The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam

341 Pages·2016·19.14 MB·English

by  Jerry Brotton

Also by Jerry Brotton
Great Maps
A History of the World in 12 Maps
The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction
The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection
The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo
Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (with Lisa Jardine)
Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World

VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2016 by Jerry Brotton Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages
diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized
edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing
any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue
to publish books for every reader.
First published in Great Britain as This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World by Allen
Lane, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK
Library of Congress cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brotton, Jerry.
Title: The Sultan and the queen: the untold story of Elizabeth and Islam/Jerry Brotton.
Description: New York: Viking, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016029495 (print) | LCCN 2016031895 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525428824 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780698191631 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558–1603. | Turkey
—History—Murad III, 1574–1595. | Great Britain—Foreign relations—Turkey. | Turkey—Foreign
relations—Great Britain.
Classification: LCC DA355 .B69 2016 (print) | LCC DA355 (ebook) | DDC 327.4205609/031—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029495
Version_1
To my wife, Charlotte
Contents
Also by Jerry Brotton
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map

Introduction
1 Conquering Tunis
2 The Sultan, the Tsar and the Shah
3 The Battle for Barbary
4 An Apt Man in Constantinople
5 Unholy Alliances
6 Sultana Isabel
7 London Turns Turk
8 Mahomet’s Dove
9 Escape from the Seraglio
10 Sherley Fever
11 More Than a Moor
Epilogue
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
Visit http://bit.ly/2bRF8pK for a printable version of this map.
Introduction
Toward the end of September 1579, a letter arrived in London addressed to
Queen Elizabeth I of England. Wrapped in a satin bag and fastened with a silver
capsule, the letter was an object of exquisite beauty, unlike any other diplomatic
correspondence the queen had ever received. It was written on a large parchment
roll dusted with gold and dominated by an elaborate calligraphic monogram and
emblazoned with a flourish across the top. The letter was composed in Ottoman
Turkish, a stylized Arabic script that was used in all formal correspondence by
its sender, the thirty-three-year-old Ottoman sultan Murad III. This was the very
first communication between a Turkish sultan and an English ruler. It was
written in response to the arrival in Constantinople that spring of an English
merchant, William Harborne, who had requested commercial privileges for his
country superior to those that had thus far been awarded to any other Christian
nation by the Ottomans.
It had taken six months for the letter to make its way from Constantinople to
London, where it was presented to the queen alongside a Latin translation
prepared by an imperial scribe. The letter followed the standard conventions of
an Ottoman hukum, a written order to a subject, and was addressed as a direct
“Command to Elzābet, who is the queen of the domain of Anletār.” Murad told
Elizabeth that he had been informed of the arrival of her “traders and merchants
of those parts coming to our divinely-protected dominions and carrying on
trade.” He issued an edict that if “her agents and merchants shall come from the
domain of Anletār by sea with their barks and with their ships, let no one
interfere.” As long as this queen from a faraway country was prepared to accept
Murad’s superiority and to function as his subject, he would be happy to protect
her merchants.
• • •
Elizabeth responded quickly. The opening of her letter, dated October 25, 1579,
was as revealing as Murad’s. The queen began by describing herself as:
Elizabeth by the grace of the most mighty God, the only Creator
of heaven and earth, of England, France and Ireland Queen, the
most invincible and most mighty defender of the Christian faith
against all kind of idolatries, of all that live among the
Christians, and falsely profess the name of Christ, unto the most
imperial and most invincible prince, Zuldan Murad Chan, the
most mighty ruler of the kingdom of Turkey, sole and above all,
the most sovereign monarch of the East Empire, greeting, and
many happy and fortunate years.1
Elizabeth was eager to boast of her own imperial aspirations—although it
was stretching credulity to suggest she was queen of France—and to assure
Murad that she shared his antipathy toward Catholic “idolatry” and those
“falsely” professing Christ. But her main interest was in establishing a
commercial relationship with the Ottomans, even if it meant having to write
from a position of subjection:
Most Imperial and most invincible Emperor, we have received
the letters of your mighty highness written to us from
Constantinople the fifteenth day of March this present year,
whereby we understand how graciously, and how favorably the
humble petitions of one William Harborne a subject of ours,
resident in the Imperial city of your highness presented unto
your Majesty for the obtaining of access for him and two other
merchants, more of his company our merchants also, to come
with merchandizes both by sea & land, to the countries and
territories subject to your government, and from thence again to
return home with good leave and liberty, were accepted of your
most invincible Imperial highness.2
This was the start of a cordial seventeen-year-long correspondence between
the sultan and the queen that marked the beginning of one of history’s more
unlikely alliances. For the wily Protestant queen who had already held on to her
crown for twenty-one years in the face of implacable Catholic opposition to her
rule, it was yet another shrewd move designed to ensure her political survival.
Ever since Elizabeth’s excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570, Europe’s
Catholic powers had offered English merchants only limited commercial access
to their ports and cities. In response to the growing economic crisis that ensued,
a group of merchants came together and proposed to explore, with the queen’s
blessing, the possibility of direct trade with the fabled lands to the east. The
Venetians and Spaniards had long acted as middlemen in the eastern trade, and
most of the coveted spices and fine silks from Persia and the Indies came
through their ports, but a handful of enterprising English traders came up with a
new business model that would help them raise capital while minimizing their
own personal risk.
Shortly before writing her first letter to Murad, Elizabeth had authorized the
creation of England’s first joint-stock company, known as the Muscovy
Company, a model that would be replicated in Turkey and, much later, in the
colonization of India and America. The idea was simple enough: given the
expense and uncertainty of setting off on long expeditions to the east, the
merchants contracted to share both the costs and the potential profits in relation
to their investment of capital. It was the unwitting conception of a new model for
conducting business, one that was to have revolutionary long-term
consequences.
• • •
For the young and inexperienced Ottoman sultan, the alliance with the Sultana of
Anletār was a small part of a much larger geopolitical world picture. Thirteen
years younger than Elizabeth, Murad had ascended to the throne of the four-
hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire at its height, when it still ruled vast swaths of
North Africa, central Asia, the Middle East and the Balkans. He faced challenges
on multiple fronts: protracted wars with the Safavid dynasty of Persia to the east,
revolts against Ottoman rule in the Balkans, challenges from Spain and the Holy
Roman Empire in Europe, as well as domestic factionalism within the ruling
court in Constantinople. Pious, fragile, sedentary and prone to epilepsy, Murad
was far more absorbed by his domestic situation within the walls of the Topkapi
Palace than by the administration of his empire, which he largely delegated to
his viziers and provincial governors.3 He allowed his chief consort, the
Albanian-born Safiye Sultan, to exercise unprecedented political power from
within the protected space of his fabled harem and gave his mother, Nurbanu
Sultan, free rein to dictate rival policies to those of his mistress, with disastrous
consequences.4 It was probably fortuitous for Elizabeth that the sultan was more
interested in inviting Sufi mystics to interpret his dreams than in administering
his extensive empire. Murad’s court was complacent enough to claim that the