The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (12 page)

Hogan’s geography might have been questionable, but his determination was not. He managed to convince Burghley, Walsingham and Sir Thomas Gresham, the queen’s financial adviser and founder of the Royal Exchange (who was always looking for new projects to enlarge Elizabeth’s coffers), that he should travel to Morocco and meet the sultan as the queen’s formal representative. Quite what he was to discuss has been a matter of intense conjecture. As we have seen, Elizabeth had been provided with outdated information back in 1561, when she had given Anthony Jenkinson a somewhat naive letter for Shah Tahmasp. She had no intention of repeating her mistake with another Muslim ruler, and on this occasion she furnished Hogan with a letter of introduction (since lost) and detailed instructions, probably drawn up by Burghley, explaining what he should say upon meeting the Moroccan sultan. Remarkably, the recently excommunicated queen appeared to reproduce the age-old papal line regarding trade in prohibited goods. She ordered Hogan to thank al-Malik for allowing the English to trade in Morocco, but also to ask that he address English commercial grievances sparked by disputes with local Jewish merchants over the settlement of payments in “the matter of sugars.” She told him to avoid any discussion of arms deals. If the sultan raised the issue of “artillery and munition as he shall from time to time have need of (a matter to which we can neither in honor or conscience yield unto), our pleasure therefore is that you make no mention thereof to him.” If the sultan pressed Hogan about why the English could not supply him with arms, he was to say, “it is a matter that somewhat concerneth the service of our God,” and that any attempt at such a trade would “draw the hatred of all Christian princes our neighbors upon us” and lead to war.
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Armed with his instructions and the dual role of private merchant and Elizabeth’s first ambassador to Morocco, Hogan set sail from Portsmouth on May 6, 1577. Fifteen days later he landed at Safi, where he was met by a Moroccan delegation and English resident merchants. By the end of the month he had reached the outskirts of Abd al-Malik’s royal court in Marrakesh. As he rode into the city “there met me all the Christians of the Spaniards and Portuguese to receive me, which I know was more by the king’s commandment than of any good wills of themselves.” Hardly stopping even to acknowledge his Christian adversaries, Hogan recounted somewhat petulantly that they “hung down their heads like dogs, and especially the Portuguese, and I countenanced them accordingly.” On June 1 Hogan was finally ushered into a meeting with al-Malik, where he read out the queen’s letter in Spanish, waiting patiently as it was translated into Arabic. The sultan responded cordially (via a Spanish interpreter), and “declared that he, with his country and all things therein, should be at your majesty’s commandment.” Over the next month al-Malik and Hogan developed a brief but intense friendship. They dined together, watched plays, listened to music until midnight, messed about on al-Malik’s boat, baited bulls with what Hogan called the sultan’s “English dogs” and even watched what the bemused Englishman described as “a Morris dance.” In the midst of all the fun, Hogan managed to extract an agreement that “the Jews there resident” should settle their English debts, and he also obtained “300 quintals [13 tons] gross of saltpeter”—with no mention of any weapons in exchange.

Hogan gave an extremely positive assessment of al-Malik’s rule in his correspondence with London. “I find him agreeable to do good to your merchants more than any other nation,” he wrote to Elizabeth, although he acknowledged that the sultan still faced internal challenges from the deposed Abdallah Muhammad. “He is not yet all in quiet within his country,” as Hogan put it, “for the black king keepeth in the mountains, being of small force.” But what really caught Hogan’s attention was al-Malik’s apparent antipathy toward Spain and his support of England. He reported al-Malik as saying, “I make more account of you coming from the queen of England than of any from Spain,” because Philip II “cannot govern his own country, but is governed by the Pope and the Inquisition. Which religion he doth wholly mislike of, finding him to be a very earnest Protestant of good religion and living, and well experimented as well in the Old Testament as New, bearing great affection to God’s true religion used in your Highness’s realm.”
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Hogan’s obviously partial report read more like Lutheran propaganda than the theological confessions of a Muslim ruler avidly reading the New Testament and embracing the “true” Protestant faith. Just as the Shi’a Safavids were cast by the Portuguese and Venetians as saintly crusaders akin to early Christian warriors, so Protestant English merchants refashioned the Moroccan king in their own theological image to assuage any qualms they may have felt about doing business with him.

After this apparent revelation of al-Malik’s Protestant beliefs, Hogan went on to explain that the sultan was prepared to use his influence among the Ottomans to ensure that “all English ships that shall pass along his coast of Barbary, and through the straits [of Gibraltar] into the Levant seas” would be granted “safe conduct that the said ships and merchants with their goods might pass into the Levant seas, and so to the Turk’s dominions.” As far as Hogan was concerned, he was now dealing with a quasi-Protestant Moroccan ruler offering him free trade across his kingdom, and unfettered access to Ottoman dominions and markets even farther east. It was an assumption that sustained trade for the moment, but one that would not stand up to close scrutiny, or survive subsequent cataclysmic events in Morocco.

Hogan concluded his account by writing that “touching the private affairs entreated upon betwixt her Majesty and the Emperor, I had letters from him to satisfy her highness.” It is most unlikely that Hogan would have left Morocco with a substantial consignment of saltpeter without exchanging it for the arms that the sultan craved, whose export Burghley, Walsingham and Gresham had already sanctioned. There is a long, undistinguished history of states, whatever their religious or ideological beliefs, being economical with the truth when it comes to selling arms to apparent adversaries, and the Elizabethans were no different. Formal written instructions are sometimes far from reliable guides to the truth, and it seems that Elizabeth, fearing that her letter to Hogan might be intercepted by Portuguese or Spanish spies, produced a set of written instructions elaborately condemning arms deals, while her verbal instructions authorized them.

When Hogan returned to London in late July, he carried letters for Elizabeth from al-Malik that acceded to all of Elizabeth’s demands and proposed an exchange of ambassadors to formalize their new alliance. The Portuguese ambassador in London, Francisco Giraldi, was outraged and certainly believed that Hogan had exchanged English munitions for saltpeter during his visit. His formal complaint to Walsingham on August 9, 1577, provides insight into just how much Londoners knew about the Anglo-Moroccan trade. “I wish respectfully to inform you,” he wrote tartly, “that this city is full of the reception given by that tyrant the Shereef [a corruption of the Arabic for “noble”] to her Majesty’s ambassador; how he went to meet him, and honored him with this name by word of mouth, as has been more fully related to me by a Portuguese who came in the ship which brought the news. Also the thousands of stores and arms which that Ughens [Hogan] has taken in the galleon and in two other smaller vessels, which I am certain was little to the taste of the King, my master.”
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Elizabeth had to tread carefully. She wrote back to al-Malik in September saying she was happy to receive his ambassador, but would need great secrecy in the matter. A formal Anglo-Moroccan commercial and military alliance might be only a matter of months away.

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Hogan’s insistence that Morocco could provide access to the Ottoman markets had revived Walsingham’s long-standing interest in establishing trade with Constantinople. He believed that Christian reports of the Ottomans’ demise after the defeat at Lepanto were greatly exaggerated. The Holy League rapidly disintegrated as Pius died in May 1572 and Venice, desperate to reestablish commercial relations with the Ottomans, signed a peace treaty in March 1573 acknowledging Selim’s sovereignty over Cyprus and even paying him a financial tribute. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the Ottoman grand vizier (in effect, the prime minister), conducted a massive naval rebuilding program and boasted that the “Ottoman state is so powerful, if an order was issued to cast anchors from silver, to make rigging from silk, and to cut the sails from satin, it could be carried out for the entire fleet.”
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As the Ottomans rebuilt, the Habsburgs seized Tunis in 1573. A year later a new Turkish fleet, now even larger than before Lepanto, retook the city and restored Ottoman domination of the eastern Mediterranean.

So far as Walsingham could tell, the Ottomans were more powerful than ever and they appeared likely to control access to Asia via the Mediterranean for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, there were uncertainties: Selim died suddenly in December 1574 and was succeeded by his weak and capricious son Murad III, who retreated into his imperial palace and showed little appetite for taking on the might of Habsburg Spain. Undaunted, Walsingham was determined to foster an alliance.

The new sultan’s first act was to have his five younger brothers strangled to prevent challenges to his accession. He notoriously allowed his
haseki,
or consort, Safiye Sultan, to exercise unprecedented political power from within the protected space of the Topkapi Palace’s harem. Safiye, one of Ottoman history’s most enigmatic figures, was believed to be of Albanian origin and had been presented to Murad as a teenager after being captured by Ottoman forces. Murad also gave his mother, Nurbanu Sultan, a Venetian noblewoman enslaved within the imperial household, the opportunity to adopt the role of queen mother and dictate rival policies to those of Sokollu Mehmed, with disastrous consequences.

One policy that particularly interested Murad was the desire to woo Protestants by stressing the commonalities between their faith and that of Islam. In an extraordinary letter written with Murad’s approval by the Ottoman Chancery in 1574 and addressed to “the members of the Lutheran sect in Flanders and Spain,” the Protestant reformers were praised because:

you, for your part, do not worship idols, you have banished the idols and portraits, and bells from churches, and declared your faith by stating that God Almighty is One and Holy Jesus is His Prophet and Servant, and now, with heart and soul, are seeking and desirous of the true faith; but the faithless one they call Papa [the pope] does not recognize his Creator as One, ascribing divinity to Holy Jesus (upon him be peace!), and worshipping idols and pictures which he has made with his own hands, thus casting doubt upon the Oneness of God and instigating how many servants of God to that path of error.
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Rather like Hogan’s fantasy of al-Malik being “nearly” Protestant, in the Ottoman appeal Lutherans become
almost
Muslim, apparently sharing their rejection of intercession and their belief that Jesus was a prophet, though not a divinity, a belief ascribed solely to the “faithless,” misguided Trinitarian Catholic pope. Whether this was a calculated or an accidental misunderstanding of Protestant belief, its aim was clear: the Turks were eager to exploit the political divisions between Catholicism and what they referred to as the “Luterān mezhebi” (“Lutheran sect”).

While Hogan was busy negotiating in Morocco, the Ottomans’ attention was drawn away from Catholics and Lutherans back to the troublesome Shi’a dynasty in Persia. Wishing to exploit the internal turmoil following Shah Tahmasp’s death the previous year, Murad declared war, beginning a long and attritional conflict that would define his reign. At a stroke the Turkish invasion of the Caucasus brought the Muscovy Company’s faltering Persian trade to an abrupt halt. As far as Walsingham was concerned, the response required from England’s merchants was obvious. The Ottomans were a powerful empire sympathetic to Protestants that needed to arm and clothe its armies. They were obviously crying out for two of England’s staple commodities: cloth and guns.

Two of London’s biggest commercial companies and their leading merchants had come to the same conclusion. In 1575 Edward Osborne and his trading partner Richard Staper, both members of the Clothworkers’ Company, with extensive business interests in Spain, Portugal, Brazil and the Low Countries, proposed to open up Turkish trade through Poland. According to Richard Hakluyt, “about the year 1575 the foresaid right worthy merchants at their charges and expenses sent John Wright and Joseph Clements by the way of Poland to Constantinople, where the said Joseph remained 18 months to procure a safe conduct from the
Grand Signor
[the phrase used by the English to describe the Ottoman sultan] for Mr. William Harborne, then factor for Sir Edward Osborne, to have free access into his dominions, and obtained the same.”
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Hakluyt’s praise was understandable, as he was in the pay of Osborne and Staper. They were instrumental in granting him a Clothworkers’ scholarship at Oxford, which they continued to fund after he left. This was probably why Hakluyt omitted to mention that the rival Mercers’ Company had financed an earlier Turkish venture, this time by sea.

In June 1577, because Clements was in Constantinople, Thomas Cordell of the Mercers’ Company obtained an Ottoman license (or firman) ensuring safe-conduct to trade cloth, tin, lead and steel for a voyage bound for Tripoli, Alexandria and Constantinople. One of the ships that was then prepared for the voyage was the
Pelican,
a 120-ton galleon that did not in the end make it but was instead renamed the
Golden Hind
and became Sir Francis Drake’s flagship when he left Plymouth in November 1577 on the first English circumnavigation of the globe. Cordell had probably obtained the license from French merchants trading under the Franco-Ottoman Capitulations, which had been ratified in 1569. Under the terms of the trade agreement the Ottomans regarded Christian merchants as
harbis,
alien non-Muslims, protected by an
aman,
or temporary license. They were then tolerated as
musta ‘min,
a status similar to that of a
dhimmi,
a licensed non-Muslim, but they were exempt from paying taxes for one year.
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There are no surviving records showing whether Cordell reached Constantinople, or how Clements obtained his precious license, but we do know that by the spring of 1578 the English were ready to do business with the Ottomans. Then, in July, news from Morocco sent shock waves throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.