The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  In response to such attacks, Elizabeth appointed a master of the revels in 1581 to censor any play performed in the city deemed offensive to the church or state. Wary of such opprobrium, the early theater impresarios built playhouses outside London’s ancient Roman walls, in the so-called liberties, areas free from the oversight of the city’s civic authorities and usually instead under relatively lax royal or aristocratic control. The Rose, the Hope and the Swan were all open-air playhouses erected on the south bank of the Thames—or Bankside—an area known for its dangerous yet also glamorous atmosphere. People crossed over to the south bank to visit a brothel or a bear pit—or to see a play. In the minds of many Londoners the three activities were interchangeable. When Philip Henslowe first bought the lease of the Rose tavern it was a brothel, whose activities continued to provide a profitable supplement to the theater that he erected in the building’s backyard.6 He also built the Hope Theatre on the site of a bear garden, where up to a thousand spectators could come and pay a penny to see a play, then return the next day and spend the same amount to watch a bear tied to a stake, whipped and attacked by dogs.7

  The theater inhabited a precarious position in Elizabethan London: it was a vibrant new industry, a contributor to London’s financial prosperity, watched by thousands from all walks of life. Yet it was also subjected to relentless attack from the authorities. Its practitioners lived and worked in London’s poorest areas alongside volatile and marginalized communities of prostitutes, servants, artisans and “strangers”—people escaping religious persecution and slavery from the Low Countries, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and even the New World. The theater was drawn to the stories reaching London from the Islamic world of enslavement, conversion, piracy and heroic adventure because they held a mirror up to its own practices and people.

  In the summer of 1581, a play appeared that dramatized the issues of trade, money, religion and national differences generated by recent events in and around Turkey. Its author, Robert Wilson, was a talented young actor and playwright attached to a company financed by Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. The play was called The Three Ladies of London. In 1583 Wilson would subsequently transfer his allegiance to the theatrical company called Queen Elizabeth’s Men and forge his reputation producing plays for the Rose Theatre, which opened six years later. But in the early 1580s he was still learning his trade with Leicester’s Men and writing plays indebted to the medieval morality tradition and classical Roman city comedy whose sobriety might even have satisfied Stephen Gosson.

  The Three Ladies of London centers on the struggle between personifications of Love, Conscience and Lucre. It begins in London, with Lady Love and Lady Conscience complaining that Lady Lucre and her employees, the vice characters of Dissimulation, Fraud, Simony and Usury, have destroyed the traditional civic virtues and replaced them with the pursuit of money. The problem is identified as foreign goods coming into England purchased with money borrowed at excessive interest rates—a practice known as usury and condemned as immoral. Lady Love complains:

  For Lucre men come from Italy, Barbary, Turkey,

  From Jewry: nay, the pagan himself

  Endangers his body to gape forth her pelf [money].

  They forsake mother, prince, country, religion, kiff and kin,

  Nay, men care not what they forsake, so Lady Lucre they win.8

  The overseas trade practiced in Muslim kingdoms like Morocco and Turkey by merchants such as Hogan and Harborne is identified as the source of the problem, responsible for eroding England’s time-honored social relations.

  As the play progresses, Usury and Simony begin their work on behalf of Lady Lucre. Both vices are represented as nefarious Italian Catholics infiltrating virtuous Protestant England. Usury explains that he left his birthplace in Venice to come to London because “England was such a place for Lucre to bide.”9 Simony admits that his “birth, nursery and bringing up hath hitherto been in Rome, that ancient religious city” where he had been selling ecclesiastical privileges (including papal indulgences) before English merchants smuggled him into London—where, he tells Lucre, “I heard in what great estimation you were.”10 Wilson then introduces an effete, villainous Italian merchant called Mercadorus with a ludicrous accent. He tells Lady Lucre—addressed as “Madonna”—“me do for love of you tink no pain too mush.”11 Lucre orders him to “go among the Moors, Turkes, and pagans” to sell English grain, leather and beef. In return “for these good commodities” he must bring back exotic oriental “trifles to England” such as amber, jet, coral “and every such bauble,”12 expensive objects with little intrinsic value. With comic relish Mercadorus acknowledges the widespread awareness of—and concern with—the English trade with Morocco and Turkey:

  Tink ye not dat me have carried over corn, ledar, beef and bacon too all tis while,

  And brought hedar many baubles dese countryman to beguile?

  Yes, shall me tell you Madonna? Me and my countrymans have sent over

  Bell-metal to make ordnance, yea and ordnance itself beside,

  Dat my country and oder countries be so well furnished as dis country, and has never been espied.13

  The play invites its audience to laugh at England’s weakness for fripperies and its willingness to arm Muslims with metal taken from churches. The country is seen as sick, exporting its resources and absorbing unhealthy “baubles,” and even arming its opponents.14 As Mercadorus pursues his villainy, Usury murders the character personifying Hospitality to ensure that money is spent on “trifles” rather than the poor, Love is forced into a marriage with Dissimulation, and Conscience falls into debt and turns to running a brothel.15

  Meanwhile, Mercadorus arrives in Turkey, where he is confronted by Gerontus, described as a “Jewish usurer in Turkey,” who has lent him money to buy goods in London. Gerontus complains that Mercadorus has broken the terms of his bond. “You know I lent you two thousand ducats for three months’ space,” he tells Mercadorus, but the unscrupulous Italian “fled out of the country.” Gerontus complains that if Jews behaved like this they would never be trusted, “But many of you Christians make no conscience to falsify your faith and break your day”16 (that is, a contractually agreed settlement date). He claims the original capital plus the accrued interest, but Mercadorus deceives him, promising to settle in a few more days, while asking Gerontus for “toys” or “some fantastic new knack,” because “da gentlewomans in England buy such tings for fantasy.”17 Seduced, Gerontus offers him perfumes, precious stones and “many more fit things to suck away money from such green-headed [covetous] wantons,”18 suggesting yet another group to blame for England’s consumerism, this time women.

  When Mercadorus defaults yet again, Gerontus swears “by mighty Mahomet” to have him arrested and brings him before a “Judge of Turkey” to resolve the dispute. The judge is the first Turk recorded on the English stage. Gerontus fears that Mercadorus will appear “in Turkish weeds to defeat me of my money”19 by converting to Islam. This is based on a principle pronounced by the Turkish judge, who warns Gerontus that “if any man forsake his faith, king, country and become a Mahomet,” then all his “debts are paid.”20 Sure enough, Mercadorus enters wearing a turban, announcing repeatedly, “me will be a Turk,”21 and agrees to swear upon the judge’s holy book, possibly the Qur’an. Gerontus is horrified and, fearing that he will be blamed for Mercadorus’s apostasy, cancels the debt. A jubilant Mercadorus accepts, but then refuses to “turn Turk,” leaving the judge to offer the following homily before he departs: “Jews seek to excel in Christianity, and Christians in Jewishness.”22 Mercadorus exits with his own vicious little moral:

  Me be a Turk? No. It will make my Lady Lucre to smile

  When she knows how me did da scald [scurvy] Jew beguile.23

  In this convoluted three-way exchange, it is the Catholic Mercadorus who is seen as the villain, not the Turk or the Jew, who both try to beha
ve honorably by pursuing the debt in question. Eventually they are all corrupted by money, but this is a Protestant morality play that trades in bad faith: Wilson ends up blaming the Italian Catholic merchant for the play’s ills, while exculpating the Muslim and the Jew.24 In the final scene a judge named Nemo arraigns Ladies Lucre, Love and Conscience and imprisons them in a forlorn attempt to ensure that “we be not corrupted with the unsatiate desire of vanishing earthly treasure.”25 Nemo’s name means “no one” in Latin, which hardly inspires confidence that London’s rampant materialism will be curbed.

  A clumsy melodrama, caught between the two-dimensional personifications of medieval morality plays and the more dynamic verisimilitude of later Elizabethan drama, Wilson’s play has not stood the test of time. It is rarely studied and never staged these days, but in late 1581 its topicality was unquestionable. It addressed the hopes and anxieties of a Turkish trade that was enriching England, that aligned it with the Ottomans and their Jewish commercial intermediaries, and that cemented Protestant opposition to Catholicism. If lucre could corrupt a Catholic into converting to Islam, and enable a Jew to worship Muhammad, then how easily might Protestant Englishmen be seduced into embracing Judaism—or even Islam?

  For Wilson, the corrupting influence of international trade was symptomatic of the larger problem of usury. On May 19, 1581, a proclamation had been issued “Reviving the Statute against Usury” in response to public “doubts and questions” regarding the Act of Usury passed in 1571, which had fixed the legal limit at which interest could be charged on loans at 10 percent. The “doubts” being raised clearly related to moneylenders trying to exceed the set rate, partly in response to the growing volume of overseas trade, including with Morocco and Turkey. The statute was therefore not “against” usury, but simply sought to redefine its terms. Wilson’s play exploited a general confusion about usury. Having been regarded for centuries as an immoral practice condemned by scriptural authority, it was now increasingly seen as a necessary evil, mainly due to the expansion of overseas trade. The traditional ways of doing business face-to-face at market time, with goods bartered or exchanged on the spot for hard currency, were giving way to an international credit network over vast distances and time, where bills of exchange were required to transact goods, and where currency and interest rates dictated profit (or loss).26 Elizabethan England’s economic prosperity depended on usury, but nobody liked to admit it: hiding behind a Catholic, a Jew or even a Muslim was infinitely preferable.

  Protestant merchants like Anthony Jenkinson, Edmund Hogan and William Harborne had all needed to obtain credit to purchase goods from Muslim merchants, and they invariably turned for help to Jewish brokers. Although Christian and Islamic theology officially forbade the practice, the Torah and Talmud tolerated the use of financial loans, so the Englishmen could ask Jewish merchants or moneylenders to lend to them. These religious distinctions over usury lay at the heart of anti-Semitic prejudice in the period. In times of peace and profit, Christian merchants and their Muslim counterparts accepted Jewish merchants and moneylenders as integral to their trade: but when times were bad and losses mounted, the Jews became scapegoats. Wilson’s play finds it is easy to blend the usurious and credulous Jew Gerontus with Turkish Muslims, and encourage his Protestant English audience to laugh as he is duped by the Catholic Mercadorus, but over the next decade the portrayal of Jews and international finance on the Elizabethan stage would become darker and more complicated in the hands of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.

  • • •

  In September 1582 John Aylmer, Bishop of London, wrote a letter to Thomas Blanke, lord mayor of London, complaining about the fate of “certain miserable captives in Turkey.” Aylmer hoped that these Englishmen could be ransomed with the help of collections held in London’s churches, and “redeemed out of that hellish thralldom where they be, to the great danger of their souls.” Aylmer went on to make the first known attack on the Anglo-Ottoman Capitulations:

  Surely in mine opinion it is very strange, and dangerous, that the desire of worldly and transitory things should carry men so far, with such kind of traffic, which neither our ancestors before us knew of, nor can be attempted without selling of souls for purchasing of pelf to the great blemish of our religion and the shame of our country. Wherefore if your Lordship and the rest of your brethren could by your authority stay such intercourse with infidels and save the souls of our people from the Gulf of Mahomet, I think you should do a gracious deed and win an everlasting remembrance.27

  Complaints like Aylmer’s had little discernible impact on the City’s merchants or on Elizabeth’s advisers, who seem to have had no qualms about entering the “Gulf of Mahomet.” On the contrary, even as Aylmer was writing, plans were being hatched to expand commerce with Turkey and Morocco by securing commercial monopolies in both regions. When it came to trade, material interests prevailed over religious ones.

  • • •

  Where the English saw a new commercial opportunity, the Spanish saw a serious threat to their geopolitical interests. Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to London, had already written a long memorandum to King Philip II in 1582 outlining the commercial and geopolitical dangers of England’s alliances with Shi’a and Sunni Muslim kingdoms. “The English,” he wrote,

  settled through the Muscovite with the Tartars on the banks of the Volga to allow the free passage of their merchandise down the river to the Caspian Sea; whilst the Persian, building large ships in Astrakhan, should give them leave to trade and distribute their merchandise, through Media and Persia, in exchange for goods which reach the Persians by the rivers that run from the East Indies to the Caspian Sea. This privilege was granted to the English by the Persian.

  He went on to express anxiety about the Anglo-Ottoman trade, reiterating that it was “extremely profitable” for the English, “as they take great quantities of tin and lead thither, which the Turk buys of them almost for its weight in gold, the tin being vitally necessary for the casting of guns and the lead for purposes of war. It is of double important to the Turk now, in consequence of the excommunication pronounced ipso facto by the Pope upon any person who provides or sells to infidels such materials as these.”

  Mendoza warned that the English were in discussion with the Ottomans to import merchandise from Persia through Constantinople and overland via Russia, “without their having to pass, as at present, by Italy.” Mendoza added that with the Ottomans’ collusion the English “might monopolize the drug and spice trades,” thus “weakening the forces of your Majesty, by diverting the English trade from Italy.”28 In fact, the English had nowhere near the resources to achieve such a global monopoly, but Mendoza’s letter was a sign of how far their success in the east had rattled the Spanish. As far as Mendoza could discern in the spring of 1582, the scale of their diplomatic achievements in Russia, Persia, Morocco and Turkey suggested that anything was possible.

  Nobody was more surprised by Elizabeth’s renewed interest in Ottoman trade than William Harborne. Having arrived back in London as Wilson’s play was being performed, the disgraced Englishman must have assumed that his Turkish career was over. He was not mentioned in the articles establishing the Turkey Company that September, but Burghley, Osborne and Staper decided that his experience outweighed his humiliation and proposed to send him back to Constantinople. A hugely relieved Harborne waited patiently as Osborne and Staper haggled with Burghley over his formal commission as the queen’s first Turkish ambassador. They also wrangled over the financial terms of the Turkey Company’s establishment, requesting that the crown settle Harborne’s outstanding debts of £600 and cover his travel costs and salary for a five-year tenure, and provide an annual budget of £1,000 for buying the sultan lavish “presents” (thinly veiled bribes).

  Burghley demurred, knowing that Elizabeth wanted all the financial and political benefits of overseas trade without incurring any of its costs.29 The queen may also have hesitat
ed to take such a momentous step toward formalizing a diplomatic and commercial alliance with the Ottomans. Osborne and Staper were interested in trade, not politics, and stood their ground. They reminded Burghley of Elizabeth’s promise to Murad “to send thither her ambassador to gratify his goodwill . . . whose presence is hourly expected.” Any delay risked alienating Murad, who might “think himself deluded” and refuse to sanction new English Capitulations.30 Burghley would not relent, and the new company’s governors were forced to foot Harborne’s bills.

  The queen seemed pleased to save the cost of paying for Harborne’s embassy, and on November 20, 1582, she issued a formal commission to Harborne “to be her majesty’s ambassador or agent in the parts of Turkey.” Praising the “trustiness, obedience, wisdom and disposition of this our beloved servant William Harborne,” the commission ordained him “our true and undoubted orator, messenger, deputy and agent.” He was also given a letter to present to Murad, reiterating his diplomatic credentials, in the hope that his appointment would cement the “perfect and inviolable” league between England and Turkey, and that “a noble traffic will flourish between these nations.”31 Within weeks Harborne was aboard the Turkey Company’s ship Susan, bound for Constantinople. In less than eighteen months he had gone from being a self-confessed “worm” fearing for his life, to England’s first ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and the newly formed Turkey Company’s official representative.