The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (20 page)

Leicester’s pro-regulation merchants adopted a more optimistic common-law approach to regulating trade, believing the statutes they proposed would “keep reasonable men in order and bridle unreasonable men trading into Barbary, by incorporating them.” They pointed to the oversupply of English commodities “being sold there to much lost advantage,” in contrast to the demand for Moroccan goods “viz. sugar much advanced there,” that could be restrained by the creation of a regulated company (an organization with a government charter giving it exclusive rights to trade in a particular region). They also proposed that any English transgressions in Morocco could be “restrained by order and fear of punishment at home,” and that if anyone impeached his countrymen in Morocco “he must of a Christian become an infidel and abandon his country, which cannot be entered.” Finally, they argued that regulation was a direct response to “seeing the commodities of that country is in so few men’s hands as a few wily heads, with great stocks.”
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It took an even wilier head, like Leicester’s, to argue that a monopoly was required to oppose monopolization.

The result was a foregone conclusion. On the same day, July 15, 1585, the “letters patent or privileges granted by her majesty to certain noble men and merchants for a trade to Barbary” were proclaimed, providing a charter for the foundation of what would become known as the Barbary Company. Most of them were copied almost verbatim from the privileges granted to the Turkey Company less than four years earlier. But there were two important differences. The first was that the new initiative was not a joint-stock but a regulated company (the former allowed members to trade on their individual capital and at their own risk, whereas the latter formalized and shared collective investments, profits and losses). The second was that Leicester was given unprecedented executive powers so far as a commercial company was concerned. Alongside Leicester and Robert Rich, 1st Earl of Warwick, forty London merchants trading in Morocco were named who, the patent claimed, “have sustained great and grievous losses.” The way to avoid such losses was to stipulate that “none others, shall and may, for, and during the space of twelve years, have and enjoy the whole freedom and liberty in the said traffic or trade, unto or from the said country of Barbary,” aside from those named. Although there was no official governor, all ordnance was subject to “the consent of the said earl of Leicester,” making the privilege little more than Elizabeth’s gift to Leicester and his cronies to run the Moroccan trade as they liked.
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Leicester could now ship timber and munitions to Morocco with impunity, and in return Elizabeth was guaranteed a resident company agent, at no cost to the crown, capable of pursuing a diplomatic alliance with al-Mansur against the growing threat of Spain.

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The wisdom of appointing a resident agent was exhibited by the continued effectiveness of another English agent operating in the Muslim world, more than two thousand miles from Morocco, the rejuvenated William Harborne. In January 1585 Harborne had intervened successfully in yet another maritime incident that threatened Anglo-Islamic relations, but this time one committed against the English. In May 1584 the Turkey Company’s ship
Jesus
had been seized, its cargo confiscated and its crew imprisoned in Tripoli (Libya). The local authorities believed that a factor had boarded the ship owing a local Turkish merchant 450 crowns, and promptly seized the ship, hanging its master and one of its crew. The vessel’s fate might have remained unknown had it not been for the
Jesus’
s resourceful boatswain, Thomas Sanders, who managed somehow to smuggle a letter out of captivity in Tripoli to his father in Tavistock in Devon. Sanders provided one of the earliest English accounts of life as a galley slave. He described his “miserable bondage and slavery” in vivid detail, with lurid stories of how he was sold into the Turkish galleys, where “we were chained three and three to an oar and we rowed naked above the girdle,” raiding Greek vessels trading African slaves. He wrote that some of his compatriots had been compelled to “turn Turk,” graphically describing their forced circumcision.
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When the news reached London, the Turkey Company’s directors were outraged by what they saw as a flagrant breach of the resurrected Anglo-Ottoman Capitulations by a Turkish client state. They petitioned Elizabeth successfully to raise the matter with Sultan Murad, who in turn wrote to the Kaid Ramadan Pasha, ruler of Tripoli, demanding that he release the ship, cargo and crew immediately. Emboldened by such royal support from queen and sultan, Harborne himself wrote to Ramadan Pasha in January 1585 demanding immediate restitution. The Englishman condemned the Pasha’s actions as “contrary to the holy league sworn by both our princes,” and warned him that unless he redeemed the crew and cargo he would “answer in another world unto God alone, and in this world unto the Grand Signior, for this heinous crime committed by you against so many poor souls, which by this your cruelty are in part dead, and in part detained by you in most miserable captivity.”
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Harborne’s argument anticipated the calls for a regulated Moroccan trade back in London; here was a Christian demanding that a Muslim abide by the terms of the contractual agreement set out in the Capitulations, regardless of faith or personality. The authoritative tone Harborne now adopted toward a Muslim ruler was in stark contrast to the fretful, self-pitying figure pleading his case during the
Bark Roe
fiasco. It helped that he could use the Ottoman sultan as diplomatic leverage, but there was no doubting that he had finally mastered his brief, and that the English were starting to pull their weight in the Levantine trade. The letter succeeded: the captives were released and mostly melted away into the Mediterranean littoral, never to be heard of again.

Once Harborne had firmly established himself as ambassador with control of a network of English consuls across the Mediterranean, he took on a more explicitly political role. He was in regular correspondence with Walsingham, who was now briefing him to entice Murad into a desperately needed anti-Spanish alliance. By early 1585, relations with Spain were virtually on a war footing, and England was perilously isolated from the rest of Europe. As a consequence Elizabeth had finally sided with those of her counselors advising a more aggressive approach toward Spain. Walsingham, foremost among them, drew up “A Plot for the Annoying of the King of Spain,” which advocated using Sir Francis Drake to launch a preemptive attack on the Spanish fleet. Elizabeth approved, unleashing Drake’s squadron of twenty-five ships in a series of assaults on Spanish shipping across the Atlantic and Caribbean. On August 10, she signed the Treaty of Nonsuch with Dutch Calvinists fighting the Spanish in the Low Countries. Under its terms the queen offered the Dutch £125,000 as well as the support of an expeditionary English army led by Leicester, still preening over the successful establishment of the Barbary Company and eager for an opportunity to prove himself on the battlefield. Philip II interpreted the treaty as a declaration of war against Spain, and in October he informed Pope Sixtus V of his intention to invade England. It was a momentous decision. By December 1585 a plan for a massive fleet to sail against the English was being prepared.
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Keenly aware of the inevitability of a Spanish attack, Walsingham had been corresponding with his agents in the Low Countries and with Harborne in Constantinople about the need to create an Anglo-Islamic alliance against the Spanish threat. That December the spy William Herle wrote to Elizabeth from Antwerp, insisting that the English policy of arming Muslims to fight Catholics was not only expedient but righteous. “Your majesty in using the King of Fez &c,” he wrote, “doth not arm a barbarian against a Christian, but a barbarian against an heretic [Philip II], the most dangerous that was in any age, the usurper of kingdoms, and the subverter of God’s true religion, which you are bound as defendresse of the faith, to defend.”
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Such arguments added credence to Walsingham’s Ottoman policy.

Throughout the autumn of 1585, Walsingham encouraged Harborne to agitate for Ottoman military aggression against the Spanish, adding Elizabeth’s voice in the matter. “I did advise you,” he wrote on October 8,

of a course to be taken there for procuring the Grand Seigneur, if it were possible, to convert some part of his forces bent, as it should seem by your advertisements, from time to time wholly against the Persians, rather against Spain, thereby to divert the dangerous attempt and designs of the said King from these parts of Christendom. So am I at present, her majesty being, upon the success of the said King of Spain’s affairs in the Low Countries, now fully resolved to oppose herself against his proceedings in defense of that distressed nation, whereof it is not otherwise likely but hot wars between him and us, wills me again to require you effectually to use all your endeavor and industry in that behalf.
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If Harborne could persuade Murad that it was in his interests for the Ottomans to attack the Catholic Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean, it might hamper Philip’s English invasion plans. Ever the realist, Walsingham appreciated that this was an ambitious request and concluded his letter by advising Harborne that “if you shall see that the sultan cannot be brought altogether to give ear to this advice,” then “procure at least that, by making show of arming to the sea for the King of Spain’s dominions, hold the King of Spain in suspense, by means whereof he shall be the less bold to send forth his best forces into these parts.”
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Like Walsingham, the Venetian Morosini understood that a pragmatic approach to religion played its part in all this subterfuge, and he wrote to the Venetian Seignory in 1585 that Murad “places especially great worth on the friendship of the Queen of England, because he is convinced that, owing to the religious schism, she will never unite against him with other princes in Christendom; she will, on the contrary, always be an excellent instrument for disturbing and thwarting such alliances.”
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Both Sunni Muslim and Protestant Christian rulers had told each other only half the reasons for their mutual association.

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Even as Walsingham was turning a merchant into a spy versed in military matters, Leicester was dispatching a soldier to oversee commercial matters in Morocco. Having established the Barbary Company’s privileges on terms of his choosing, it was incumbent upon him to appoint England’s first official ambassador to Morocco. The man he chose was Henry Roberts, a very different kind of ambassador than William Harborne. Roberts was a client of Leicester’s, a soldier with experience fighting in Ireland and privateering against the Spanish, but little knowledge of trade or diplomacy. He would later claim, “I was forced to take this voyage full sore against my will, for the which cause I was forced to yield up my place where I was settled in Ireland,” saying that his forced relocation had cost him five hundred pounds.
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Whatever the truth, Roberts’s appointment was closely linked to his association with Don António, Prior of Crato, who since losing the Portuguese crown to Philip II in 1580 had used Elizabeth’s backing to support his claim to the throne. Elizabeth and Leicester appointed Roberts with a view not only to establishing formal trade relations through the Barbary Company but also to securing al-Mansur’s support for Don António’s claim to the Portuguese throne, yet another policy that put Protestant England and its Muslim ally Morocco on a collision course with Philip II’s Spain.

Roberts left England with three ships on August 14, 1585, and arrived at Safi, on the west coast of Morocco, exactly a month later. He was met “with all humanity and honor” by the local authorities as the first official English ambassador to Morocco. He dined with the resident English, French and Flemish merchants before setting out on the ninety-mile journey inland to the capital, the “Red City” of Marrakesh.
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Marrakesh, which Roberts entered in the stifling September heat, was Morocco’s second great city, home to nearly twenty thousand people and the gateway to the trans-Saharan caravan trade in salt, ivory, spices, gold and slaves. Founded in the eleventh century by the Berber Almoravid dynasty, it had maintained an abiding rivalry with the much older city of Fez, 280 miles to the north, whose madrasas were known throughout the Muslim world, securing its fame as one of the great centers of theological and legal scholarship. Until the 1550s Fez had remained Morocco’s capital city, but with the rise of the Sa’adian dynasty power had shifted south, and by the time Roberts reached Marrakesh, al-Mansur was transforming the city into one of Islam’s great imperial capitals.

In 1578 work began on a palatial complex known as the Dar al-Makhzen, designed to rival the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Granada and Philip II’s Escorial, then under construction northwest of Madrid. Where Philip’s palace was paid for with New World gold and silver, al-Mansur’s was built on profits from Moroccan sugar. Carrara marble was imported from Tuscany and two thousand captives were brought from Fez (including many Portuguese survivors of the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir) to build the palace and new mosques, madrasas, hospitals, factories and even funerary tombs for the new sultan’s ancestors. Antonio de Saldanha, a Portuguese nobleman captured by the Sa’adians who wrote a chronicle of al-Mansur’s reign, claimed that the rebuilding included premises for Christian merchants, and that “in the streets set aside for their shops, all the goods of France, Italy, England and Spain were sold at lower prices than in the lands where they were produced. . . . The town of Marrakesh then attained such greatness as it had never attained before nor ever would again.”
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