The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (24 page)

Twelve days later, after putting his twenty-five-year-old secretary Edward Barton in temporary charge of the embassy (partly because he was a fluent Turkish speaker), Harborne left the sweltering heat of Constantinople for the last time. When he reached Hamburg on November 19, he learned of “her majesty’s victory over the Spaniard.”
²⁴
It must have been a bittersweet moment for the tenacious Englishman. After ten years in Constantinople, he had retrieved a commercial agreement with the Ottomans when all seemed lost, established England’s first official embassy in the Muslim world, founded an extensive network of English factors across the Mediterranean and negotiated the release of scores of English captives from the horrors of galley slavery. Although he had failed to clinch a deal that would have set Turkish Muslims against Spanish Catholics, his diplomacy had played its part in unsettling the Spanish and their preparations for invasion—or so Harborne would insist upon his return to England. A life of peaceful, obscure retirement in Norfolk now awaited the former ambassador, who lived for nearly three more decades before his death in 1617.

•   •   •

In Marrakesh, Henry Roberts had been facing a similar struggle to persuade another reluctant Muslim ruler of the wisdom of backing Elizabeth in her struggle with Spain. Like Murad, Sultan al-Mansur seemed unconvinced that the English were worth the risk: they just did not appear to have the military power and diplomatic status to match their rhetoric. Don António was coming to the same conclusion. In the spring of 1588, he had appealed directly to al-Mansur for help in persuading Elizabeth to attack Spain. But the wily al-Mansur prevaricated, waiting to see what would come of the Spanish invasion of England.

On July 12, 1588, Roberts wrote to Leicester informing him that “here came news that the king of Spain’s armada is departed for England; the which I well perceive is the case that this king [al-Mansur] doth prolong the times, to know how they speed: for, if the king of Spain should prosper against England, then this king would do nothing; and, if the king of Spain have the overthrow, as by God’s help he shall, then will this king perform promises and more.”
²⁵
Don António and Elizabeth were powerless to act in Morocco, or anywhere else for that matter, until the outcome of the Spanish invasion was known.

Across the capitals of Europe and North Africa, statesmen eagerly awaited news of the fate of the Spanish Armada. In Marrakesh, the Spanish circulated rumors that their fleet had triumphed. In a letter dated August 5, Elizabeth wrote to al-Mansur informing him of her victory. The letter reached the small community of English merchants in Marrakesh at the beginning of September. The news sparked extraordinary scenes of celebration. The merchants set off fireworks and organized impromptu street banquets and dancing. They led a procession through the city center; according to eyewitness reports, some flew standards showing Elizabeth standing in triumph over a prostrate Philip, while others carried effigies of the Spanish ruler and Pope Sixtus, which they set on fire, much to the consternation of the watching Italian and Spanish merchants. The procession then entered the
mellah,
where three men challenged them. The first, Diego Marín, was a Spanish diplomat; the other two, the Portuguese nobleman Joao Gomes de Silva and the Spaniard Juan de Heredia, a survivor of the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir, were living in the city in a state of limbo after having been ransomed. What exactly happened next is disputed, but what is clear is that the three men drew their swords and attacked the English merchants, knocking several from their horses, killing between three and seven of them and wounding many more. The
mellah
descended into chaos, with Jews and Muslims watching in horror as Catholics murdered Protestants, Europe’s Christians replaying their sectarian conflicts on the streets of Marrakesh.
²⁶

Al-Mansur was appalled that such violence should threaten the peace and commercial stability of his capital city, and he immediately arrested the assailants. What happened to de Silva and Heredia is unknown, but Marín would spend the next twenty years in prison. For some of the English merchants, the Armada celebrations had proved fatal, but the Spanish defeat at the hands of the English naval forces had finally convinced al-Mansur of two things: that the mighty Spanish were not as invincible as he believed, and that England and her female ruler could no longer be dismissed as peripheral to the commercial and diplomatic world of the Mediterranean. The Armada’s failure prompted Spain’s enemies to reassess their alliances: suddenly an Anglo-Moroccan alliance seemed like a very real possibility, one that might transform the delicate balance of power in North Africa.

The shift in al-Mansur’s approach to relations with England is recorded in the writings of his court scribe and historian, Abd al-Aziz al-Fishtali, who provided the earliest known non-European commentary on the English queen. In his account of events, al-Fishtali pitted Elizabeth, whom he called “sultana Isabel,” against Philip, whom he described as “the enemy of religion, the infidel (may God increase his sorrow and weaken his hold), the tyrant [
taghiya
] of Castile [Qishtala] who is today against Islam and who is the pillar of polytheism [
shirk
].” According to al-Fishtali, once the Armada approached the English coast, “God sent a sharp wind [
reehan sarsaran
] against the fleets of the tyrant that broke up their formation and pushed them onto the enemy’s lands, bringing down their flags and banners.”
²⁷
Al-Fishtali’s use of the term
reehan sarsaran
is particularly telling: it is taken from the Qur’an (4:16), where it describes the divine winds sent against the polytheistic people of Aad. God punished the Spanish for their sins just as he punished the people of Aad.
²⁸

The English agreed: the commemorative medal struck to celebrate the English victory bore the similar inscription
Afflavit Deus et dissipati sunt
(“God blew and they were scattered”).
²⁹
Al-Fishtali interpreted the Armada’s defeat as a sign that God was on the side of the English. This provided al-Mansur with a pretext for contemplating a reconquest of Al-Andalus (the Arab name for the mainland of Spain, which had been under Muslim rule for many centuries). “These actions,” continued al-Fishtali, “were, thanks be to God in this dear matter, the harbingers of success and conquest, and a sign for him [al-Mansur] to fulfill his awaited promise, in taking possession, by God’s will, of his [Philip’s] lands and territories, and in confronting him with the victorious soldiers of God on his own turf.”
³⁰

Al-Mansur was now convinced of England’s military capabilities and signaled his willingness to discuss an alliance that would strike against Spain and install Don António on the Portuguese throne. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told Henry Roberts, whose patron, the Earl of Leicester, died suddenly, on September 4, after a short illness, just weeks after marshaling the country’s defenses against the Spanish invasion. Leicester’s death left Elizabeth utterly distraught, and seems to have acted as a catalyst for Roberts’s decision to leave Morocco. The record of Roberts’s time in Morocco was hardly impressive. As well as failing to conclude a political alliance with al-Mansur, he had overseen only small and irregular profits on exported goods, mainly cloth, but a significant loss on imports, primarily of sugar. Roberts was not sufficiently versed or interested in business to avoid falling into the traps of selling English cloth too cheaply and buying Moroccan sugar too expensively. The diplomatic strategy of drawing al-Mansur into an anti-Spanish alliance had failed, and Leicester’s death left Roberts more exposed than ever.

Having been almost completely ignored by al-Mansur during his time there, Roberts was promptly adopted as a pawn by the canny sultan as soon as the latter learned of the Armada’s defeat. Roberts was staying outside Marrakesh in one of al-Mansur’s garden palaces, presumably oblivious of the attack inflicted on his fellow English merchants in the city’s
mellah
. On September 14 he left Morocco “at the king’s charges, with forty or fifty shot attending upon me for my guard and safety,” bound for England.
³¹

In the terse account of his embassy, “written briefly by himself” following his return to London, Roberts recalled that he had left Marrakesh and traveled 150 miles southwest to the port of Agadir. “In this port,” he wrote, “I stayed forty three days, and at length the second of November I embarked myself and one Marshok Reiz [his real name was Ahmad Bilqasim], a captain and a gentleman, which the emperor sent with me upon an ambassage to her majesty.”
³²
His own embassy at an end, Roberts was now accompanying Morocco’s first-ever ambassador to England. What he did not know was that the embassy was just one element in a carefully choreographed exchange of diplomats destined to lead to an Anglo-Portuguese-Moroccan military axis. As Roberts and Bilqasim sailed for England, the Portuguese pretender Don António had agreed to send his brother Don Cristóbal to al-Mansur’s court as a hostage to secure the sultan’s commitment to a proposed military alliance.

On November 10, Don Cristóbal left London with four warships and six merchant ships, bound for Morocco. Having passed Roberts and Bilqasim en route, the Portuguese arrived in Marrakesh in January 1589 and immediately petitioned al-Mansur to support Don António in reclaiming his throne. The irony of the situation was not lost on al-Fishtali, who wrote that Don Cristóbal needed “our swords, made triumphant by God, to regain his lost kingship . . . although our imamate swords with their sharp blades had earlier destroyed the edifice of his kingship” at the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir, and “only with our hands would he recover it.”
³³

Just as Don Cristóbal arrived in Morocco, Roberts and Bilqasim landed in England. As usual, Roberts made a meal of it, complaining that “after much torment and foul weather at sea, at New Year’s Day I came on land at St. Ives in Cornwall.” From there the two men traveled “by land up toward London.” Roberts reported: “We were met without the city with the chiefest merchants of the Barbary Company, well mounted all on horseback, to the number of forty or fifty horse, and so the ambassador and myself being both in coach, entered the city by torchlight, on Sunday at night the 12 of January 1589.”
³⁴
The Moroccan ambassador’s dramatic arrival in London concluded in a suitably theatrical way a turbulent episode in Elizabethan England’s relations with the Islamic world, which had witnessed the success of Harborne’s embassy to Constantinople, the birth of the Barbary Company and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. It set the stage for another to be played out over the next decade, this time in London’s public theaters.

7

London Turns Turk

In the summer of 1588 London was braced for a Spanish invasion that, if successful, would open up the possibility of a victorious Philip II returning in public triumph to the city he had ridden through thirty-four years earlier as consort to the queen. Six months later, with Philip’s armada in ruins, instead of a Catholic conqueror, Londoners watched a Muslim ambassador riding in state through the capital. The sight of Ahmad Bilqasim—or Marshok Reiz, as his English hosts Anglicized his name—entering London at the head of an entourage that included the Barbary Company’s most senior merchants signaled an important shift in Elizabethan foreign policy toward the Islamic world. Both the Moroccan and Ottoman rulers had watched tiny, insignificant England overcome the mighty war machine of “the great tyrant of Castile” and now regarded her queen as an important political player on the international stage. Elizabeth and her advisers understood that a strategic alliance with these Muslim rulers was more important than ever to combat the inevitable attempt by King Philip to recover from his recent humiliation.

Little documentary evidence remains of where the Moroccan ambassador stayed and whom he met during his time in London, but the official diplomatic correspondence suggests what both sides hoped to achieve from his mission. A remarkable memorandum written by Bilqasim in late January 1589 outlined the scale of al-Mansur’s projected alliance. It proposed:

To offer unto your majesty not only to employ in her assistance men, money, victuals and the use of his ports, but also his own person, if your majesty should be pleased to require it; and to desire, for the better withstanding of the common enemy the King of Spain, there might [be] a sound and perfect league between them.

To let her understand that for the better furtherance of her princely purpose to restore Don António to the kingdom of Portugal, he thought it a good course that the army by sea that she should send with him, should enter into the Straits [of Gibraltar], and there to ship such assistance as he should send; whereby the King of Spain, for the defense of those parts of Spain within the Straits, that coast upon Barbary, should be constrained to withdraw his forces out of Portugal; whereby Don António, finding the country unfurnished of foreign forces, may be better able to recover his country.

Lastly, to offer, when the 100 ships should come upon the coast of Barbary, whereby he might in his own person go into Spain, he would deliver unto her majesty 150,000 ducats.
¹

Acting through Bilqasim, al-Mansur was proposing an audacious joint military campaign against the Spanish that would put Don António on the Portuguese throne and enable him to reconquer the lost Muslim lands of Al-Andalus, in return for which he would pay Elizabeth 150,000 ducats. With his subtle but emotive emphasis on “recover” and “restore,” the sultan offered a “perfect league” between the English and the Moroccan rulers that was as much an ideological as a geographical union of the two countries. In the uncertain aftermath of the Spanish Armada’s defeat, al-Mansur was proposing an extraordinary identification of Muslim aims with Protestant ones.