The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (38 page)

They traveled through Raqqa, where they had a run-in with some Turks, before reaching Babylon. William Parry assessed that its tower, which he called “Nebuchadnezzar’s Tower,” was “about the height of St. Paul’s.” When they finally crossed into Persian dominions, Parry “thought we had been imparadised, finding our entertainment to be so good and the manner of the people to be so kind and courteous, far differing from the Turks.”
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Finally, on December 1, 1598, the group reached the Safavid Persian city of Qazvin.

Sherley could not have timed his arrival better. Thirty-six years earlier, when Anthony Jenkinson was the first Englishman to enter the city, Shah Tahmasp had just concluded a peace treaty with the Ottomans and thus had no interest in an alliance with Christians. Jenkinson was promptly expelled. Sherley arrived just as Shah Tahmasp’s grandson, Shah Abbas, ended years of internecine conflict by defeating the Safavids’ sworn enemies the Uzbeks. The shah was now ready to confront the Ottomans once more. He had overseen a remarkable transformation of the Safavid Empire since his accession in 1588, at seventeen. Ottoman expansion in the west and Uzbek depredations in the northeast meant that he had inherited a kingdom riven with factional rivalries and reduced drastically in size and stature since the glory days of Shah Ismail. A pragmatic and ruthless leader, Shah Abbas understood that if he was to survive and his kingdom to prosper, he must somehow end division, reorganize the army and recover lost territory. He immediately made a strategic peace treaty with the Ottomans, quashed internal dissent and created a new standing army with musketeers and an artillery corps. He also took the bold decision to move his imperial capital from Qazvin to the more central Isfahan. That city underwent a period of enormous urban renewal: Shah Abbas supervised the building of one of Islam’s greatest capitals at a time when other great Muslim cities like Marrakesh were being redesigned on a grand scale. Isfahan’s transformation included new palaces, mosques, bazaars, madrasas, baths, forts, gardens and public avenues, earning it the epithet
Esfahān nesf-e jahān ast
(“Isfahan is half the world”—the other half being paradise).
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In the spring of 1598, as work began on his new capital, Shah Abbas had made his move against the Uzbeks. He marched out of Isfahan in April, and on August 9 his army of 10,000 soldiers defeated the Uzbeks at the Battle of Rabat-i-Pariyan, seizing Herat, Nishapur and Meshed. As he returned to Isfahan at the head of a triumphal procession, he heard of Sherley’s arrival. He ordered a steward by the name of Marjan Beg to present Sherley with twenty gold pounds to sustain him until he was called for. Mainwaring observed with relief that Marjan Beg was pleased with Sherley’s typically contemptuous response: “Sir Anthony, according to his princely mind, turning the money over with his foot, returned this answer: ‘Know this, brave Persian, I come not a-begging to thy king, but hearing of his great fame and worthiness thought I could not spend my time better than come to see him, and kiss his hand, with the adventure of my body to second him in his princely wars.’”
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Sherley’s rhetoric of fame, adventure and contempt for wealth seems to have captured the ethos of the Persian court. Mainwaring notes that Marjan Beg responded to Sherley’s bravado, “Pardon me, brave stranger, for now I see thou art a prince thyself, for so it seemeth by thy princely answer.” Sherley demurred, but was finally being given the regal treatment he felt he deserved. Equally thrilling, it was time to dress up. His party was “furnished with apparel and horses” and prepared for a meeting with the shah.
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At the very end of December, Sherley’s party was summoned to a royal audience four miles outside Qazvin. The Sherley brothers were attired in lavish Persian outfits, “Sir Anthony himself in rich cloth of gold, his gown and his undercoat, his sword hanging in a rich scarf to the worth of a thousand crowns, being set with pearls and diamonds, and on his head a turban according, to the worth of two thousand [Spanish] dollars, his boots embroidered with pearl and rubies.”
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As they approached, Abel Pinçon was given a sickening insight into the shah’s ruthlessness. Shah Abbas was making a “triumphal entry” into Qazvin: “He caused to be carried on the end of strong and heavy spears twenty thousand heads of Tartars whom he had defeated in Uzbek.” Mainwaring estimated that it was only twelve hundred, but whatever the number it was “a hideous spectacle” designed to impress Qazvin’s inhabitants, which also unsurprisingly intimidated the newly arrived Christians.
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At this point, Shah Abbas appeared. Pinçon described him as “about thirty years of age, small in stature but handsome and well proportioned, his beard and hair is black . . . he has a strong and active mind and an extremely agile body, the result of training.”
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Mainwaring claimed that “at our first encounter of the king, Sir Anthony and his brother did alight off their horses, and came to kiss the king’s foot; for it is the fashion of the country. . . . After that was performed the king did look upon them both very stately, and afterward did look upon us all, giving never a word unto Sir Anthony.”
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Sir Anthony glossed over such servility, recalling he “kissed his stirrup; my speech was short unto him, the time being fit for no other.” He was keen to stress that Abbas told him that the Englishman “had done him infinite honor, to make such a journey for his sake.”
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Other sources say he delivered a more fulsome and obsequious oration to Abbas, which sounds more in keeping with his characteristic verbosity. “I am a soldier whose profession is clean contrary to words, which shall sooner fail me,” he is reported to have begun. He then offered to act as “a subject for your majesty’s most excellent virtues, if my devotion and observances were not sealed with my blood, the which I do humbly and freely offer at your majesty’s feet, to be shed and spent, at the least sign and token of your majesty’s pleasure.”
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Again, accounts differ as to Abbas’s response, but as they were all from Sherley’s party they were unanimous in stating that it was positive. Mainwaring claimed that the shah embraced and kissed the brothers, “and taking Sir Anthony by the hand, swearing a great oath that he should be his sworn brother, and so he did call him always.”
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Parry went so far as to claim that Sherley immediately “possessed the king with such a burning desire to invade the Turk’s dominions” that he threatened to launch a campaign there and then.
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Whatever the truth of these accounts, the English were certainly welcomed royally. They received sumptuous entertainment, spending over two months feasting, drinking and hunting with the shah’s court. Gifts of horses, camels, mules, weapons and jewels were exchanged, and if the reports are to be believed, Sir Anthony and Shah Abbas became virtually inseparable “in sporting and banqueting,” walking arm in arm through the city’s streets. The Englishman was even made a
mirza,
a title originally reserved for Muslim princes. It was hardly surprising that in return Sir Anthony extolled Abbas’s virtues, describing him as “excellently well shaped, of a most well proportioned stature, strong and active . . . his mind infinitely royal, wise, valiant, liberal, temperate, merciful, and an exceeding lover of justice.” He even praised the Persian ruler’s approach to political succession: in contrast to the Ottomans, rather than strangling his siblings upon his accession, the magnanimous Abbas only blinded them.
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It is difficult to assess the genuineness of the two men’s friendship. There are no known records from the Persian archives to tell us what Shah Abbas thought of Sir Anthony, while the Englishman’s memoir and the reports of his supporters are either too vague or deeply biased. Nevertheless, though doubtless exaggerated, subsequent events suggest that Sherley and Abbas’s closeness went beyond that of any other Elizabethan Englishman and Muslim ruler. Certainly men like Jenkinson, Hogan and Harborne had never managed such a personal rapport with a Persian, Ottoman or Moroccan ruler. But they had been lowly merchants pursuing ignoble commercial agendas. Sherley would have recoiled in horror at such a comparison. His diplomatic brief was unofficial, possibly not even sanctioned by Essex, but he reveled in proclaiming his aristocratic status. The relationship between the two men was closer in spirit to that of the Portuguese king Sebastian and the English renegade Sir Thomas Stukeley. Both Sherley and Stukeley regarded themselves primarily as warriors with little time for unseemly discussions of money or commerce.

Religion was a far more complex matter. Sherley’s party certainly progressed beyond Anthony Jenkinson’s limited grasp of the distinction between Shi’a and Sunni Islam. William Parry understood that the Safavid faith was “as the Turk’s, but somewhat different in religion. As the Persian prayeth only to Mahomet and Mortus Ally [‘Ali ibn Abi Talib], the Turk to those two and to three other that were Mahomet’s servants. Against which three the Persian still inveighs.”
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Parry also learned that “their conceit of Christ is that he was a very great prophet and a most holy and religious man, but in no way comparable to Mahomet: for Mahomet (say they) was that final prophet by whom all things were and are to be perfected and consummated.” Parry did not condemn this belief; he only observed, “They further say that because God never had wife, therefore Christ cannot possibly be his son.”
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Pinçon felt that his Christian readers were familiar with the schism between Sunni and Shi’a and it was thus “unnecessary to treat of the hatred and discord which exist between them [the Persians] and the Turks over the explanation of the Alcoran and over the precedence and dignity of their false prophets,” only saying that “the Persians hold the Turks in great abomination.” He also made a token gesture to reclaim Abbas for Christianity, acknowledging that he was a “Mahometan” but that “round his neck he always wears a cross, in token of the reverence and honor which he bears toward Jesus Christ.” Pinçon’s attempted assimilation only went so far: just a few paragraphs earlier he had succumbed to more familiar stereotypes, damning Abbas as a tyrant who tormented his subjects, “behaving toward them inhumanely and cruelly, cutting off their heads for the slightest offense, having them stoned, quartered, flayed alive and given alive to the dogs, or to the forty Anthropophagi [a mythical race of cannibals] and man-eaters that he always has by him.”
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Sir Anthony of course had his own view on Abbas’s religion. He had already found the shah’s “government differing so much from that which we call barbarousness” that he compared it flatteringly to Plato’s
Republic
.
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After many weeks in his company, conversing in a mix of Latin, Persian (Farsi), Italian and possibly even Spanish, he reflected on Abbas’s theological beliefs, which he saw as positively Machiavellian:

For the king knowing how potent a uniter of men’s minds the self-same religion is for the tranquility of an estate: and the like disuniter several religions are for the disturbance of the peace of an estate, he is exceeding curious and vigilant to suppress through all his dominions, that religion of Mahomet which followeth the interpretation of Ussen [Uthman] and Omar [Umar], and to make his people cleave to that of Aly: not (as I judge) through any conscience, which carrieth him more to the one than the other; but first to extirpate intrinsic factions, then to secure himself the more firmly against the Turks.
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It made sense for Sherley to conclude that the shah’s Shi’a beliefs were as politically strategic as his suppression of the Sunni followers of Uthman and Umar, but his judgment may have revealed more about his own religious predisposition than about that of Shah Abbas.

After Sherley’s party had spent nearly three months reveling in Qazvin, the shah invited them to accompany him to his new royal capital of Isfahan. When they arrived, Sir Anthony began the delicate task of finding a way to broach the subject of his political mission. For once in his life, he seems to have grasped the sensitivity of a Christian proposing an alliance with a Persian shah “to move him to war in so fit a time against the Turk,” and he prevaricated while Abbas showed him the splendor of his new city. Finally, “taking the opportunity of the king’s being alone with me and my brother in a garden” and using increasingly cryptic and periphrastic language, Sherley raised what he called “the enterprise.” He argued that “the extreme tyranny of the Turk” continued to threaten the Persians, and that if Abbas wanted “the recovery of that which was by force and violence usurped from his state,” there was a solution: “If it pleased him to invite the princes Christian to his amity,” Abbas could forge a Shi’a-Christian alliance that would defeat the Ottomans and give the shah control over central Asia.
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Once the shah’s advisers heard of Sherley’s proposals, they were furious, and a protracted debate ensued. Many warned Abbas that “these Christians . . . were sent to disquiet your majesty’s tranquility of your state.” He should not jeopardize a hard-fought peace with the Turks nor intimate any military weakness by having to “beg an amity of the Christian princes.” Besides, despite Abbas’s recent victory over the Uzbeks, his army was still not strong enough to face the mightier Ottomans.

Others were more supportive of Sherley’s proposals. One counselor pointed out that “this Christian hath brought with him a founder of artillery: let him be useful to your majesty”—although there are no records of such an expert in Sherley’s team. As weeks went by without agreement, Sherley complained that talk of the proposals “did aggravate both the grief of my mind, and unquiet of my body,” and he took to his bed.
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As he did so, a Turkish ambassador arrived in Isfahan, warning Abbas to respect their truce and demanding that he cede territory to Mehmed III and acknowledge his servility by sending one of his sons as a hostage to Constantinople. It seemed that like Jenkinson, Sherley might soon be unceremoniously ejected from Persia in the face of the Ottomans’ overwhelming political and military superiority.