The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (11 page)

Emboldened by these developments and encouraged by the initial forays of London’s merchant community into Russia, Persia and Morocco, Elizabeth and her advisers decided to extend their search for alliances beyond Europe. Ever since the eleventh century, unscrupulous Christian merchants had traded with the “Saracens,” leading the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 to threaten with excommunication “all those faithless and impious Christians, who against Christ Himself and the Christian people provide the Saracens with weapons, iron and wood.”
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This prohibition, reinforced in councils over the subsequent centuries, was quietly ignored by many Christian states and their merchants operating in the eastern Mediterranean. The Venetians continued to trade with the Ottomans before and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and France had proposed commercial agreements with the Ottomans granting its merchants trading privileges as early as 1535. These were known as the “Capitulations” (from the Latin for “chapter” or “paragraph,” to describe an agreement with specified terms; the word developed its modern sense of “surrender” only in the seventeenth century). The treaties gave the French a significant advantage in the Levantine trade and cemented a more formal military and naval alliance with Sultan Süleyman, designed to check Habsburg imperial expansion.
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England was generally too small and too far away to matter very much when it came to such edicts, but now, as a Protestant nation led by an excommunicated sovereign placed beyond papal sanction and with some experience of trade with Morocco, England and its merchants were suddenly freer than any other Christian country to trade with the Islamic world.

The dawning realization that England could pursue more significant commercial alliances with Muslim rulers was a circumstantial response to excommunication, exacerbated by the wider conflicts of the time. In September 1566, just months after the accession of the ultraorthodox crusading pope Pius V, Süleyman the Magnificent died, ending a forty-six-year reign of relentless Ottoman territorial expansion. His successor, Selim II, immediately set out to prove himself by turning away from renewed Ottoman conflict with Persia, choosing instead to confront Christianity in the Mediterranean. With an aggressive pope in Rome and a bellicose sultan in Constantinople, the naturally cautious Philip II was beset with challenges to his rule from all sides. In 1568, already struggling with a Calvinist Dutch revolt, he faced yet another challenge from the Morisco community in Granada. The Moriscos, or “New Christians,” were Spanish-born Muslims forced to convert to Christianity after the
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(reconquest) of Iberia from Islam and the mass expulsions by the Catholic rulers of Castile in 1492. Angry at Philip’s increasingly intemperate policy toward them, they offered to acknowledge Ottoman sovereignty if Selim provided them with military aid. An exasperated Philip regarded the Moriscos as akin to a fifth column aiding the Ottoman imperialists and the Protestant cause in northern Europe.
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As prayers were offered in Constantinople’s mosques supporting the Moriscos, the sultan began dispatching soldiers and weapons to Granada.

Like Elizabeth, Selim had designs on the Moroccan sultanate, although his interests were more territorial than commercial. From the time of his accession Selim tried to destabilize the Sa’adian dynasty, which had managed to retain its autonomy by playing the Spanish off against the Ottomans. Selim exploited the divisions between the kingdom’s ruler, Abdullah al-Ghalib, and his younger brothers, Abd al-Malik and Ahmad al-Mansur, offering al-Malik and al-Mansur refuge in Algeria and Constantinople, where they made preparations to retake Morocco from their elder brother. Selim then turned his attention to Tunis. The city’s fall to the Habsburgs in 1535 had always rankled his father, Süleyman, and in late 1569 Ottoman forces took the city back from its Spanish-backed Hafsid rulers. Selim was now in charge of the North African coast as far as Morocco and was poised to push into southern Spain should the Morisco uprising prove successful.

Having taken control of the southwestern side of the Mediterranean, Selim now looked east and planned an invasion of Cyprus, knowing that this would almost certainly result in war with the island’s Venetian rulers. Legend has it that the decadent sultan wanted the island for the quality of its wine (questionable on many levels). Cooler heads among Selim’s administrators knew that whoever held Tunis and Cyprus controlled the flow of trade across the Mediterranean basin, the geographical flash point for what one historian of the region has called the “forgotten frontier” between Latin Christian and Turkish Muslim communities in the sixteenth century.
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In 1569, as Selim made preparations for the Cyprus campaign, he ratified the Franco-Ottoman Capitulations of the 1530s in a deft move aimed at ensuring French neutrality in any conflict that might unite Venice, the Papal States and possibly even Spain against him.

Ottoman designs on Cyprus inevitably led to a declaration of war against Venice in the summer of 1570, and in July a Turkish army of more than 60,000 invaded the island. Over the next sixteen months a brutal campaign was waged between Cyprus’s Venetian defenders and the vastly superior Ottoman forces. In May 1571, as the Turkish army besieged the last stronghold of Famagusta, Pope Pius and the Venetian authorities finally agreed on a fragile Holy League, which also included Spain, the Knights of Malta (fêted since throwing off the Ottoman siege of their island headquarters in 1565) and most of the Italian city-states. The league hastily assembled a Christian fleet of more than 200 ships led by Philip II’s half brother Don John of Austria, which set sail for Cyprus that August. It came too late for the defenders of Famagusta, who surrendered just after the fleet started out. When Don John learned of this, he headed for Lepanto near Patras in the Greek Peloponnese, where the Ottoman fleet of 300 ships lay at anchor. On the morning of October 7, 1571, the two sides engaged each other in what would come to be regarded as the greatest naval battle of the century. By 4:00 p.m. the Ottomans had been outgunned and defeated by the Holy League, losing around 210 of their ships and an estimated 15,000 soldiers and sailors.
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For a brief moment, Christendom forgot its divisions and united in celebration of its first victory in nearly a century over the seemingly invincible Turks. Across Europe the news was greeted with an extraordinary outpouring of delight and relief. Festivities, processions and church masses all celebrated the event as divine intervention just at the moment when Islam seemed poised to overwhelm Christianity. Pamphlets, paintings and poems were published celebrating what the Venetian Pietro Buccio described as a “marvelous and glorious Christian victory against the infidels.”
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When the news reached London, it sparked public celebrations there too, despite Elizabeth’s recent excommunication. Sermons in St. Paul’s thanked God for the victory, and the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed wrote that “there were bonfires made through the city, with banqueting and great rejoicing, as good cause there was, for a victory of so great importance unto the whole state of the Christian commonwealth.” As far as Holinshed was concerned, the Ottomans were “that common enemy of us all, who regardeth neither Protestant nor Catholic.”
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Although this showed a limited understanding of Ottoman realpolitik—which had a very clear grasp of Protestant and Catholic divisions and how to exploit them—Holinshed’s observation caught the popular mood. This was a moment, he intimated, when religious divisions could be set aside to unite Christianity against its biggest foe.

The victory at Lepanto would prove hollow within only a few years, and sympathy between England and the rest of Christendom evaporated almost immediately. Philip II and Pius V were now in a league that threatened to rid Europe of its Protestant “heresy,” and both Elizabeth’s allies and her adversaries knew it. One of England’s spies in the Low Countries responded to the victory at Lepanto by reporting that Spain’s “next enterprise shall be to subdue the English Turks,”
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while another English spy, William Herle, wrote from the Low Countries in June 1573 that Philip II hated the English Protestants “with an immortal hatred never to be reconciled, esteeming them worse than either Turks, Marranos, Jews, or Infidels, the blasphemers of God’s holy name and of his son Jesus Christ.”
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Elizabeth turned to her most trusted counselors—William Cecil, Lord Burghley and Francis Walsingham, her ambassador to France and ruthless spymaster—who advised her to consider cultivating alliances at both ends of the Mediterranean, with Portugal and the Ottomans. The Portuguese might prove difficult, considering the recent rifts over Morocco, but there was at least a diplomatic presence in both countries that might allow some compromise to be reached. The Ottomans were a different case altogether. The 1570s represented the apogee of Ottoman imperial power and territorial reach—though Elizabeth and her counselors, from their limited perspective in London, could not have known it. To them the Ottomans seemed to be winning. Anyone who was able to take on the papacy and the Spanish was to be welcomed, whatever his religious persuasion. But at such a distance from London and with no resident English ambassador or merchants, any attempt to negotiate with the sultan would prove extremely difficult, even dangerous. So the proposal for an Ottoman initiative was quietly shelved and Burghley opened negotiations with Portugal, agreeing to sacrifice English commercial interest in Guinea to retain a foothold in Morocco. By 1576 an Anglo-Portuguese treaty had resolved most of the outstanding commercial disputes, but it failed even to mention Morocco, leaving the English free by omission to continue trading there with impunity.
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Even before the agreement was signed, English merchants were exploiting instability within the Sa’adian dynasty to pursue increasingly formal arms deals with the crown’s tacit support. One of the key figures in the trade was Edmund Hogan, a member of the Mercers’ Company from Hackney, who had commercial interests in Germany and Spain and was widely admired as one of “the wisest and best merchants in London.”
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In 1572 Hogan had sent a man named John Williams to Morocco to check reports of an abundance of high-quality potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, a key ingredient in making gunpowder, which was extremely scarce in western Europe and was imported at great expense from Persia and India. Attempts by the English to make saltpeter artificially were difficult, messy (involving urine and animal excrement) and low-yielding. As a result there was much excitement when Williams returned with Moroccan saltpeter, which he told Hogan was “far better than he could provide in any other place where he had traveled.” The only problem was the new sultan, Abu Abdallah Muhammad II, Al-Mutawakkil, who had succeeded his father in 1574 after a brief power struggle with his uncle Abd al-Malik. Faced with al-Malik’s continued opposition, Abdallah Muhammad was not interested in trading saltpeter for English cloth: he told Williams that “if we would take upon us to bring him bullets of iron for his great ordnance, we should have saltpeter.” The sultan’s counselors advised him against the trade, arguing that “although his law was to the contrary . . . no saltpeter should pass to the Christians, considering the commodity of pellets [iron shot or cannon balls] was as needful for him as saltpeter to the Christians.”
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In 1575 Williams returned to England with saltpeter samples and took them to Killingworth Castle to show Burghley and Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, who was entertaining the queen on one of her royal progresses. Both men were impressed with the quality and approved the export of shot, cannon balls and other munitions. But the order came too late for Abdallah Muhammad. As the arms arrived (and just as Burghley was concluding the Anglo-Portuguese treaty), Abd al-Malik marched into Morocco from Algeria at the head of an Ottoman army, defeating Abdallah Muhammad outside his capital city of Fez and proclaiming himself the fourth Sa’adian sultan of Morocco. Abdallah fled to Ceuta, where he sought the somewhat unlikely protection of his great adversary, the young Portuguese king Sebastian I.

Having spent many years at the Ottoman court, al-Malik was more urbane and cosmopolitan than his predecessor, and he was eager to reestablish links with the English as a bulwark against the Spanish. Assessing his depleted military supplies, he realized he needed to encourage Hogan’s proposals. Although the English merchant found craftsmen initially willing to travel to Morocco to cast weapons, he reported that when they were about to embark from Harwich they took fright “and suddenly fled away.”
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Why they refused to leave is unclear, but not everyone was enthusiastic about trading with the infidel.

Despite these setbacks, the wily Hogan believed a deal was on offer from the new and inexperienced sultan. In a memorandum written to Elizabeth’s advisers in March 1577, he claimed that al-Malik was prepared to offer the English an exclusive trade in saltpeter in exchange for weapons. According to Williams’s intelligence, al-Malik claimed that, “being desirous of the honor I hear of your queen of England, and the good liking I have of the English nation,” he was prepared to “enter in league as well as for the quiet traffic of her ships and subjects in to this country of Barbary.” Hogan added one further intriguing observation: al-Malik could provide a global market for English cloth by offering an alternative route into Turkey and the vast eastern markets beyond. He argued that “all Christian commodities that goeth out of Christendom through Germany and Italy to serve the Turk, shall pass through his country to Constantinople, being a nearer passage and less charge than the other way, with good safe conduct and passport.” Hogan had watched the Muscovy Company struggle to sustain its Persian trade via the long and inhospitable Northeast Passage. He now seized this new opportunity to get at least as far as Turkey by going through Morocco, then east across North Africa. By transporting cloth “into Barbary by sea, which is as near as Spain, we shall cut off all strangers from transportation, and therefore maintain our navy to the enriching of the queen’s majesty’s subjects.” This, Hogan insisted, “is a matter of great importance because there shall be saved two thousand miles of carriage, and a good direct passage, with danger of Portugal and Spain.” He concluded by indirectly contrasting the Atlantic sea route to Morocco with the Muscovy Company’s grueling northeast voyage to the Arctic Circle by noting that “in our time, since the trade hath been in Barbary, the passage is such by sea as no ship hath miscarried that way.”
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