The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  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 sumptuo
us 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.

  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.