The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (21 page)

Upon his arrival in Marrakesh, Roberts reported, “I was lodged by the emperor’s [al-Mansur’s] appointment in a fair house in the Juderia or Jurie, which is the place where the Jews have their abode, and is the fairest place, and quietest lodging in all the city.”
⁶³
Another walled Juderia, more commonly known as the
mellah,
was the first Jewish quarter established in the salt marshes outside Fez in 1438. It took its name from the Arabic
mallah,
or “salty soil.”
⁶⁴
Marrakesh’s
mellah
had been established in the late 1550s on the same principles as Fez’s, but it was very different from the Jewish ghettos created in the Christian cities of Venice (1516) and Rome (1555). In Europe the religious persecution of Jews led to severe restrictions on their rights of employment, property ownership and freedom of movement. Under Muslim rule, Jews were granted the status of a protected minority (
dhimmi
) and acknowledged to hold important positions in government and finance, as well as the monopolies over trade in sugar and Christian captives. The vast majority were Sephardic Jews, thousands of whom had started to arrive in Morocco following the expulsions in 1492 of both Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. Their cosmopolitan experience and ability to broker international political, cultural and commercial deals on behalf of Morocco’s new rulers ensured that al-Mansur was assiduous in building a
mellah
in Marrakesh with grand mansions, its own
funduq
(markets) and synagogues, as well as Christian chapels for other exalted foreigners, like Roberts, who found themselves lodged there.

To a soldier like Roberts, used to the monoglot world of England and Ireland and its stark religious divisions between Protestant and Catholic, the multiconfessional and polyglot world of Marrakesh must have come as a massive shock. Marrakesh was a multicultural city, containing Berbers, Arabs, Sephardic Jews, Africans, Moriscos and Christians, many of them merchants and diplomats, others slaves and captives hoping to be ransomed and each professing one or another of a variety of religious persuasions. Walking through the city, Roberts would have heard Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish—the lingua franca of most of the resident Europeans—Portuguese, Italian, French and even German. Marrakesh was also becoming known as a home for a new community that was caught between religions: the
renegadoes
. The Spanish
renegado
(from the Latin
renegare,
“to deny”) was an apostate, specifically a Christian who had converted to Islam, although the term could also refer to Jewish and Muslim apostates. The word first entered English in the early 1580s, usually with a Spanish inflection—suggesting that it was a phenomenon associated with Spanish Catholicism rather than English Protestantism.
⁶⁵

Roberts, who was more used to quashing Catholic insurrection in Ireland than to moving in cosmopolitan communities, suddenly found himself living alongside individuals like Estêvão Dias, a Portuguese
converso—
a Jew forcibly converted to Christianity. When, in 1564, Dias had been denounced as a crypto-Jew by the Lisbon Inquisition, he immigrated to the Low Countries, where he lived for a time as a merchant. He traveled throughout Italy before settling in Marrakesh in 1581 and reconverting, adopting the name of Rabbi Joseph, at which point he began writing an extraordinary defense of his Jewish faith. Known as the “Marrakesh Dialogs,” Dias’s apologia is couched in the form of a dialog between two Flemish brothers. Both are merchants: one is Catholic; the other, Bernard, converts to Judaism while on business in Morocco and takes the name Obadia Ben Israel. The two brothers debate their respective religions. Obadia criticizes Catholic beliefs ranging from Trinitarianism to idolatry and denounces the recent rise of Lutheranism and Calvinism, which he identifies as a sign of the need for Christianity to embrace Judaism.
⁶⁶

In his brief account of his time in Marrakesh, Roberts expressed no interest in describing encounters with individuals like Rabbi Joseph. Instead he limited himself to prosaic details of his domestic arrangements. He occupied a spacious house alongside three resident English factors, Robert Lion, Miles Dickonson and Edmond Mastidge. It included two countinghouses, two warehouses and a study, rented for £14 a year. On top of his salary of £100, Roberts could reclaim from the company various expenses ranging from lodging, food and clothes to furniture, laundry, horses and a Moroccan groom. Lion even claimed the medical costs of treating his “leg bitten by a dog” (£1 5s 3d). In such a remote and unfamiliar country these expenses were unsurprising, but they would soon begin to diminish the Barbary Company’s profits.

Within three days of his arrival, Roberts was given an audience with al-Mansur. He “delivered my message and her Majesty’s letters, and was received with all humanity, and had favorable audience from time to time for three years,” whose content, “for diverse good and reasonable causes, I forbear here to put down in writing.”
⁶⁷
Such circumspection was understandable. Roberts spent part of his three years trading munitions on Leicester’s behalf (with Elizabeth’s tacit support), even though he was officially allowed only to act as the crown’s representative overseeing the company’s commercial activities. The rest of his time was spent trying to persuade al-Mansur to join an anti-Spanish league in support of Don António’s claim to the Portuguese crown.

•   •   •

By now both Leicester and Walsingham were exploiting their alliances at either end of the Mediterranean in a concerted effort to disrupt Spanish military preparations against England. Just as Roberts in Marrakesh was ordered to press Don António’s claims on al-Mansur, in Constantinople Harborne was pursuing a more directly anti-Spanish approach with Murad.

By July 1586 Philip had finalized his plans for the invasion of England by a huge Spanish armada, and the antagonism between the two countries spilled over into Morocco. That October, an English ship called the
Dolphin
arrived in Safi and unloaded its commercial cargo of cloth and metal worth an estimated £5,000. Then, in a piratical act reminiscent of the
Bark Roe
incident, the
Dolphin
’s captain, John Giles, suddenly attacked and captured a Spanish caravel, confiscating all its goods. The Spanish crew escaped and fled to Marrakesh. Fearful of alienating the Spanish and inviting retribution, al-Mansur condemned Giles’s piracy and threatened to confiscate the
Dophin
’s goods and levy further penalties against the English merchants unless the Spanish caravel and its cargo were released. Roberts dispatched two English merchants to Safi to instruct Giles to return the caravel. To the new ambassador’s obvious embarrassment, Giles refused, claiming that the Spanish ship had been lawfully captured on the high seas. In response al-Mansur immediately arrested all English merchants with goods on board the
Dolphin
. Roberts again attempted to reach a resolution by asking those involved to stand the cost of the goods on board the Spanish vessel, but as in the case of Isaac Cabeça in 1568, the English merchants began squabbling over their respective contributions.

One of the merchants’ servants was “imprisoned among a number of heathens” in “the infidel’s prison” in Taraoudant, 180 miles south of Safi, but managed to write a letter to the Privy Council back in London begging them to intervene in the whole “unnatural dealing.” The letter was a terrible indictment of Roberts as the crown’s agent and of the Barbary Company more generally. Both were condemned as unable to address either the English merchants’ factionalism or the complexities of working successfully with al-Mansur. The servant claimed that a “malicious and envious” faction among the English mercantile community led by William Gore (one of the merchants involved in the Cabeça dispute) were “affectioned more to the Spaniards” and refused to bear any of the costs involved in settling the dispute, thus “disobeying the commandments of her majesty’s servant,” the hapless Roberts.

Under duress and facing the prospect of confinement in a Moroccan jail unless the Spanish claim was settled, the unfortunate servant began by complaining about “what small account these heathen people make of us and our English commodities, which proceedeth of the disorderly dealing of the Barbary Company, by overlaying this wicked country of late with abundance of goods.” He then listed the “great injuries and abuses” that were “daily offered by the king [al-Mansur] in favor of the Spaniards,” which included “detaining our goods ashore, imprisoning merchants, our masters and mariners of our ships, at the departure of any ship laden by the Spaniards and threaten us that, if their ships miscarry, we shall answer for it, in such cruel manner that no Christian heart would suffer, if we could otherwise remedy it.” He concluded that “the Barbary Company regardeth little the wrongs and intolerable injuries we abide among those cursed people.”
⁶⁸

The fate of the poor servant is unknown, and the Spanish caravel’s cargo was never returned, but the
Dolphin
’s cargo was nonetheless restored. (The Barbary Company claimed that this was due to a letter written by the lord admiral Charles Howard of Effingham to al-Mansur, while Roberts maintained that it was all his own doing—another example of how far internal relations within the company had deteriorated.) Technically it seemed like a victory for the English, but the political tensions between England, Morocco and Spain were now greater than ever. The financial balance sheet of Roberts’s years in Marrakesh was even less impressive.

Leicester had never really tried to make the Barbary Company a going commercial concern: his interests were more political, primarily to monopolize the Moroccan arms trade and by extension to persuade al-Mansur to enter into an anti-Spanish alliance. As a result, the terms of the company’s trade were extremely irregular when compared with those of the Muscovy and Turkey companies. By allowing its agents to claim lavish expenses, the company compromised its chances of profitability, a problem that was compounded by Leicester’s agreement to pay al-Mansur £4,000 worth of cloth, lead, iron and tin in the first year’s trading, in order to ensure his subsequent monopoly over the import of metals, mainly for munitions. Excluding the £4,000 paid in goods, sales in 1586 amounted to just £2,994. By shipping more than two thousand cloths a year, the company had saturated the Moroccan market, driving down prices. Worse still, those importing Moroccan sugar, almonds and gold all registered losses, mainly due to the expense of transportation. Seven tons of raw sugar were bought at £5 8s a pound, but they cost over £9 to transport back to London, where they sold at £9 a pound, a loss of over £5 a ton.
⁶⁹
The initial excitement over importing saltpeter soon evaporated as the costs of refining and transporting it (not to mention the bribes and presents required to sustain the trade) proved prohibitive and led to further heavy losses. Yet the trade mission was bearing other dividends.

By 1586, it seemed that the Barbary and Turkey companies were helping to weaken the threat of Spanish aggression. Both companies had been established with the dual purpose of trade and politics, to exploit a strategic and potentially profitable commercial alliance, and to cultivate military alliances in the face of Catholic aggression. While the political alliances had borne some fruit, the commercial results were decidedly mixed. In contrast to the Moroccan trade, the Turkey Company was thriving. The company had put £45,000 into start-up costs, exporting cloth and metal in return for silk, spices, cotton, currants, mohair, carpets, indigo and drugs of various kinds. At the height of Harborne’s embassy, it was dispatching nineteen ships weighing between 100 and 300 tons and crewed by nearly eight hundred seamen on an average of five voyages a year to trade in ten Ottoman-controlled Mediterranean ports. The profits on some voyages were estimated at more than £70,000, producing returns of nearly 300 percent.
⁷⁰
Both Murad and Elizabeth were benefiting enormously from the trade, and the strategic alliance that came with it. The Spanish were furious with Harborne’s success, as were the other Catholic powers, but diplomatically there was little they could do. In 1586 the new French ambassador in Constantinople, Jacques de Savary Lancosme, reiterated his predecessor’s long-standing demands that Murad expel Harborne. The Englishman coolly quipped, “I think he won’t be quite strong enough to turn me out.”
⁷¹
He was right: in Constantinople at least, the English were there to stay.

6

Sultana Isabel

By the late 1580s hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Elizabethan merchants, diplomats, sailors, artisans and privateers were plying their trade throughout the Islamic world, from Marrakesh to Qazvin in Persia. Slowly the consequences of their adventures began to have a discernible public impact in England, particularly in London. One of the most startling came on October 2, 1586, when a Welsh minister named Meredith Hanmer preached a sermon at St. Katharine’s Church, near the Tower of London, entitled “The Baptizing of a Turke.” This homily was the first recorded example of a Muslim converting to English Protestantism, which was all the more remarkable given the circumstances. In his sermon Hanmer explained that Chinano (possibly a garbled Anglicization of the Turkish “Sinan”) was a forty-year-old native of “Nigropontus” on the Greek island of Euboea, which had fallen to the Turks in 1470. “This Turk,” Hanmer claimed, “was taken captive by the Spanish, where he continued in great misery the space of twenty-five years, whom the most worthy knight Sir Francis Drake found at Carthaginia.”
¹
Drake had set off for the Spanish colonies in the Americas in 1585 with seventeen ships and two thousand men, pillaging his way across Florida, the Caribbean and the northwest coast of South America. By February 1586 he had reached Cartagena in modern-day Colombia. There he burned its monasteries, ransomed resident Spaniards and captured local Indian, Moorish and Turkish slaves, including Chinano.
²