The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (9 page)

The shah that Jenkinson was about to meet was very different from his fanatical, charismatic father. Born just six months before Ismail’s catastrophic defeat by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chaldiran, Tahmasp grew up in the shadow of a ruler whose followers believed he was the messiah, but who died a broken man when Tahmasp was just ten. During Tahmasp’s turbulent minority he faced civil wars among his followers, as well as constant threats from the Ottomans to the west and the Uzbeks to the east. In the pursuit of more conciliatory and pious foreign and domestic policies, he signed the Peace of Amasya with the Ottomans (1555), followed by an Edict of Sincere Repentance (1556), which attempted to formalize Shi’a laws by banning painting, wine and many Sufi rituals that had been central to Safavid belief. In direct contrast to his father’s fervent millenarianism, Tahmasp regarded himself as a pious king trying to consolidate his empire’s political and religious boundaries, rather than expand them.
²⁶
As Jenkinson arrived in Qazvin, the shah had recently completed an ambitious program of public works designed to transform it from a Sunni city into the center of Shi’ite political and religious power. Royal baths, cisterns and bazaars were built, as well as an entirely new royal garden complex to the north of the city, known as Sa’ādatābād, with palaces, promenades, canals and parade grounds for practicing polo and archery.
²⁷

When Jenkinson was finally granted an audience with the shah in his new palace on the afternoon of November 20, 1562, he was clearly unimpressed. Gone were his usual observations of sartorial elegance and domestic opulence. Instead he immediately pronounced the Safavid ruler—whom he called “Shaw Thomas”—as “nothing valiant,” so that “through his pusillanimity the Turk hath much invaded his countries.” What really fascinated him was the shah’s Shi’a religion. “He professeth a kind of holiness,” he wrote, “and saith that he is descended of the blood of
Mahomet
and
Murtezallie,
” Murtezallie being Muhammad’s cousin ’Ali ibn Abi Talib. He went on: “although these Persians be Mahometans, as the Turks and the Tartars be, yet honor they this false fained
Murtezallie,
saying that he was the chiefest disciple that Mahomet had, cursing and chiding daily three other disciples that Mahomet had called
Omar,
Usiran
and
Abebecke,
” Jenkinson’s rather approximate transliterations of the names of the first three caliphs—Umar, Uthman and Abu Bakr. While confusing his early Islamic history in claiming that “these three did slay the said
Murtezallie,
” Jenkinson grasped that it was this struggle between the Shi’a and Sunni branches of Islam, “and other differences of holy men and laws, [that] they have had and have with the Turks and Tartars mortal wars.” This was apparently as far as Jenkinson could delve into the complex distinctions between Sunni and Shi’a theology. He concluded that to “entreat of their religion at large, being more or less Mahomet’s law and the Alkoran, I shall not need at present.”
²⁸

After charming Sultan Süleyman and Tsar Ivan, and spending nearly five years (on and off) in trying to reach the Persian Sophy, Jenkinson saw his luck with eastern potentates finally run out. Even his eloquence could not prevent the audience with Shah Tahmasp from turning sour. Upon entering the shah’s presence, Jenkinson was given shoes so “I might not be suffered to tread upon his holy ground—being a Christian, and called among them
Gower
[from the Persian
gaur,
or non-Muslims], that is, unbeliever and unclean: esteeming all to be infidels and pagans which do not believe as they do, in their false filthy prophets
Mahomet
and
Murtezallie
.” Jenkinson presented the shah with Elizabeth’s letter and spoke of his hope of “friendship, and free passage of our merchants and people, to repair and traffic within his dominions, for to bring in our commodities, and to carry away theirs, to the honor of both princes.” The shah was having none of it. He demanded to know why Elizabeth’s letter was written in Latin, Hebrew and Italian, when he claimed to “have none within our realm that understand those tongues.” He also “demanded of me what country of Franks [Christian Europeans] I was, and what affairs I had there to do.” The interview was going from bad to worse: nobody at the shah’s court knew anything about this tiny place called England, its female ruler or its “famous city” of London. As with Abdullah-Khan, what interested Shah Tahmasp far more than insignificant England was “King Philip, and the great Turk, and which of them was of most power.” Jenkinson judged that this was not the time to criticize the Ottomans, as he had in response to Abdullah-Khan’s questions, answering the shah “to his contentation, not dispraising the great Turk.” But then the shah’s interrogation of Jenkinson took a dramatic turn:

Then he reasoned with me much of religion, demanding whether I were a
Gower,
that is to say, an unbeliever, or a
Muselman,
that is, of Mahomet’s law. Unto whom I answered, that I was neither unbeliever nor Mahometan, but a Christian. What is that said he unto the king of Georgia’s son [the Muslim convert David XI of Kartli], who being a Christian was fled unto the said Sophie, and he answered that a Christian was he that believeth in
Jesus Christus,
affirming him to be the son of God, and the greatest prophet: doest thou believe so said the Sophie unto me: yea that I do said I: Oh thou unbeliever said he, we have no need to have friendship with the unbelievers, and so willed me to depart. I being glad thereof did reverence and went my way.
²⁹

Thousands of miles from home, the plucky young mercer from Leicestershire stood his ground in front of two Muslim rulers—one the Shi’a shah Tahmasp, the other the Georgian king David XI, a convert from eastern Orthodox Christianity—and affirmed his belief in Christ as the son of God. It must have been a terrifying moment, and one that Jenkinson surely realized placed him in mortal danger. As he made his exit, he was followed by “a man with a basanet of sand, sifting all the way that I had gone within the said palace, even from the said Sophie’s sight unto the court gate,” in a symbolic erasing of the polluting presence of the unbeliever. Jenkinson must have imagined that his audience with Shah Tahmasp would have the triumphant culmination of a trading alliance between the two countries. Instead he found himself effectively banished from the shah’s court, his life possibly in the balance, the Persian adventure wrecked as a result of insuperable religious differences. But he quickly learned that theology was not the sole cause of his expulsion.

Only four days before Jenkinson reached Qazvin, a Turkish ambassador had arrived “to conclude a perpetual peace betwixt the same great Turk and the Sophy.” Nine years earlier, in November 1553, Jenkinson had watched as Sultan Süleyman marched into Aleppo en route to Persia just weeks after strangling his son Mustafa. The consequences of that murderous decision would eventually scupper Jenkinson’s negotiations with Shah Tahmasp. Mustafa’s death left Süleyman’s sons Selim and Bayezid to fight over the right to succeed their father. The inevitable factionalism and intrigue culminated in Bayezid rebelling against his brother and father. Having been defeated by them at the Battle of Konya in May 1559, Bayezid fled and sought asylum at Shah Tahmasp’s court in Qazvin. The shah was initially delighted to shelter such a prestigious rebel from his great enemy and used Bayezid as leverage in negotiating a favorable renewal of the peace treaty of Amasya. In return, Süleyman and Selim demanded Bayezid’s rendition. Finally, in 1561 Shah Tahmasp agreed, and an Ottoman delegation was sent to Qazvin. Bayezid and his four sons were handed over and summarily garroted the moment they left the city in July 1562.
³⁰
An appalled Jenkinson reported that with Bayezid “being slain according to the Turk’s will, the Sophy sent him his head for a present, not a little desired, and acceptable to the unnatural father.” It would be inaccurate to say that the shah had ordered Bayezid’s execution, but he certainly displayed murderous duplicity in sanctioning yet another act of political filicide.

As Jenkinson later discovered, the Ottoman ambassador who was in Qazvin to ratify the revised peace treaty with the shah had consulted resident Turkish merchants, who agreed that Jenkinson was bad for business, because his “coming thither (naming me by the name of Frank) would in great part destroy their trade.” Sure enough, Jenkinson learned that the shah had been persuaded “not [to] entertain me well, neither dismiss me with letters or gifts, considering I was a Frank, and of that nation that was enemy to the great Turk his brother.” If the shah persisted in pursuing an alliance with the Englishman and it came “to the knowledge of the Turk, it should be a means to break their new league and friendship.” He was further dissuaded “because he had no need, neither that it was requisite for him to have friendship with unbelievers, whose countries lay far from him, and that it was best for him to send me with my letters unto the said great Turk for a present.”
³¹
Having extracted trading privileges from Süleyman in Aleppo, Jenkinson now faced another possible audience with him, but this time as a gift from a rival Muslim ruler. Worse, it was quite possible that he might arrive in Constantinople dead, like Bayezid, rather than alive.

Fortunately, Jenkinson was saved by the intervention of Abdullah-Khan and his son, Shah Ali Murza, who persuaded the shah that “if he used me evil, there would few strangers resort into his country,” which would adversely affect trade. With the Ottoman delegation gone, Shah Tahmasp agreed, and on March 20, 1563, “he sent me a rich garment of cloth of gold, and so dismissed me without any harm.” Jenkinson immediately headed back to Shirvan and the relative safety of Abdullah-Khan’s court. The governor explained that had it not been for Ali Murza’s intervention on Jenkinson’s behalf, he would have “been utterly cast away and sent to the great Turk.” He also claimed that Shah Tahmasp would have granted him trading concessions “had not the peace and league fortuned to have been concluded between them and the great Turk.”
³²
For once in his short but charmed career, Jenkinson had been the victim of monumentally bad timing.

Extracting trading privileges from the ever hospitable Abdullah-Khan was better than nothing, and in May Jenkinson cut his losses and set off on the long journey back to Moscow. He arrived there in August 1563, presenting Ivan with a cache of silk and jewels, as well as “the apparel given unto me by the Sophy.” In return he received enhanced trading privileges from the tsar. He wintered in Moscow before heading north to the White Sea, which he reached in July 1564. Embarking for England, Jenkinson faced what he described almost casually as “great and extreme dangers of loss of ship, goods and life” before finally arriving back in London on September 28, 1564, almost three and a half years after he had left.
³³

Over ten remarkable years, Jenkinson had traveled farther and achieved more than any other Tudor adventurer. He had met three of Asia’s most powerful and terrifying rulers, survived to tell the tale, opened up trade with Russia and Persia and gained unprecedented insights into the region’s Sunni-Shi’a conflict. Eventually, the commercial alliance he had cultivated with the Ottomans in the early 1550s carried no weight in his attempts to establish trade with Persia a decade later, as he stepped into a world of religious and ethnic complexity that he barely understood, and which nearly cost him his life. He probably owed his survival to Süleyman’s and Tahmasp’s utter indifference to Elizabethan England. They did not seem to know even where it was, dismissing it (if they ever thought about it at all) as a peripheral player on the world stage.

Over the next two decades, five more expeditions followed. In the late 1560s Jenkinson’s immediate successor, Arthur Edwards, spent far longer at the Safavid court than he had, obtaining the prized trading privileges that had eluded his predecessor. Shares in the Muscovy Company, which had originally cost £25, now cost £200, but the trade failed to yield a consistent profit. The journey was too far, the returns too meager and the local conditions too volatile, with repeated skirmishes among Turks, Persians and Tatars leading to the kidnap, ransom, robbery and even murder of successive unfortunate English merchants working in the region.
³⁴

Jenkinson returned to Russia twice, in 1566 and for the last time in 1571. On both occasions his tact and skill were required to restore amicable trade agreements with Ivan, who took the opportunity of seeing his old friend again to propose a most unlikely marriage with Queen Elizabeth. The queen’s court retained one further tangible legacy of Jenkinson’s Persian adventure. Records from 1564 detailing Elizabeth’s domestic servants describe “our dear and well beloved woman Ippolyta the Tartarian,” who wore dresses made of Granadan silk and introduced the queen to the fashion of wearing Spanish leather shoes. Ippolyta is presumably “Aura Soltana,” the “young Tartar girl” presented to Elizabeth by Jenkinson in 1560.
³⁵
In the late 1570s Jenkinson returned to England, never to leave again, content to pursue his interests in commerce and property in Northamptonshire, where he died a very wealthy man in 1610.

Over three extraordinary decades, Anthony Jenkinson had met an Ottoman sultan, been sent out to travel to China, settled for Russia where he befriended a tsar, and ended up at the court of the Shah of Persia. Such was the nature of sixteenth-century travel and discovery. Jenkinson’s success justified the connection of Russia with Persia in the minds of London’s political and commercial elite and paved the way for further and even closer alliances with Muslims over the next four decades. Thanks to Jenkinson, the Islamic world had come just a little closer to England. In 1586 the poet William Warner issued a new edition of his celebrated history
Albion’s England,
in which Jenkinson was extolled as one of England’s greatest explorers, responsible for transforming the country’s place in the world under Elizabeth’s rule and within Warner’s lifetime: