The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (16 page)

The galley slaves in question were probably the crews of the
Peter
and the
Swallow,
two English ships captured off Algiers two years earlier. The plea brought release and redemption, although it earned for the English a mortal enemy in the shape of the galley slaves’ owner, the Turkish admiral Qilich Ali Pasha.

Sultan Murad and Queen Elizabeth seemed to be edging toward a closer commercial and political relationship when Harborne was faced with an unexpected crisis. On October 12, 1579, as Sokollu Mehmed Pasha was listening to petitions in the Topkapi’s imperial council chamber, a Bosnian dervish suddenly leaped forward and stabbed him to death. Rumors abounded at court that Murad’s powerful mother, Nurbanu Sultan, had ordered the assassination to resolve the courtly power struggle between her and Sokollu Mehmed. Whatever the motivation behind his murder, Sokollu Mehmed’s death triggered a decisive shift in the balance of power within the palace. Over the next two decades the post of grand vizier would be progressively diminished, with eleven different incumbents unable to stop the sultan’s harem from taking political matters into their own hands. Sokollu Mehmed’s protégés were removed from government, and with them went his more emollient and westward-looking foreign and economic policy.
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It is testament to Harborne’s determination and resourcefulness that he continued his dogged pursuit of an Anglo-Ottoman agreement. His time spent wooing—and probably bribing—subsequent grand viziers infuriated the other resident European diplomats, most especially Jacques de Germigny, the French ambassador. It was bad enough that Harborne lacked official diplomatic accreditation; even more galling was his skill in playing France off against Spain, while still trading under the cover of the French Capitulations. “I was informed,” Germigny fumed in a report to Henry III in March 1580, “that this Englishman had represented to the Grand Vizier the seriousness of the increase of the power of the King of Spain, to the extent that he would take possession of Portugal and the territories dependent on the said kingdom neighboring to this lord in the Levant.”
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He protested that, despite Sokollu Mehmed’s death, Harborne was “pursuing his negotiation actively in this Porte, and appears to be greatly favored, as much by reason of the loads of steel, tin, and latten [copper alloys] which he has brought them and promises to bring thereafter.” In June, Germigny confessed that it all “makes me fear that the said Englishman will soon realize his aim” of obtaining full commercial privileges from the sultan. The English advance, together with signs of a growing rapprochement between Murad and Philip II, threatened to leave France dangerously isolated.

By then it was too late. Murad had already agreed to the terms of a peace treaty with Spain, and at the end of May 1580, just days before the dispatch of Germigny’s letter, he signed a charter of privileges granting the English full commercial rights in Ottoman dominions. These Anglo-Ottoman Capitulations would prove to be even more important than Walsingham’s Memorandum of 1578, and they endured for 343 years, until they were dissolved under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish republic.

The agreement began by praising “Elizabeth Queen of England, France and Ireland, the most honorable queen of Christendom,” to whom Murad agreed to “give license to all her people, and merchants, peaceably and safely to come unto our imperial dominions, with all their merchandise and goods without any impeachment, to exercise their traffic, to use their own customs, and to buy and sell according to the fashions of their own country.”
²³
It listed in minute detail the privileges granted to the English: their ships were guaranteed security and help in the face of piracy (from Muslims or Christians), shipwreck or even debt; in the event of death, goods reverted to the merchant’s estate; in case of commercial disputes both sides agreed to abide by the ruling of the local
cadi
(judge) based on sharia law; English merchants were exempt from paying
kharāj
(a local community charge) and were allowed to appoint consuls in Alexandria, Damascus, Tunis, Algiers and Cairo; and if “any pirates or other free governors of ships trading the sea shall take any Englishman, and shall make sale of him . . . if the party shall be found to be English and shall receive the holy religion [Islam], then let him freely be discharged, but if he will still remain a Christian, let him then be restored to the Englishmen, and the buyers shall demand their money again of them who sold the man.”
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For Harborne the Capitulations were the triumphant conclusion to nearly three years of tireless trade, diplomacy and bribery. For the French, they were a calamity. The English agreement was closely modeled on the Franco-Ottoman Capitulations of 1569, which had not been renewed since Murad’s accession in 1574. Now the English had trading rights, the Ottomans were in league with the Spanish, and it was the French, preoccupied with their own internal religious strife, who were left politically and commercially isolated. Just weeks after signing the English Capitulations, Murad sent a terse letter to Henry III, rejecting any suggestion that Ottoman alliances with countries such as England violated prior agreements with France, assuring him somewhat disingenuously that “there is absolutely no refusing or repulsing to the coming and going of anybody,” and “nothing whatsoever to preoccupy you concerning the ancient friendship with you and in the matters of precedence and pre-eminence over the other kings.”
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As European rulers of various theological persuasions queued up to court Murad, the French risked losing their long-standing influence at the Porte.

As the French floundered, Harborne prospered. From his residence in Galata, he exploited the Capitulations to consolidate a thriving commercial network across the Mediterranean. With the financial backing of Osborne and Staper, he traded with merchants as far north as Poland and the Baltic, as far west as Algiers, stretching all the way to Syria in the east, as well as with Turks, Egyptians, Greeks and Italians. He bought cotton, yarn and carpets from Turkey, flax from Egypt and the Black Sea, wine, oil and currants from Crete and Zante, all the time extending his trade in the ubiquitous English kerseys, lead, tin and copper. He was escorted everywhere by two Janissaries, a sign of the esteem in which the sultan held a man widely recognized, as one observer put it, as “the Queen’s agent at the court of the great Turk, by whom he is held in the greatest credit.”
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Harborne even used this “credit” to visit Ottoman-controlled Jerusalem on a pilgrimage that was probably as good for business as it was for his soul.

Just as it seemed that Harborne had achieved more than anyone in London could have hoped, disaster struck again. In September 1580, the
Bark Roe,
a merchant vessel carrying a cargo worth over £1,000 of kerseys, tin, brazilwood, madder, lead and broken “bell metal” from English Catholic churches, left London for the eastern Mediterranean. The ship’s captain was Peter Baker, a servant of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (one of Elizabeth’s closest advisers and the man an eccentric minority still believe wrote Shakespeare’s plays). Baker was already known in London merchant circles as a “greedy” and “evil man” with a reputation for robbing Christians, having seized a ship in the Mediterranean five years earlier laden with salt. He was responsible for a crew of around seventy, including two merchants, and a ship of 160 tons armed with twenty-four cannon. The crew would report much later that Baker had announced they were traveling “as merchants, though at sea the captain armed himself as a man-of-war,” announcing that “we were sailing for Turkey to act as pirates.” By January 1581, another crew member recalled, they were “laden with broken bells from England, and when we went to Malta” they made arrangements to sell the metal stripped from English churches to the Maltese Knights of St. John. After fifteen days anchored off Malta, Baker “summoned us on deck. It was bright moonlight; we had not yet unloaded any goods, and he informed us that he wanted to engage in cruising at a venture, plundering the Turks.” The crew was divided, but one member admitted that “having unloaded the metal of the bells, we had to sail as corsairs.”
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It was a foolish decision that exposed their inexperience and cupidity—and threatened to wreck the Anglo-Turkish trade just as it began to flourish.

The following month the
Bark Roe
reached the island of Chios, which the Ottomans had taken from the Genoese in 1566. There by pure chance they met Harborne, en route to the Holy Land with a group of French and Flemish merchants. Fresh from his triumph in obtaining the English Capitulations, Harborne was oblivious to Baker’s piratical plans. Instead he swaggered around the island, boasting of the terms of the Capitulations, much to the confusion of local Ottoman officials, who assumed that the new agreement ended English merchants’ rights to trade under the lapsed French privileges. As the
Bark Roe
prepared to leave in early March 1581, Harborne reported that “the Jew customer of that port, alleging it unlawful for our nation to use of that [French] country banner and privilege coveted [tried] to embargo and detain” Baker’s ship until he received clarification from his masters in Constantinople. Harborne hastily produced the new Capitulations, “not ever before showed,” and the Jewish customs official allowed the ship to leave the island free of any charges.
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Having sold all his cargo, and possibly aggrieved at being detained on Chios, Baker bade farewell to Harborne and set off southward in pursuit of whatever bounty he could find. He chased Turkish and Greek vessels off Rhodes, then sailed westward across the Aegean, attacking two ships off Methóni in the Peloponnese at the end of March. “The ships we thought were Turkish,” confessed one crew member, “but when we captured them we found out they were Greek and that they were carrying a cargo of camlets [woven fabric made of camel or goat hair] and raw silk.”
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To make matters worse, the cargo was owned by a consortium of Greek and Venetian merchants, and the ships’ passengers included Greek Orthodox priests from Patmos, which lay under Ottoman jurisdiction, a jurisdiction that Baker had now violated.

In one foolish act Baker had brought the wrath of the Turkish, Greek and Venetian authorities down upon the English, confirming all their worst suspicions about these gauche interlopers. Seemingly unaware of the diplomatic crisis he was igniting, Baker quarreled violently with his crew over the spoils. They insisted that “he had no authority to take or rob any Christian,” and forced him “to re-enter Malta to try for justice for fear that piracy would be laid to our charge.”
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By April 22 the
Bark Roe,
its crew and the two Greek ships were back in Malta, where they were imprisoned in Valletta by Monsignor Federico Cefalotto, the Maltese representative of the Roman Inquisition.

Over the next four months the Maltese authorities began building a case against Baker around claims made by the Greeks (who wanted their cargo back) and the Venetians (who demanded 12,000 ducats to cover their losses). Even worse, the captured Greek priests from Patmos lay within the jurisdiction of the Turkish admiral Qilich Ali Pasha, who was still smarting from having had to surrender English galley slaves to Harborne just two years earlier. The admiral immediately blamed the fiasco on the unsuspecting Englishman, condemning him as a spy and a pirate and demanding that the sultan imprison him and fine him 40,000 ducats and revoke the Capitulations. Horrified, Harborne rushed back to Constantinople to try to clear his name with the Ottoman authorities, from where he sent a letter to Lord Burghley on June 9, 1581, explaining the situation.

As he wrote, Harborne knew that the future of the Anglo-Ottoman alliance hung in the balance. For the first time in nearly three years, his usually cool and urbane demeanor gave way to fear and self-pity. “Behold,” he wrote to Burghley, “in what pit of perplexity and snares of unluckiness (almost inevitable) I am entangled through the unchristian and detestable dealings of Peter Baker.” Baker’s actions had unleashed “the slanderous and hellish barking of the maliciously disposed Admiral,” who threatened to ruin not only “our English traffic” in the region but also Harborne’s personal reputation in “disgorging his long hidden poison against me.” Baker’s stupidity had driven Harborne to the brink of despair. “The intolerable grief of mind which these pirates have caused me, I cannot utter,” he wrote. His greatest fear was how Sultan Murad would respond, and he invited Burghley to reflect on how such accusations would prejudice “this heathen prince against me, a worm.”
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Shorn of the usual honorific flourishes and verbose rhetoric that characterized Anglo-Ottoman correspondence, in this moment of extreme peril Harborne’s veil slipped, and he was left calling Murad a heathen and seeing himself as little more than a parasite.

Harborne had good reason to panic. Arrested by the Ottoman authorities and subjected to relentless interrogation, he now admitted to Burghley that he had used credit to buy merchandise and send it back to London, but that as a result of Baker’s piracy all his assets had been frozen and he had no money to settle his debts. To add to his humiliation, he had to beg the French ambassador to act as surety, which Germigny did with grace and, one imagines, some satisfaction, informing Henry III of the remarkable turn of events and noting that Baker’s and Harborne’s behavior “gives a very bad smell to the said English here.”
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Harborne’s pleading with the Ottomans was futile. Murad revoked the English Capitulations and signed new ones with the French. By July 1581 France was once again in control of European trade into Turkey, and Harborne’s mission seemed in ruins.