Queen Elizabeth I’s Islamic policies
“Neither the earth, the seas, nor the heavens, have so much force to separate us, as the godly disposition of natural humanity, and mutual benevolence have to join us together.” So wrote Elizabeth I to the Shah of Persia in 1561. Her letter, composed in a mixture of Hebrew, Italian and Latin, was designed to open up trade between the two countries, and was entrusted to an extraordinary traveller, Anthony Jenkinson, as he boarded a ship laden with woollen cloth.
Jenkinson, a mercer by profession, had already held private audiences with two of the world’s most powerful rulers: The Ottoman sultan, Suleyman the Magnificent, and the Russian czar, Ivan the Terrible. He’s just one of the fascinating characters who forged England’s first sustained interaction with the Muslim world, a neglected aspect of Elizabethan history that Jerry Brotton, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London and the author of A History of the World in 12 Maps, brings vividly to life in this elegant and entertaining book.
Jenkinson’s interview with Shah Tahmasp was not a success, not least because another great Muslim power, the Ottoman Empire, chose to deprecate his mission. Religion was a factor too: Jenkinson’s footsteps in the palace were blotted out with sand, as Brotton notes, “in a symbolic erasing of the polluting presence of the unbeliever”. But, then, religion was one of the reasons behind this burst of interest in the Muslim world.
Elizabeth could not stay forever neutral in the Pan-European struggle between Roman Catholicism and reform, and in 1570 she was excommunicated by the pope. From then on, Protestant England was a rogue state, looking elsewhere for trade and alliances, an Elizabethan Brexit, perhaps. Caught in a sea of trouble but feisty, ambitious and none too bothered by theological abstractions, Elizabethans reached out to foreign lands that were, at least at the outset, only dimly understood. But within roughly 40 years, England had struck agreements with the major Muslim powers and had established a network of spies, diplomats, traders, adventurers and privateers “from Marrakesh via Constantinople to Isfahan”. They ranged from the incomparable Jenkinson to the incorrigible Anthony Sherley, knight, chancer and 16th-century snake-oil salesman, who wound up touring the capitals of Europe as an emissary of the Shah of Persia. The defeat of the Spanish Armada was celebrated with fireworks in Marrakesh, while in Constantinople English merchants secured commercial privileges that remained in force until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.
Mr Brotton punctuates his narrative with ruminations on the Moors and Turks on the English stage, which varied from caricature to Othello; yet the real life encounters could be more complex and surprising. Hassan Aga, treasurer of Algiers, turned out to be a former English merchant, Samson Rowlie. Captured, converted and even castrated, he was forging a successful career in the Algerian Civil Service — a fate “more appealing,” Brotton supposes, than “life as a struggling, peripatetic Protestant merchant from Norfolk”. The Queen sent a Lancashire blacksmith, Thomas Dallam, to Constantinople in 1599 with a splendid clockwork organ for the sultan. In return, he got a peep into Mehmed’s harem. Later, his Turkish guide turned out to be “an Englishman, borne in Chorley in Lancashire; his name Finch”. Dallam’s hometown was scarcely 20 miles away. In an age when most people lived and died where they were born, some figuratively travelled to the moon.
Out there, for all the talk of idolatry and infidels, discussions could be brisk and purposeful, boundaries porous, identities fluid. Even in that religiously charged era, the so-called clash of civilisations could sound very faint indeed.
Caught in a sea of trouble but feisty, ambitious and none too bothered by theological abstractions, Elizabethans reached out to foreign lands that were, at least at the outset, only dimly understood... and within roughly 40 years, England had struck agreements with the major Muslim powers
The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam Jerry Brotton Viking 338 pages; $30