The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (13 page)

Ever since al-Malik’s accession in 1576, the ousted Abdallah Muhammad had been marooned in exile in Portuguese-occupied Ceuta. During his brief reign Abdallah Muhammad had been notorious for his hostility toward Christians, but now in extremis he made Sebastian a remarkable offer. If the young Portuguese king invaded Morocco, deposed al-Malik and restored him as ruler, Abdallah Muhammad promised to rule the kingdom as a Portuguese vassal state. Any experienced Christian ruler should have dismissed such a cynical proposal without a second thought, but to the astonishment of his counselors, the pious and naive Sebastian, desperate for an excuse to prove his mettle, could not resist. One of the sixteenth century’s more misguided monarchs, Sebastian was both pompous and impulsive and had the great misfortune to succeed his grandfather, King John III, when he was just three, following the sudden death of his father, Prince John Manuel, two weeks before his birth. Under King John, the Portuguese Empire had reached its zenith, monopolizing the Far Eastern spice trade, colonizing Brazil and reaching China and Japan. But by the 1570s, after Sebastian reached his majority, the empire was already in decline, in direct contrast to the neighboring Spanish Empire ruled by his cousin Philip. The young Portuguese king’s religious devotion and obsession with leading a crusade to rid Africa of the Moors blinded him to the folly of attacking, with a far smaller force and little backing from the rest of Christendom, a Moroccan army that had the tacit support of the Ottomans. By the spring of 1578 Sebastian began assembling a ragtag army of Portuguese conscripts, Moroccans loyal to Abdallah Muhammad, German Calvinist mercenaries and Castilian adventurers. Their number also included one of England’s most notorious renegades, Thomas Stukeley—soldier, spy, pirate and informer.
³⁵

“Of this man,” wrote Burghley, “might be written whole volumes.” Even by the swashbuckling standards of Elizabethan England, Stukeley had an extravagant career. Rumored to be the illegitimate son of Henry VIII, he had fled England before he turned thirty to escape arrest for sedition and fraud. He fought with great bravery and distinction on the continent throughout the 1550s, before returning to England and gaining Elizabeth’s favor as a privateer attacking Spanish and French shipping. In 1568 he was arrested on suspicion of treason and collusion with the Catholic Irish rebels. Having denounced Elizabeth, claiming scandalously that he “set not a fart for her, whore, nor yet for her office,”
³⁶
he fled, first to Spain and then to Rome, arriving in the wake of the papal bull of excommunication. Loyal Elizabethans were appalled by Stukeley’s behavior. Holinshed castigated him as “a defamed person almost through all Christendom, and a faithless beast,” while the historian William Camden condemned him grandly as “a ruffian, a riotous spendthrift and a vapourer [boastful bully].”
³⁷
Preaching open rebellion against Elizabeth, Stukeley encouraged first King Philip II and then Pope Pius V to finance his personal invasion of Ireland. In 1571 he captained Spanish galleys at the Battle of Lepanto, and by 1578 he finally obtained Pope Gregory XIII’s begrudging support for his Irish adventure, receiving just one ship and 600 Italian soldiers.

When Stukeley arrived in Lisbon in May en route to Ireland, Sebastian was still desperately short of soldiers. He implored the Englishman to abandon his Irish adventure and join him on his equally improbable expedition into Africa. The king wrote to Rome with typical sententiousness, explaining that he had bigger plans for Stukeley, and that he “understood the business better than the pope, or any of us, or anyone else in the world, and
in fine
it was best not to go [to Ireland] at present.” With characteristic opportunism (and the unattractive alternative of sailing on with a leaky boat and mutinous soldiers), Stukeley agreed, abandoning the papacy and Ireland, which he now claimed would have brought him only “hunger and lice.” Throughout the summer of 1578 the English renegade watched as Sebastian assembled his fractious army of 16,000 soldiers, who were quickly outnumbered by an extraordinary array of noncombatants, described by one commentator as “an unsavory company of baggage” that included bishops, priests and “an infinite number of drudges, slaves, negroes, mulattoes, horse boys, laundresses, and those sweet wenches that the Frenchmen do merrily call the daughters of delight.”
³⁸
Finally, in late June, the fleet was ready. Sebastian was wisely advised that midsummer was no time to lead an army of armor-clad knights into a battle with an experienced standing army in the sweltering Moroccan heat. As ever, the impetuous king refused to listen, and on June 26 his armada of hundreds of ships left Lisbon.

On July 12, the fleet made a chaotic landing at Asilah, on Morocco’s northwest coast. Rather than reembarking and sailing down the coast to his chosen landing site of Larache, Sebastian chose a suicidal weeklong forced march inland to reach his objective. “A perilous overland march of some thirty-five miles to reach a point only twenty safe miles away by sea,” observes one modern historian, was “an attraction which the scatter-brained youth could not resist.”
³⁹
On August 3, the exhausted and demoralized army, debilitated by marching for days on end in full armor in midday temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and running low on rations, reached the Mekhazen River on a plain north of the town known locally as El-Ksar el-Kebir (in Portuguese, Alcácer-Quibir). There they met and were quickly encircled by al-Malik’s formidable army of at least 60,000 experienced Berbers, Arabs, Turks and Moriscos, four times the size of Sebastian’s pitiful force. Even worse, it soon became clear that Sebastian’s decision to favor infantry with pikes over cavalry and arquebusiers (soldiers equipped with wheel-lock firearms) was a fatal mistake as they confronted al-Malik’s 30,000 horse and 3,000 crack Morisco arquebusiers, many of whom were probably armed with English munitions. Facing almost certain annihilation, Sebastian’s advisers gathered on the night of August 4, in a council of war. The consensus was to avoid disaster and beat a dignified retreat to the coast. Sebastian scorned this advice and ordered an engagement early the next day, in the hope of exploiting the element of surprise.

The following day, “the [fifth] day of August, which was Monday, in the year of our salutation 1578, the battle was begun between the two kings about twelve of the clocke.” Once again Sebastian managed to disable his army, choosing to fight at the hottest time of the day and riding into the blinding sun. What he did not realize was that his adversary, al-Malik, was mortally ill even before he reached the battlefield. Those close to the ailing king suspected he had been poisoned by disaffected Turkish supporters, others feared the plague; but, whatever the cause, by the time he addressed his troops that morning he had only hours to live. The Moroccan artillery fired first, briefly halting the advance of Sebastian’s infantry. Almost immediately “the arquebusiers on foot on both sides discharged as thick as hail, with such a horrible, furious, and terrible tempest, that the cracking and roaring of the guns did make the earth so to tremble, as though it would have sunk down to hell.” The fighting quickly descended into hand-to-hand combat: Sebastian’s German and Spanish regiments fought with such ferocity that they broke through the opposition, followed by the Portuguese cavalry. As the Moroccans buckled, al-Malik mounted his horse to rally his troops, but the effort was too much. He collapsed onto his litter and died within the hour. If the news had reached the rest of the battlefield, Sebastian might have won a most unlikely victory, but instead “his death was subtly dissembled” by the Moroccans and their troops rallied.

As the fighting raged on, a second king fell. Abdallah Muhammad had led an unsuccessful cavalry charge and seen the way the battle was going. He tried to escape across the Mekhazen, but he was thrown by his horse “and being unskilful to swim, was drowned and perished.” Stukeley also suffered an ignoble end: having deserted his Italian troops at the Moors’ first assault, “there came a piece of artillery that took off both his legs; and so he ended his days.”
⁴⁰
He might not have given a fart about Elizabeth, but it may have been one of her cannon balls that killed him. Finally, as the waves of Moorish infantry mowed down the last groups of exhausted soldiers, the third king fell on the battlefield. Sebastian had made every mistake possible in pursuing his dream of a crusade against the infidel, but at the last he proved a courageous, even inspirational warrior, who “forsaketh not his people: thinking it dishonorable to seek safety by flight, and with those few that followed him, behaved himself valiantly. He slew so many, he sent so many to hell, that many called him the lightning.” He was last seen, even as all was clearly lost, charging once more into the heat of the battle, where he was cut down. He was probably unknown to his killers as the last undisputed king of the Portuguese House of Avis, which had ruled Portugal since 1385.

After six hours of brutal conflict the Battle of El-Ksar el-Kebir—referred to in Europe as the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir or the Battle of the Three Kings, known to the Moors as the Battle of Wad el-Mekhazen and reported in English diplomatic correspondence as the Battle of Alcazar—was over. Sebastian’s army of 16,000 had been annihilated. Reports suggested that anywhere between 3,000 and 12,000 soldiers had been killed and no more than 200 had managed to escape. The rest, including the thousands of noncombatants, were carried off into captivity: the wealthy ones ransomed, the vast majority sold into slavery. Al-Malik was survived by his brother, Ahmad al-Mansur, who fought in the battle and immediately claimed the throne once victory was assured. He ordered the recovery of the bodies of the three dead claimants to his new crown:

These dead bodies of three kings being brought into one pavilion, made a horrible spectacle, and wrung tears from the beholders. For what more sorrowful and horrible a sight could there be, than to behold three most mighty kings, that died in one battle, lying together. The army of one of whom was vanquished when he lived, and after he was dead did straight away overcome the army of the other two kings: and whereas all three did aspire to the kingdom of Morocco, none of them held it.
⁴¹

When news of the defeat reached Lisbon the following month, a resident German merchant wrote home describing “how great were the lamentations, the despair and grief, not only in this city, but in all the land. The men went about as if dazed. . . . It is a woeful matter to lose in one day the king, their husbands, their sons, and all the goods and chattels they had with them. But what is even more terrible is that this kingdom must now fall under Spanish rule, which they can brook the least of all.”
⁴²
The humiliation was so profound that many Portuguese historians believe the country never recovered. Although Sebastian’s body was eventually repatriated and buried in the church of Santa Maria in Belém, many refused to believe he was dead, claiming he had fled the battle and would one day return to save the country from its seemingly terminal decline. The messianic belief in “Sebastianism” was even evoked to defend the Brazilian monarchy in the late nineteenth century, and it is still part of the modern Portuguese concept of
saudosismo,
a yearning or nostalgia for what was lost and might yet be regained.

•   •   •

Across Europe, rulers assessed the significance of the battle. The Ottomans were annoyed at seeing another Muslim ruler (albeit one who paid them obeisance) destroy a Christian army, especially after their own failings at Lepanto, but they reassured themselves that al-Mansur would remain pro-Turkish and cement their dominion in North Africa. Philip II was officially distraught at the news of his cousin Sebastian’s death, though he immediately saw an opportunity to exploit the subsequent power vacuum in Lisbon. Spain’s papal nuncio wrote to Rome to blame Sebastian’s defeat on Elizabeth’s support of al-Malik: “there is no evil that is not devised by that woman who, it is perfectly plain, succored Mulocco [al-Malik] with arms and especially artillery,” he thundered. Clearly shaken by the loss of their carefully cultivated Muslim ally, the English were dismayed by the prospect of Portugal falling into Philip’s hands. That would give the Spanish king effective control over the vast wealth of the whole of Iberia, the Low Countries, the New World and the Portuguese possessions in southeast Asia. With no immediate heir, Sebastian was succeeded by his aged great-uncle Cardinal Henry. Henry’s succession was contested by his nephew Don António, Prior of Crato, grandson of King Manuel I. Don António had fought bravely at Alcácer-Quibir, where he was captured, but had managed to ransom himself. Both England and France backed the Portuguese pretender in a forlorn attempt to stop Philip II, but such foreign support hardly helped his claim, especially when it included English “heretics” who were blamed for supplying the weapons that had defeated Sebastian. In August 1580 Philip’s troops marched into Portugal, defeating Don António’s forces at the Battle of Alcântara. Don António fled first to France and then to England, in the forlorn hope of building political opposition to the Spanish takeover. The following April Philip II of Spain was crowned Philip I, King of Portugal and the Algarve, creating (with the inclusion of Portugal’s possessions in the New World) one of the greatest empires the world had ever seen.

Elizabeth’s attempts to create an alliance with the Muslim world appeared to be in ruins, and her political isolation more complete than ever. Spain now had the heretic queen in its sights.

4

An Apt Man in Constantinople

As news of the events in Morocco began to reach London in the autumn of 1578, Francis Walsingham concluded that it signaled the end of the fledgling Anglo-Moroccan alliance, almost before it had begun. Ever the pragmatist, he turned his attention elsewhere—to the Ottomans. By the end of the year, the secretary of state and chief adviser on foreign affairs had written one of the most important documents in the early history of Anglo-Turkish relations, his “Memorandum on the Turkey trade,” written for Elizabeth and her counselors, which would become the blueprint for all subsequent Elizabethan relations with the Ottoman Empire.