When the news reached London, the Turkey Company’s directors were outraged by what they saw as a flagrant breach of the resurrected Anglo-Ottoman Capitulations by a Turkish client state. They petitioned Elizabeth successfully to raise the matter with Sultan Murad, who in turn wrote to the Kaid Ramadan Pasha, ruler of Tripoli, demanding that he release the ship, cargo and crew immediately. Emboldened by such royal support from queen and sultan, Harborne himself wrote to Ramadan Pasha in January 1585 demanding immediate restitution. The Englishman condemned the Pasha’s actions as “contrary to the holy league sworn by both our princes,” and warned him that unless he redeemed the crew and cargo he would “answer in another world unto God alone, and in this world unto the Grand Signior, for this heinous crime committed by you against so many poor souls, which by this your cruelty are in part dead, and in part detained by you in most miserable captivity.”54
Harborne’s argument anticipated the calls for a regulated Moroccan trade back in London; here was a Christian demanding that a Muslim abide by the terms of the contractual agreement set out in the Capitulations, regardless of faith or personality. The authoritative tone Harborne now adopted toward a Muslim ruler was in stark contrast to the fretful, self-pitying figure pleading his case during the Bark Roe fiasco. It helped that he could use the Ottoman sultan as diplomatic leverage, but there was no doubting that he had finally mastered his brief, and that the English were starting to pull their weight in the Levantine trade. The letter succeeded: the captives were released and mostly melted away into the Mediterranean littoral, never to be heard of again.
Once Harborne had firmly established himself as ambassador with control of a network of English consuls across the Mediterranean, he took on a more explicitly political role. He was in regular correspondence with Walsingham, who was now briefing him to entice Murad into a desperately needed anti-Spanish alliance. By early 1585, relations with Spain were virtually on a war footing, and England was perilously isolated from the rest of Europe. As a consequence Elizabeth had finally sided with those of her counselors advising a more aggressive approach toward Spain. Walsingham, foremost among them, drew up “A Plot for the Annoying of the King of Spain,” which advocated using Sir Francis Drake to launch a preemptive attack on the Spanish fleet. Elizabeth approved, unleashing Drake’s squadron of twenty-five ships in a series of assaults on Spanish shipping across the Atlantic and Caribbean. On August 10, she signed the Treaty of Nonsuch with Dutch Calvinists fighting the Spanish in the Low Countries. Under its terms the queen offered the Dutch £125,000 as well as the support of an expeditionary English army led by Leicester, still preening over the successful establishment of the Barbary Company and eager for an opportunity to prove himself on the battlefield. Philip II interpreted the treaty as a declaration of war against Spain, and in October he informed Pope Sixtus V of his intention to invade England. It was a momentous decision. By December 1585 a plan for a massive fleet to sail against the English was being prepared.55
Keenly aware of the inevitability of a Spanish attack, Walsingham had been corresponding with his agents in the Low Countries and with Harborne in Constantinople about the need to create an Anglo-Islamic alliance against the Spanish threat. That December the spy William Herle wrote to Elizabeth from Antwerp, insisting that the English policy of arming Muslims to fight Catholics was not only expedient but righteous. “Your majesty in using the King of Fez &c,” he wrote, “doth not arm a barbarian against a Christian, but a barbarian against an heretic [Philip II], the most dangerous that was in any age, the usurper of kingdoms, and the subverter of God’s true religion, which you are bound as defendresse of the faith, to defend.”56 Such arguments added credence to Walsingham’s Ottoman policy.
Throughout the autumn of 1585, Walsingham encouraged Harborne to agitate for Ottoman military aggression against the Spanish, adding Elizabeth’s voice in the matter. “I did advise you,” he wrote on October 8,
of a course to be taken there for procuring the Grand Seigneur, if it were possible, to convert some part of his forces bent, as it should seem by your advertisements, from time to time wholly against the Persians, rather against Spain, thereby to divert the dangerous attempt and designs of the said King from these parts of Christendom. So am I at present, her majesty being, upon the success of the said King of Spain’s affairs in the Low Countries, now fully resolved to oppose herself against his proceedings in defense of that distressed nation, whereof it is not otherwise likely but hot wars between him and us, wills me again to require you effectually to use all your endeavor and industry in that behalf.57
If Harborne could persuade Murad that it was in his interests for the Ottomans to attack the Catholic Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean, it might hamper Philip’s English invasion plans. Ever the realist, Walsingham appreciated that this was an ambitious request and concluded his letter by advising Harborne that “if you shall see that the sultan cannot be brought altogether to give ear to this advice,” then “procure at least that, by making show of arming to the sea for the King of Spain’s dominions, hold the King of Spain in suspense, by means whereof he shall be the less bold to send forth his best forces into these parts.”58
Like Walsingham, the Venetian Morosini understood that a pragmatic approach to religion played its part in all this subterfuge, and he wrote to the Venetian Seignory in 1585 that Murad “places especially great worth on the friendship of the Queen of England, because he is convinced that, owing to the religious schism, she will never unite against him with other princes in Christendom; she will, on the contrary, always be an excellent instrument for disturbing and thwarting such alliances.”59 Both Sunni Muslim and Protestant Christian rulers had told each other only half the reasons for their mutual association.
• • •
Even as Walsingham was turning a merchant into a spy versed in military matters, Leicester was dispatching a soldier to oversee commercial matters in Morocco. Having established the Barbary Company’s privileges on terms of his choosing, it was incumbent upon him to appoint England’s first official ambassador to Morocco. The man he chose was Henry Roberts, a very different kind of ambassador than William Harborne. Roberts was a client of Leicester’s, a soldier with experience fighting in Ireland and privateering against the Spanish, but little knowledge of trade or diplomacy. He would later claim, “I was forced to take this voyage full sore against my will, for the which cause I was forced to yield up my place where I was settled in Ireland,” saying that his forced relocation had cost him five hundred pounds.60
Whatever the truth, Roberts’s appointment was closely linked to his association with Don António, Prior of Crato, who since losing the Portuguese crown to Philip II in 1580 had used Elizabeth’s backing to support his claim to the throne. Elizabeth and Leicester appointed Roberts with a view not only to establishing formal trade relations through the Barbary Company but also to securing al-Mansur’s support for Don António’s claim to the Portuguese throne, yet another policy that put Protestant England and its Muslim ally Morocco on a collision course with Philip II’s Spain.
Roberts left England with three ships on August 14, 1585, and arrived at Safi, on the west coast of Morocco, exactly a month later. He was met “with all humanity and honor” by the local authorities as the first official English ambassador to Morocco. He dined with the resident English, French and Flemish merchants before setting out on the ninety-mile journey inland to the capital, the “Red City” of Marrakesh.61
Marrakesh, which Roberts entered in the stifling September heat, was Morocco’s second great city, home to nearly twenty thousand people and the gateway to the trans-Saharan caravan trade in salt, ivory, spices, gold and slaves. Founded in the eleventh century by the Berber Almoravid dynasty, it had maintained an abiding rivalry with the much older city of Fez, 280 miles to the north, whose madrasas were known throughout the Muslim world, securing its fame as one of the great centers of theological and legal scholarship. Until
the 1550s Fez had remained Morocco’s capital city, but with the rise of the Sa’adian dynasty power had shifted south, and by the time Roberts reached Marrakesh, al-Mansur was transforming the city into one of Islam’s great imperial capitals.
In 1578 work began on a palatial complex known as the Dar al-Makhzen, designed to rival the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Granada and Philip II’s Escorial, then under construction northwest of Madrid. Where Philip’s palace was paid for with New World gold and silver, al-Mansur’s was built on profits from Moroccan sugar. Carrara marble was imported from Tuscany and two thousand captives were brought from Fez (including many Portuguese survivors of the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir) to build the palace and new mosques, madrasas, hospitals, factories and even funerary tombs for the new sultan’s ancestors. Antonio de Saldanha, a Portuguese nobleman captured by the Sa’adians who wrote a chronicle of al-Mansur’s reign, claimed that the rebuilding included premises for Christian merchants, and that “in the streets set aside for their shops, all the goods of France, Italy, England and Spain were sold at lower prices than in the lands where they were produced. . . . The town of Marrakesh then attained such greatness as it had never attained before nor ever would again.”62
Upon his arrival in Marrakesh, Roberts reported, “I was lodged by the emperor’s [al-Mansur’s] appointment in a fair house in the Juderia or Jurie, which is the place where the Jews have their abode, and is the fairest place, and quietest lodging in all the city.”63 Another walled Juderia, more commonly known as the mellah, was the first Jewish quarter established in the salt marshes outside Fez in 1438. It took its name from the Arabic mallah, or “salty soil.”64 Marrakesh’s mellah had been established in the late 1550s on the same principles as Fez’s, but it was very different from the Jewish ghettos created in the Christian cities of Venice (1516) and Rome (1555). In Europe the religious persecution of Jews led to severe restrictions on their rights of employment, property ownership and freedom of movement. Under Muslim rule, Jews were granted the status of a protected minority (dhimmi) and acknowledged to hold important positions in government and finance, as well as the monopolies over trade in sugar and Christian captives. The vast majority were Sephardic Jews, thousands of whom had started to arrive in Morocco following the expulsions in 1492 of both Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. Their cosmopolitan experience and ability to broker international political, cultural and commercial deals on behalf of Morocco’s new rulers ensured that al-Mansur was assiduous in building a mellah in Marrakesh with grand mansions, its own funduq (markets) and synagogues, as well as Christian chapels for other exalted foreigners, like Roberts, who found themselves lodged there.
To a soldier like Roberts, used to the monoglot world of England and Ireland and its stark religious divisions between Protestant and Catholic, the multiconfessional and polyglot world of Marrakesh must have come as a massive shock. Marrakesh was a multicultural city, containing Berbers, Arabs, Sephardic Jews, Africans, Moriscos and Christians, many of them merchants and diplomats, others slaves and captives hoping to be ransomed and each professing one or another of a variety of religious persuasions. Walking through the city, Roberts would have heard Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish—the lingua franca of most of the resident Europeans—Portuguese, Italian, French and even German. Marrakesh was also becoming known as a home for a new community that was caught between religions: the renegadoes. The Spanish renegado (from the Latin renegare, “to deny”) was an apostate, specifically a Christian who had converted to Islam, although the term could also refer to Jewish and Muslim apostates. The word first entered English in the early 1580s, usually with a Spanish inflection—suggesting that it was a phenomenon associated with Spanish Catholicism rather than English Protestantism.65
Roberts, who was more used to quashing Catholic insurrection in Ireland than to moving in cosmopolitan communities, suddenly found himself living alongside individuals like Estêvão Dias, a Portuguese converso—a Jew forcibly converted to Christianity. When, in 1564, Dias had been denounced as a crypto-Jew by the Lisbon Inquisition, he immigrated to the Low Countries, where he lived for a time as a merchant. He traveled throughout Italy before settling in Marrakesh in 1581 and reconverting, adopting the name of Rabbi Joseph, at which point he began writing an extraordinary defense of his Jewish faith. Known as the “Marrakesh Dialogs,” Dias’s apologia is couched in the form of a dialog between two Flemish brothers. Both are merchants: one is Catholic; the other, Bernard, converts to Judaism while on business in Morocco and takes the name Obadia Ben Israel. The two brothers debate their respective religions. Obadia criticizes Catholic beliefs ranging from Trinitarianism to idolatry and denounces the recent rise of Lutheranism and Calvinism, which he identifies as a sign of the need for Christianity to embrace Judaism.66
In his brief account of his time in Marrakesh, Roberts expressed no interest in describing encounters with individuals like Rabbi Joseph. Instead he limited himself to prosaic details of his domestic arrangements. He occupied a spacious house alongside three resident English factors, Robert Lion, Miles Dickonson and Edmond Mastidge. It included two countinghouses, two warehouses and a study, rented for £14 a year. On top of his salary of £100, Roberts could reclaim from the company various expenses ranging from lodging, food and clothes to furniture, laundry, horses and a Moroccan groom. Lion even claimed the medical costs of treating his “leg bitten by a dog” (£1 5s 3d). In such a remote and unfamiliar country these expenses were unsurprising, but they would soon begin to diminish the Barbary Company’s profits.
Within three days of his arrival, Roberts was given an audience with al-Mansur. He “delivered my message and her Majesty’s letters, and was received with all humanity, and had favorable audience from time to time for three years,” whose content, “for diverse good and reasonable causes, I forbear here to put down in writing.”67 Such circumspection was understandable. Roberts spent part of his three years trading munitions on Leicester’s behalf (with Elizabeth’s tacit support), even though he was officially allowed only to act as the crown’s representative overseeing the company’s commercial activities. The rest of his time was spent trying to persuade al-Mansur to join an anti-Spanish league in support of Don António’s claim to the Portuguese crown.
• • •
By now both Leicester and Walsingham were exploiting their alliances at either end of the Mediterranean in a concerted effort to disrupt Spanish military preparations against England. Just as Roberts in Marrakesh was ordered to press Don António’s claims on al-Mansur, in Constantinople Harborne was pursuing a more directly anti-Spanish approach with Murad.
By July 1586 Philip had finalized his plans for the invasion of England by a huge Spanish armada, and the antagonism between the two countries spilled over into Morocco. That October, an English ship called the Dolphin arrived in Safi and unloaded its commercial cargo of cloth and metal worth an estimated £5,000. Then, in a piratical act reminiscent of the Bark Roe incident, the Dolphin’s captain, John Giles, suddenly attacked and captured a Spanish caravel, confiscating all its goods. The Spanish crew escaped and fled to Marrakesh. Fearful of alienating the Spanish and inviting retribution, al-Mansur condemned Giles’s piracy and threatened to confiscate the Dophin’s goods and levy further penalties against the English merchants unless the Spanish caravel and its cargo were released. Roberts dispatched two English merchants to Safi to instruct Giles to return the caravel. To the new ambassador’s obvious embarrassment, Giles refused, claiming that the Spanish ship had been lawfully captured on the high seas. In response al-Mansur immediately arrested all English merchants with goods on board the Dolphin. Roberts again attempted to reach a resolution by asking those involved to stand the cost of the goods on board the Spanish vessel, but as in the case of Isaac Cabeça in 1568, the English merchants began squabbling over their respective contributions.
One of the merchants’ servants was “imprisoned among a number of heathens” in “the infidel’s prison” in T
araoudant, 180 miles south of Safi, but managed to write a letter to the Privy Council back in London begging them to intervene in the whole “unnatural dealing.” The letter was a terrible indictment of Roberts as the crown’s agent and of the Barbary Company more generally. Both were condemned as unable to address either the English merchants’ factionalism or the complexities of working successfully with al-Mansur. The servant claimed that a “malicious and envious” faction among the English mercantile community led by William Gore (one of the merchants involved in the Cabeça dispute) were “affectioned more to the Spaniards” and refused to bear any of the costs involved in settling the dispute, thus “disobeying the commandments of her majesty’s servant,” the hapless Roberts.
Under duress and facing the prospect of confinement in a Moroccan jail unless the Spanish claim was settled, the unfortunate servant began by complaining about “what small account these heathen people make of us and our English commodities, which proceedeth of the disorderly dealing of the Barbary Company, by overlaying this wicked country of late with abundance of goods.” He then listed the “great injuries and abuses” that were “daily offered by the king [al-Mansur] in favor of the Spaniards,” which included “detaining our goods ashore, imprisoning merchants, our masters and mariners of our ships, at the departure of any ship laden by the Spaniards and threaten us that, if their ships miscarry, we shall answer for it, in such cruel manner that no Christian heart would suffer, if we could otherwise remedy it.” He concluded that “the Barbary Company regardeth little the wrongs and intolerable injuries we abide among those cursed people.”68
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