The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (4 page)

To ease any potential qualms about the marriage, the English circulated celebratory verses reminding everyone that Philip was descended from King Edward III and so was, as one writer put it, an “
English
Philip.” They “tell us that he is English and not Spanish,” wrote one of Philip’s advisers, while noting with equal satisfaction that Mary was of course Spanish through her maternal line. On July 31 the newlyweds left for London on a tide of public goodwill. Philip stopped at Windsor on August 3 to be installed officially as a Knight of the Garter, and on the eighteenth they made their triumphant entry into London. The gallows erected to execute supporters of the Wyatt Rebellion were taken down and replaced with stages hastily erected to display pageants and tableaux celebrating the union. Philip admired the elaborate displays created in his honor, boasting that throughout the city he was greeted “with universal signs of joy and love.”
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The procession ended at Whitehall, where the couple entered the privy apartments to find one of the most astonishing of all wedding presents from Philip’s father. Hanging from the walls were twelve enormous tapestries, woven from the finest gold, silver and silk thread. Each one was over fifteen feet high, ranging in width from twenty-three to forty feet, a physically overwhelming presence even in such grand chambers. They were, in the words of one onlooker, a woven account of Charles V’s “proceedings and victories against the Turks.”
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Known today as the
Conquest of Tunis
tapestries, the cycle, now hanging in the Palacio Real in Madrid, provides a blow-by-blow account of one of the sixteenth century’s greatest clashes between Islam and Christianity: Charles V’s military expedition to Tunis in the summer of 1535 to crush the Turkish pasha and grand admiral of the Ottoman fleet, Kheir ed-Din, known to westerners as Barbarossa.

“Barbarossa” means red beard in Italian, though by conflation with “barbarous” the name was also an acknowledgment of Kheir ed-Din’s fearsome reputation for raiding Christian towns and destroying Christian ships across the Mediterranean. In 1534 Süleyman the Magnificent appointed Kheir ed-Din head of the Ottoman fleet, encouraging him to plunder the Italian and North African coasts, an assault that culminated in his capture of the strategically important city of Tunis in August. Kheir ed-Din had deposed the city’s king, the tyrannical Mulay Hassan, a vassal of the Habsburg emperor. Worse still for Charles, Barbarossa was supplied with arms by Francis I, whose growing alliance with the Ottomans threatened Spanish influence in the Mediterranean basin.

Charles felt he needed to respond decisively. The prospect of a latter-day crusade against the infidel in North Africa appealed to him, as he saw himself as “Defender of the Faith.” In 1269 the French king Louis IX had died of dysentery while unsuccessfully besieging Tunis—an unfortunate ending that led to his canonization. Charles had his eye not only on succeeding where Louis had failed, but also on achieving sainthood. In the autumn of 1534 he began assembling a huge armada. He financed the expedition in part with gold sent back to Spain by conquistadors to be used, as one put it, “in the holy enterprise of war against the Turk, Luther and other enemies of the faith.”
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A combined fleet of more than four hundred ships carrying 30,000 Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Flemish and German soldiers set sail on June 14, 1535, and reached Tunis later that month. After a punishing siege and ferocious battle on the city’s outskirts that left an estimated 30,000 dead, Kheir ed-Din fled and Tunis fell to Charles’s forces on July 21. Habsburg dispatches claimed that around 20,000 Christian slaves were freed, although many more Muslims were slaughtered in the three-day sack and pillage of the city, and some 10,000 more (it is estimated) were sold into slavery.
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Charles was so confident of victory that he took the Flemish artist Jan Vermeyen with him to record events in meticulous detail. He then commissioned William de Pannemaker, Brussels’s finest tapestry maker, to weave twelve enormous tapestries based on Vermeyen’s drawings. The series began with a panoramic map of the Mediterranean theater of operations and followed key moments in the campaign, culminating in the final graphic scenes of the fall and sack of Tunis. It took forty-two weavers many years to complete the set, at the enormous cost of fifteen thousand Flemish pounds. When the tapestries were finally completed in Brussels in the summer of 1554, they were packed up immediately and sent to London, where they were unveiled for the first time to celebrate the union of Mary and Philip.

Each tapestry emphasized the awesome military might and financial power of the Habsburg Empire. For the English and Spanish entourage admiring them that August, the message was clear: the Spanish king would go to any lengths to protect his religious and imperial interests. For many of the English gazing up at these beautiful but intimidating scenes, the tapestries provided the first eyewitness depictions of Muslims in such realistic detail. For generations of Englishmen and -women, Muslims were distant and exotic people, glimpsed on the edges of hazy world maps or in literary romances. Suddenly Mary’s court was confronted with images of life-size turbaned Turkish and Berber soldiers bearing down on their victims, whose women and children were slaughtered and sold into slavery. This vivid image of the crushing of the “infidel” provided a stark warning to English Protestants that the heretical break with Rome would not be endured. Islam and Protestantism were both heresies, to be eradicated where possible by political unions, or, if necessary, by direct military assault.

For Catholics, this message seemed a blessed salvation from the twin specters of Lutheranism and Islam. But to English Protestants it confirmed their worst fears. As one Protestant commentator observed in July 1555, Mary and Philip’s religious advisers were arguing that “the Turks are one and the same thing as we who embrace the pure doctrine of the Gospel.”
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Mary had already made the connection between Protestantism and the Muslim “heresy” as early as the autumn of 1535, when she took the dramatic step of imploring Charles V to lead a crusade against her father following his divorce from her mother and the split from Rome. “In so doing,” she wrote, he “will perform a service most agreeable to Almighty God, nor will he acquire less fame and glory to himself than in the conquest of Tunis or the whole of Africa.”
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Given Henry’s appalling treatment of his elder daughter, her emotional plea was perhaps not as shocking as it might first appear. Like that of so many Christians in the sixteenth century battling with profound changes to their faith, Mary’s understanding of Muslim Turks had been shaped by misconceptions of Islam that had endured for centuries, and went right back to the religion’s origins in seventh-century Arabia. Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina in AD 632, Christians provided a variety of inconsistent and contradictory responses to Islam, ranging from indifference and bemusement to horror and disgust. The first problem for many Christians was the rapid success of Islam as a religious and political force in the seventh and eighth centuries.

In direct contrast to Islam’s political strength and theological unity, Christianity had suffered centuries of persecution under the pagan Roman Empire, only to emerge after the fall of Rome divided between an eastern Orthodox church based in Constantinople and a western Latin church led by the pope in Rome.

Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam traced its origins as a monotheistic faith at least as far back as Abraham. Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus were all regarded as prophets who had imperfectly described the word of God. The Torah, the Psalms and the Gospel were thus acknowledged as holy texts prefiguring the ultimate divine revelation provided by the Prophet Muhammad in the recitation of the Qur’an. Christians claimed that Jesus’ message supplanted that of Moses and the Jewish faith; Muslims now claimed that Muhammad’s prophecies had superseded those of Jesus. Their austere simplicity was based on the five pillars of faith:
shahâda,
the recitation of the foundational belief;
salât,
daily prayers and ablutions;
zakat,
giving alms;
sawm,
fasting through the month of Ramadan; and
hajj,
the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Islam rejected sacramental rites and holy intercessors and dismissed the Christian belief in the Holy Trinity. Jesus was regarded as a holy prophet, but he was not crucified, nor was he the son of God. To worship him as God was, as far as Muslims were concerned, a blasphemous error. Nevertheless, as People of the Book, Jews and Christians retained the right to freedom of worship even within the
dâr al-Islam
(“House of Islam”), where they were known as
dhimmi,
or protected minorities.

Most of the theological detail of Islam was lost on early Christian commentators, and for understandable reasons. Access to the culture and language of the Islamic world was difficult: by the mid-sixteenth century the Qur’an had been translated into Latin only three times.
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Then there was the partiality of early Christian responses to Islam. Faced with an expanding, seemingly irresistible Muslim empire, some early Christian communities decided to convert but remained understandably silent about the reasons behind their decision. Those who did not convert sought to offer a persuasive account of the superiority of Christian providential beliefs. The result from the eleventh century and onward was a stream of written apologetics—defenses of Christianity—that made little attempt to understand Islam as an independent faith. Instead, they presented it as a scourge sent by a Christian God to test his followers’ faith. These writings produced a series of insults, caricatures and myths about Islam that laid the foundations for many of today’s stereotypes. Muslims, they claimed, were barbaric, licentious and gluttonous, practicing a bellicose, tyrannical and murderous religion. Muhammad was condemned as a lecherous, drunken, epileptic trickster with deviant sexual tastes, and the Qur’an derided as a fraudulent amalgamation of Jewish and Christian beliefs.
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As the terms “Islam” and “Muslim” appeared in English only in the seventeenth century, ethnic terms like “Moor” and “Arab” were used instead, though such was the importance of the Ottoman Empire that “Turk” was commonly applied to Muslims of any and all ethnic origins. Where religion was mentioned, it was in relation to the “law of Muhammad.” But the faith’s prominence had to be explained through the Bible in some way, which gave rise to the medieval use of the terms “Saracen,” “Ishmaelite” and “Hagarene,” a cluster of names derived from Abraham’s offspring. In the Old Testament, Ishmael was Abraham’s son, born illegitimately of his wife Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar. Ishmael lived to father twelve princes whom Christian and Jewish writers regarded as founders of the twelve Arab tribes (named in Genesis 25:12–16). For medieval writers these terms—particularly “Saracen”—became synonymous first with Arabs, then with all Muslims.

By the time of the Crusades, the “Saracens” were regarded primarily as a military threat. Christian misconceptions of the rival faith hardened in two ways. The first was that Islam was perceived as a pagan religion. Saracens were idolatrous
perfidi
—treacherous or unfaithful, from where we get “infidel”—who worshipped idols, including Apollo and Muhammad. Over time, as Christians began to realize that their adversaries were monotheists rather than pagans, the idea emerged that Islam was just another heresy of the true faith, a confused amalgamation of Christian and Jewish theology that accepted God but rejected the Trinity. Muhammad was ridiculed as the ultimate heresiarch, a fraudulent prophet who had tricked his followers with the promise of a debauched paradise using demonic magic and feigned miracles.

It was easier to understand Islam as part of Christianity’s more familiar struggles with heretical communities than to provide a meaningful explanation of its beliefs. Describing Saracens as heretics enabled the faithful to accept them as part of God’s plan, a terrifying but necessary prefiguration of the Book of Revelation’s Apocalypse, the Day of Judgment and humanity’s redemption. Even the rise of the Ottomans—thought to be descendants of the Trojans or Scythians—and their conquest of Constantinople in 1453 were regarded as divine punishment for Christianity’s inability to unify its eastern Orthodox and western Latin churches.
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What Christians saw when they looked at Islam was not a rival religion but a distorted image of themselves.

This perception endured for centuries. Medieval England may have seemed a long way from Arabia, but events involving “Saracens” had already impressed themselves on the medieval Christian imagination throughout Europe.
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The Arabs had only been defeated in France at Tours in 732. They conquered the whole of Spain and by 1187 they had taken Jerusalem. In 1143 the Lincolnshire-born theologian and Arabic scholar Robert of Ketton completed the first-ever translation of the Qur’an into Latin while studying Arabic in Spain. As its title suggested,
Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete
(“The Religion of Muhammad the Pseudo-prophet”) was designed to show Islam as a Christian heresy—or what Robert calls a “death-dealing” religion—and to convert Muslims to Christianity. Despite drawing on Arabic Qur’anic
tafsīrs
(commentaries), Robert’s translation was little more than a loose paraphrase of the original and had little or no success in converting Muslims. It survives in twenty-five medieval copies, and remained the standard version of the text in Europe until the mid-seventeenth century.

In William Langland’s poem
Piers Plowman
(c. 1360–1387) the Prophet is described as a “Cristene man,” a pseudo-Christian schismatic whose followers can find salvation only if they understand their heretical error in worshipping the “wrong” Messiah (Muhammad), and convert instead to Christ and “oure bileue,
Credo in deum patrem
” (“our belief,
I Believe in God the Father Almighty
”).
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In contrast to this learned and literary approach to Islam, more popular English traditions continued to draw on older traditions that regarded Muslims as pagans. The mystery-play cycles performed in York and Chester were full of Greek and Roman emperors, as well as Herod and Pontius Pilate, who were all shown worshipping Muhammad as a pagan idol. Heresy, paganism and millenarianism had all defined Christian responses to Islam for generations.