turkish, boldly negotiating exceptional commercial access to their vast dominions (presumably speaking in a mixture of Italian and French, the Levant’s lingua franca). If the history of Anglo-Ottoman relations begins anywhere, it is with the twenty-four-year-old Jenkinson’s extraordinary achievements in Aleppo in the winter of 1553–1554.

That spring Süleyman and Jenkinson both left Aleppo. The sultan headed east, marching into Persia, while Jenkinson went west, returning home to London, where the following year the Mercers’ Company acknowledged his success in the Levant by making him a full member. Two years later, with Willoughby, Chancellor and Cabot all dead, Jenkinson’s commercial and diplomatic experience made him the obvious person to lead the Muscovy Company’s next Russian voyage. Jenkinson, still only twenty-seven but already described by the Muscovy Company directors as “a man well traveled, whom we mind to use in further traveling,”
¹⁰
was appointed captain general of a fleet of four ships heading back to Russia via the forbidding White Sea to take advantage of the trading rights granted to Chancellor by Ivan the Terrible. In May 1557 Jenkinson set sail, reaching the White Sea in the relatively clement month of July, before traveling overland to Moscow and the tsar’s court, where he arrived in December.

Once again, Jenkinson found himself dealing with a powerful emperor ruling an eastern empire that was in transition; once again, he managed to charm his way into the ruler’s affections and extract unprecedented access to him and his kingdoms. On Christmas Day 1557, Jenkinson was given an audience with Ivan. He kissed the tsar’s hand, presented letters from Mary and Philip, and sat down for dinner with “diverse ambassadors and other strangers, as well as Christians and heathens.” Ivan’s advisers then told him almost immediately that “the emperor would give me that I desired”: unfettered commercial access to the Caspian Sea and trade with Persia.
¹¹
It was a perfect time for both men to do business. England needed to reach the east by avoiding both the overland routes through mainland Europe and the seaborne routes controlled by Spain and Portugal. Ivan had recently conquered Kazan and Astrakhan, Turkic Muslim khanates that had controlled the regions around the Volga delta and Caspian Sea. This enabled him to offer European traders unrestricted access to Persia and, by optimistic extension, China, in exchange for closer commercial and military ties. But ongoing hostilities with Poland, Lithuania and Livonia on his western borders made it difficult to establish an overland trade route to Low Country markets. Jenkinson and the English seemed to provide a solution by offering a sea route via the White Sea. Tortuous though it might seem, Jenkinson (now wearing Russian dress) and Ivan agreed to establish a trading route that involved a 1,700-mile sea voyage from London to the White Sea, followed by a 3,000-mile overland route to Persia.

Sailing to Russia and reaching Moscow was the easy part of Jenkinson’s expedition when compared with the daunting Persian journey via the Caspian Sea that now faced him. On St. George’s Day, April 23, 1558, he left Moscow with just two English companions and a Tatar (Turkic) translator provided by Ivan. He headed southeast to Kazan, where he picked up the Volga River and headed south toward Astrakhan. As he traveled by horse, boat and camel, he was appalled by the devastation, including “famine and plague,” that had been wreaked on the local khanates by Ivan’s brutal military campaigns. In July he reached the recently conquered city of Astrakhan, less than sixty miles from the Caspian, but was disappointed to find that “there is a certain trade of merchandise there used, but as yet so small and beggarly, that it is not worth the making mention.” The following month he became the first Englishman to reach the Caspian Sea, knowing that its southern shores marked the beginning of the Persian Empire.
¹²
The intrepid Englishman was now beyond Ivan’s jurisdiction and faced repeated harassment, theft and extortion as he traveled in caravans, leading a train of camels with his meager merchandise, brokering deals as he went with local Tatar warlords who were at perpetual war with both Russia and Persia. Finally, in late December 1558, just weeks after Mary’s death and Queen Elizabeth’s accession (both of course unbeknownst to him), Jenkinson reached Bukhara and the relative security of its Muslim Shaybanid ruler, Abdullah Khan II.