The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (8 page)

Jenkinson was now within touching distance of Persia. But as he began to grasp the region’s complex political, commercial and religious tensions, it became clear to him that, at least on this occasion, he could go no farther. The main impediment to his progress was the sectarian divisions between his Muslim hosts. In describing the history of Bukhara, Jenkinson wrote that it “was sometimes subject to the Persians, and [its people] do now speak the Persian tongue, but yet it is a kingdom of itself, and hath most cruel wars continually with the said Persians about their religion, although they be all Mahometists.” The Shaybanids were Sunni, while their Persian rivals were Shi’a, a distinction grasped somewhat vaguely by Jenkinson through recourse to pogonology. “One occasion of their wars,” he wrote, is “that the Persians will not cut the hair of their upper lips, as the Bogharians [Bukharans] and all other Tartars do, which they account a great sin, and call them
caphars
[from the Arabic
kafir
], that is, unbelievers, as they do the Christians.”
¹³
To a mercer obsessed with sartorial appearance, it was the Sunni injunction to trim the mustache as opposed to the Shi’a practice of letting it grow that commanded Jenkinson’s attention, rather than any deeper understanding of their theological difference. Nevertheless, it is the first surviving English eyewitness account of distinctions between the two branches of Islam.

Ultimately Jenkinson was far more concerned by Bukhara’s disappointing commercial potential than by the varieties of its faiths (and beards). In peace there had been “great resort of merchants to this city of Boghar [Bukhara], which travel in great caravans from the countries thereabout adjoining, as India, Persia, Russia, with diverse others, and in times past from Cathay, when there was passage.” But now in times of “incessant and continual wars,” Jenkinson feared that “these merchants are so beggarly and poor . . . that there is no hope of any good trade there to be had worth the following.” Even worse, the hot central Asian climate meant its merchants had little interest in the coarse, heavy woolen English cloth offered by Jenkinson. Instead, Indian and Jewish merchants traded in silk and cotton, “but of kerseys [coarse woolen textile] and other cloth, they make little account,” and despite his best efforts, “they would not barter for such commodity as cloth.”
¹⁴

He considered pushing on to China but seemed to have grasped the unlikelihood of successfully realizing such an arduous and dangerous venture. He noted that the route was treacherous because of the “great wars that had dured three years before my coming hither” between Tatar and Persian warlords, making it “impossible for any caravan to pass unspoilt” to China. Besides, he concluded, “it is nine months’ journey.” This was a gross exaggeration, but a sign of just how far away Jenkinson certainly felt he was from the legendary “Middle Kingdom.”

Even his attempt to reach Persia was beset with difficulties. His local sources told him that Abdullah Khan had left Bukhara to defend it from an imminent siege by the Prince of Samarkand; beyond the city “rovers and thieves” were robbing and murdering merchants en route to Persia; Jenkinson’s safe-conduct letters had been confiscated by the Bukharan authorities, and as he had already concluded rather glumly, his heavy English cloth was (once again) “not vendible in Persia.”
¹⁵
Perhaps the Bukharans had had enough of the tenacious Englishman and wanted to get rid of him; perhaps Jenkinson had little appetite for further danger after nearly two years of constant travel. Whatever the reasons, on March 8, 1559, he left Bukhara and headed home. When he reached the Caspian he “set up the red cross of St. George in our flags, for honor of the Christians which I suppose was never seen in the Caspian Sea before.”
¹⁶
By September he was in Moscow, where he planned to spend the winter before heading for the White Sea and then on to England.

Upon his arrival in Moscow he wrote to his fellow Muscovy Company agent Henry Lane, who had traveled to Russia on Chancellor’s second expedition and was now based in Volgograd in southern Russia. Jenkinson conceded that “although our journey hath been so miserable, dangerous and chargeable with losses, charges and expenses,” there was still a profitable “trade of merchandise to be had in such lands.” He signed off his letter to Lane, “giving you most hearty thanks for my wench Aura Soltana.” When the Elizabethan geographer and travel writer Richard Hakluyt published Jenkinson’s letter in the second edition of his
Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation
(1598–1600), he added a marginal note that read, “This was a young Tartar girl which he gave the Queen afterward.”
¹⁷

In the midst of his loquacious accounts of heroic derring-do and profit and loss, Jenkinson’s casual aside gives a sobering insight into the traffic in men and women as slaves that was also part of his commercial mission and that of most other merchants operating in central Asia at this time. He may have bought the unfortunate “Aura Soltana” in Astrakhan in July 1558, where he noted, “I could have bought many goodly Tartar children, if I would have had a thousand, of their own fathers and mothers, to say, a boy or a wench for a loaf of bread worth six pence in England, but we had more need of victuals at that time than of any such merchandise.”
¹⁸
Having bought the girl and sent her as “merchandise” to his friend Lane, he seems to have reclaimed her while in Moscow in preparation for bringing her back with him to England as the first recorded Muslim woman to enter the Tudor kingdom and, if Hakluyt is right, presenting her as a gift to Queen Elizabeth.

By the late autumn of 1560, Jenkinson was back in London. He had spent three years away from home, negotiating with some of central Asia’s most powerful rulers. The England he had left behind was a Catholic country ruled by Mary and her Spanish consort; what he found on his return was a Protestant nation with a new queen, trying to impose a new religious settlement on a country still deeply divided along religious lines. Whatever he thought of all this he kept to himself as he reported back to the Muscovy Company’s directors on the possibility of further trade with Persia. If the English could somehow exploit the Sunni and Shi’a conflict in the region and access commercial traffic through the Persian Gulf, it could be of huge financial benefit to the new Protestant kingdom. Elizabeth came to the throne facing a national debt of nearly £300,000 incurred by her late father’s wars with France, poor harvests and a slump in the cloth trade. Her creditors threatened to repossess English assets abroad.
¹⁹
Neither the company’s directors nor the queen needed much convincing to support an immediate return voyage to Persia via Russia, and by the following spring preparations were advanced for a new expedition by Jenkinson. His aim, this time, was to reach Persia’s ruler, Shah Tahmasp.

The Muscovy Company had extracted royal assent from Mary and Philip for its northern ventures but could not encroach upon Spanish imperial dominions in Africa and the Americas. Elizabeth had no such scruples. Supported by her counselors—many of whom had invested heavily in the Muscovy Company and had an interest in its success—Elizabeth wrote letters to both the “Emperor of Russia” and the “Great Sophy of Persia” requesting safe-conduct and trading privileges on Jenkinson’s behalf.

Elizabeth’s letters drew on a standard template used in such royal correspondence, praising the recipient and requesting safe passage and commercial preferment for Jenkinson through the realm. But the letter to the Persian emperor, the first she ever wrote to a Muslim ruler, required some significant amendments. The queen and her advisers knew little about the religion, politics or even identity of the Safavid Shi’a ruler, Shah Tahmasp. Whatever Jenkinson had conveyed about Safavid rule is scarcely reflected in Elizabeth’s letter. It began: “Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, &c. To the right mighty and right victorious Prince, the great Sophy, Emperor of the Persians, Medes, Parthians, Hyrcanes, Carmanarians, Margians, of the people on this side, and beyond the river of Tigris, and of all men, and nations, between the Caspian sea, and the gulf of Persia, greeting.”
²⁰

With—unsurprisingly—almost no contemporary understanding of the Safavids and their ruler, Elizabeth’s address fell back on classical and biblical assumptions about the region. What she describes is not Shah Tahmasp and his Safavid dominions, but the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great (reigned 558–529 BC), who was venerated by Christian theologians for conquering Babylon and freeing the Jews in what was regarded as part of the faith’s providential history. Unlike the Ottoman Turks, who seemed to have sprung out of nowhere, the Persians could be put within a providential biblical history, which enabled Elizabeth to avoid any mention of the fact that she was seeking a commercial alliance with a Muslim empire.

Despite “the huge distance of lands” between the two countries, Elizabeth promised the shah that Jenkinson’s “enterprise is only grounded upon an honest intent to establish trade with your subjects.” Taking care to avoid references to explicitly Christian beliefs, she anticipated that if Jenkinson were granted “good passports and safe conducts” through Persia, “the almighty God will bring it to pass, that of these small beginnings, greater moments shall hereafter spring . . . that neither the earth, the seas, nor the heavens, have so much force to separate us, as the godly disposition of natural humanity, and mutual benevolence have to join us together.”
²¹
Written in Hebrew, Latin and Italian, signed and sealed on April 25, 1561, “in our famous city of London,” the letter was presented to Jenkinson as he boarded his ship, the
Swallow,
at Gravesend on May 14, laden with “80 fardles [parcels] containing 400 kerseys,” as he prepared to sail for Russia.

•   •   •

Jenkinson’s second voyage passed without great incident. On this expedition it was politics, not geography, that would present him with his biggest challenge. Upon his arrival in Moscow in August 1561 his attempts to see Ivan were frustrated by an obstructive imperial secretary and the tsar’s imminent marriage to Maria Temryukovna, a Circassian princess who was, according to Jenkinson, “of the Mahometicall law.” Ever resourceful, Jenkinson used his time in the city to sell most of his woolen cloth, waiting until the following April, when he finally obtained an audience with the tsar. A clearly relieved and delighted Jenkinson wrote that Ivan showed him special favor and “committed matter of importance & charge unto me, to be done when I should arrive in those countries whither I intended to go.”
²²
Jenkinson had been appointed the Muscovy Company’s factor, Queen Elizabeth’s de facto ambassador, and was now tasked with acting as Ivan’s representative once he reached Persia. After yet more delay, he finally left Moscow on April 27 and headed for the Volga in the company of a Persian ambassador, with whom he “had great friendship and conference all the way.”
²³

Over the next few months Jenkinson retraced the route of his first journey, traveling through Astrakhan to the Caspian Sea. As he moved on southeast and passed into Safavid territory, he seemed to travel back in time, describing regions through events and individuals from the classical past. In August 1562 he reached the Caspian town of Derbent at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains. His only point of reference was to identify it as part of the ancient Persian province of Hyrcania and admire the ancient wall that Muslims and Christians believed Alexander the Great had built to keep out the monstrous races of Gog and Magog. Just weeks later he arrived at Shirvan and met its Shi’a
beglerbeg
(governor), Abdullah-Khan Ustajlu, Shah Tahmasp’s cousin and one of his closest advisers, whom Jenkinson called “Obdolowcan.” Yet again the Englishman appears to have made a good impression on his Muslim host, who provided lavish entertainment, including feasting and hawking. And as usual Jenkinson assiduously itemized every opulent fabric and object he saw, including the golden silken garments “of that country fashion” which he wore for the rest of his time in Persia.

When Abdullah-Khan asked “whether we of England had friendship with the Turks or not,” Jenkinson’s response was consummate. “I answered that we never had friendship with them, and that therefore they would not suffer us to pass through their country into the Sophy his dominions, and that there is a nation named Venetians, not far distant from us, which are in great league with the said Turks.” Those awful Venetians had made a friend of the shah’s sworn enemies, the Ottomans, and were responsible for blocking the honest English from reaching their obvious allies, the Safavids. When combined with Jenkinson’s charm and plausibility, there was just enough truth in such claims given that the Venetians had a history of allying themselves strategically with the Ottomans, from just after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the renewal of trading privileges following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. Abdullah-Khan was persuaded that the Englishman not only was to be trusted but could even be an asset to his cousin. When he pressed Jenkinson further, “touching religion, and also the state of our countries” and “whether the emperor of Almaine [Germany] or the great Turk were of most power,” Jenkinson nimbly “answered as I thought most meet,” probably evading the (rather tricky) questions and turning discussion toward the prospect of meeting the Sophy “to entreat friendship and free passage.”
²⁴

Having secured the governor’s “great favor” and being supplied with letters of safe-conduct, camels and horses, Jenkinson went on his way. On October 16, he reached Ardabil, another historically charged place where past and present collided, “wherein the princes of Persia are commonly buried, and there Alexander the Great did keep his court when he invaded the Persians.” It was here that Jenkinson observed that the “late prince [Shah] Ismail lieth buried in a fair
Meskit
[mosque] with a sumptuous sepulcher,” although he does not say if he managed to enter the mosque and see the shah’s tomb.
²⁵
Jenkinson was now at the very center of the ancient biblical (and Qur’anic) world, the holiest site of Safavid Shi’a belief. He was close to his ultimate goal of reaching the shah’s court. Finally, on November 2, 1562, he arrived at Shah Tahmasp’s imperial capital of Qazvin, ninety miles northwest of modern Tehran.