The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  In late June the fleet reached Cadiz and attacked immediately, first by sea, then by land.43 In the short but fierce naval exchange that followed, the English destroyed several Spanish galleons including the St. Philip, which Marbeck watched being blown up by a “Moorish slave” who set fire to the ship’s gunpowder store before seeking refuge alongside thirty-eight other Moroccans among the English forces. Marbeck wrote that Howard and Essex agreed

  to furnish them with money and all other necessaries, and to bestow on them a bark and pilot, and so to have them freely conveyed into Barbary, willing them to let the country to understand what was done and what they had seen. Whereby I doubt not but, as her majesty is a most admirable prince already over all Europe and all Africa, Asia and Christendom, so the whole world hereafter shall have just such cause to admire her infinite princely virtues.44

  The English also captured two Spanish galleons, the St. Matthew and the St. Andrew, both of which had run aground, although the Indies fleet laden with a cargo worth an estimated 12 million ducats of bullion was destroyed before the English could reach it. They then sacked the city, ransomed hostages and sailed away on July 4, leaving Cadiz on fire and a large part of Philip’s Indies fleet at the bottom of its harbor.

  News of the English victory spread quickly across Europe and North Africa. Although the expedition had failed to capture the vast wealth of the Indies fleet, its commanders celebrated it as a great triumph. William Monson, one of the English naval commanders, proclaimed, “Spain never received so great an overthrow, so great a spoil, so great an indignity at our hands as in that journey to Cadiz.”45

  The English did not have a monopoly in claiming victory. When the “Moorish slaves” reported back to Marrakesh, al-Mansur was quick to insist on his part. In characteristically astounding terms his court historian al-Fishtali described how “the sky darkened with dissension against the tyrant of Qishtala [Philip II], and the kings of the nations of the Christians attacked him like wild dogs. The most ferocious against him, and the one most daring in attacking his kingdoms and tightening the noose around him, was Isabella the sultana of the kingdoms of the lands of England.”

  Al-Fishtali claimed that the Cadiz victory was thanks to al-Mansur’s diplomatic and logistical support. It was al-Mansur who “had lured her with his support and sharpened her will against him [Philip II]; he showed her his willingness to confront him by supplying her with copper to use in cannons, and saltpeter for ammunition which he permitted her to buy from his noble kingdom. . . . With God helping him, he pitted her against the enemy of religion.”46 It is unclear just what the Moroccan galleys had achieved during the battle, but according to al-Fishtali’s account, England and Morocco were now joined in a holy war against Catholic Spain.47

  Philip II responded by preparing yet another armada, this time one that would land first in Ireland and exploit the Catholic rebellion there before invading England. A fleet of more than sixty ships carrying over 10,000 soldiers left Lisbon for Ireland on October 25, 1596, but off the northwest Spanish coast it ran into a terrible storm, losing half its ships and thousands of lives. Defeated at home and overstretched abroad, Philip II was forced to declare his kingdom bankrupt just weeks later. He would try to raise another armada the following year, but the weather wrecked his plans once more.48 Some of Philip’s Spanish advisers felt that, when it came to invading England, Divine Providence had deserted them. It seemed that on this matter God was indeed on the side of the English.

  • • •

  Although a second Moroccan delegation never materialized, another Moor did appear in London—not at London’s royal court, but on its stage. In late 1596 Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, or to give it its full title when it was first published in 1600, The Most Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice with the Extreme Cruelty of Shylock the Jew. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who demands a pound of flesh from a Venetian merchant, Antonio, in settlement of a bad debt, has divided audiences for generations. Antonio borrows the money to help his feckless friend Bassanio pursue the wealthy heiress Portia, who is in turn being wooed by a series of suitors, including the Prince of Morocco. The play reaches its climax with the famous courtroom scene where Shylock prepares to cut out a pound of Antonio’s flesh, only to be prevented by Portia, disguised as a lawyer, who argues that “if thou dost shed / One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods”49 will be confiscated by the Venetian state. Unable to act, Shylock is then condemned as an “alien” who has sought the life of a Venetian. He is stripped of his wealth and required to “presently become a Christian,”50 leaving the stage a broken man and agreeing to all the Christians’ terms.

  Shakespeare had several inspirations for writing this play. The Cadiz expedition was clearly on his mind as scholars base their dating of the play on an explicit reference to the captured Spanish galleon St. Andrew in the play’s opening lines. The Venetian merchant Salarino talks about “my wealthy Andrew dock’d in sand”—the ship had run aground when it was captured in Cadiz, and nearly did so again when it was brought back to England in the summer of 1596. In terms of dramatic precedents, Shakespeare was responding to Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and Wilson’s Three Ladies of London with their contrasting depictions of Jewish merchants—as well as Muslims.

  Another recent event may also have inspired Shylock’s creation. In January 1594 Elizabeth’s personal physician, Dr. Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese-born Jewish convert to Protestantism, was arrested on charges of treason and conspiring with the Spanish to poison the queen. Although Lopez had indeed been paid to spy for the Spanish, the charges of attempted murder were completely fabricated by the Earl of Essex, who was eager to prove his loyalty to the queen and gain an advantage over his great rival Burghley. Lopez was a pawn caught up in court machinations, and he never stood a chance. At his trial he was accused of accepting 50,000 crowns from Philip to poison Elizabeth. One of his prosecutors, Sir Francis Bacon, captured the suspicion that Lopez’s conversion had generated by describing him as “of nation a Portuguese, and suspected to be in sect secretly a Jew though here he conformed himself to the rites of Christian religion.”

  Lopez was sentenced to death and executed that June. According to the historian William Camden, he protested from the scaffold “that he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ; which coming from a man of the Jewish profession moved no small laughter in the standers-by.”51 For those who watched Lopez being hanged, drawn and quartered, his profession of innocence was seen as a comically equivocal admission of guilt, the duplicity of a convert who spoke of love when he meant hate.

  The cruel but uneasy laughter that accompanied Lopez’s violent demise permeates Shakespeare’s play. It seems that Shakespeare intended it to be a comedy (which is how it was listed when published in the Folio of 1623), and at various times over the past four hundred years audiences have felt able, or perhaps incited, to laugh at Shylock’s downfall and the anti-Semitic abuse from Portia and Antonio that comes with it. But the laughter is not the same as that associated with Shylock’s direct predecessor, Marlowe’s Barabas. Like Barabas, Shylock watches his daughter, Jessica, convert to Christianity, but despite his murderous designs on Antonio, he never engages in the wicked depravity of Marlowe’s character. Shakespeare provides Shylock with a depth of humanity not out of some secret liberal desire to express toleration toward the Jewish faith, but to sharpen the dramatic ambiguity and the power of his character.

  Shylock appears in only five of the play’s scenes, but in one of the most significant he utters a resounding plea for a common humanity. “I am a Jew,” he tells Solanio and Salarino:

  Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?52


  The speech’s conclusion also reminds the audience that Shylock is a creation of Venice’s society and its Christians, and he is no better or worse than they are:

  If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.53

  Shylock is just as vicious and acquisitive as Antonio, a point made inadvertently by Portia when she enters the courtroom dressed as a lawyer and, unable to distinguish between them, asks, “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?”54

  Portia refers to Shylock contemptuously as “Jew” on no fewer than ten occasions during the courtroom scene. But he is not the only alien who feels her wrath. Under the terms of her father’s will, she can only marry the man who identifies which of three caskets of gold, silver and lead contains Portia’s portrait. The play’s second scene opens with her recalling those suitors who have already failed, including an arrogant Italian, a drunk German, a capering Frenchman, a badly dressed Englishman and a quarrelsome Scot. It is then announced that a new suitor is about to try his luck: the Prince of Morocco. Upon hearing this Portia immediately recoils, joking, “If he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me [hear confession] than wive me.”55

  But when Morocco enters he is not what the audience might expect. He is a tawny Moor dressed in white, who sounds more like Tamburlaine than Aaron. In a speech that anticipates Shylock’s plea for humanity he asks Portia:

  Mislike me not for my complexion,

  The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,

  To whom I am a neighbor and near bred.

  Bring me the fairest creature northward born,

  Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles,

  And let us make incision for your love

  To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.56

  Having created an evil blackamoor in the shape of Aaron, Shakespeare now produced his opposite, a virtuous, heroic tawny Moor, one who has no apparent qualms about marrying into the Christian world of Portia’s fictional Belmont. His religion is never mentioned, but he retains an element of sexual frisson sometimes associated with Moors, boasting to Portia:

  I tell thee, lady, this aspect of mine

  Hath fear’d the valiant; by my love I swear

  The best-regarded virgins of our clime

  Have loved it too: I would not change this hue,

  Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen.57

  His virile boastfulness turns into fantasy when he swears to win Portia:

  By this scimitar

  That slew the Sophy and a Persian prince

  That won three fields of Sultan Solyman.58

  The audience would have known that nobody had been able to slay a Persian ruler and defeat the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. Nevertheless, here was a Moroccan warrior claiming to have defeated Ottoman and Persian forces, bearing a striking resemblance to al-Mansur. Officially al-Mansur’s diplomatic and military overtures were known only to Elizabeth’s innermost circle, but one wonders how far awareness of the Anglo-Moroccan rapprochement had spread into the public domain.

  In any event, Morocco’s suit fails: he chooses the wrong casket and Portia ushers him hastily off the stage and out of the play with the devastating couplet:

  A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go.

  Let all of his complexion choose me so.59

  There is no real reason that a Prince of Morocco should be in a romantic comedy about Venetian merchants and Jewish moneylenders. But Shakespeare had at least two precedents for putting Muslims into plays about conflicts between Jews and Christians. In Wilson’s Three Ladies of London, the honorable Jewish moneylender Gerontus complains to a Turkish judge about the hypocrisy of the villainous Christian merchant Mercadorus, while in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta Barabas forms a murderous alliance with the Turkish Ithamore. As usual Shakespeare took the middle way, putting a Jew and a Moor onstage who are not saints, but are expelled ruthlessly as soon as they threaten to challenge the status quo.

  At a theological level, Christendom had always seen Muslims and Jews as apostates who denied Christ as the son of God, heretics representing two sides of the same religious error. At a commercial level, they were intimately related too: Jews acted as mediators in most mercantile transactions with the Muslim courts in Morocco, Turkey and Persia. In fact, the English had much greater experience of Jewish merchants, moneylenders and political intermediaries in Morocco in the 1590s than in Venice. The highly publicized case of the Moroccan Jewish sugar baron Isaac Cabeça’s insolvency in 1568 and the subsequent trials in the High Court of Admiralty and Chancery would have been far more familiar to Londoners watching Shakespeare’s play than any Venetian merchant’s activities. Shylock is not an attractive character, but Shakespeare deliberately chose to move away from purely villainous stereotypes with the more ambiguous Shylock and Prince of Morocco. The exigencies of politics and trade made alliances with Jews, Turks and Moors necessary. While everyone profited, everything was fine, but when trouble arrived, the laughter stopped and one side was often pitted against the others. By the end of Shakespeare’s play, the audience is in the uncomfortable position of being as repelled by its self-righteous Christians as by its haughty Moroccan and vindictive Jew. Within just over two years of Marlowe’s death, Shakespeare had modulated his murderous eastern characters to produce a far more subtle theater of complicity, where Moors, Jews and Christians—and even the audience—were all equally culpable.

  In July 1597, a year after Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, the Barbary Company was quietly dissolved. Its charter had expired and the regulated trade seemed to have made little difference to the trade’s uneven profitability. It was proving difficult to recover debts from the Moroccan merchants, and the English merchants had flooded the market with cloth in return for expensive sugar. The Levant merchants were already complaining about the effect of the badly organized Barbary trade on English commerce across the Mediterranean. As early as 1591, one group had written to Burghley complaining that the Barbary merchants “have brought our English cloth there into contempt, and advanced their dross and base sugars to high price, and so not only spoiled and overthrown that trade, but undone themselves and many an honest merchant.”60 Regulation had clearly failed, and private trade seemed to promise better returns.61 The dissolution of the company made no discernible difference to the Barbary trade throughout the late 1590s as it returned to private hands operating outside state control. It was now every man for himself in Morocco. With the plans for a formal alliance stalled and the crown’s interest in the trade waning, Elizabeth and her advisers turned their attention more fully toward the Ottoman Porte in Constantinople.

  9

  Escape from the Seraglio

  On January 15, 1595, Sultan Murad III died in the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople. In keeping with Ottoman tradition, his death was kept secret until his heir, the crown prince Mehmed, could reach Constantinople and ensure a smooth transition of power. Four weeks later Edward Barton forwarded a letter to Lord Burghley from a man whom he called a “curious Jew” describing “what here hath lately passed,” the “death of the late Sultan Murad III and success to this empire of Sultan Mehmed III.”1 The letter was written by a Portuguese Jew named Alvaro Mendès, better known to the Ottoman court as Salomon Aben Yaèx, an associate of Barton’s with privileged access to the imperial divan. Mendès reported that on January 27 Mehmed had arrived from Manisa near the Aegean coast to claim the throne and bury his father in Hagia Sophia. What followed next has became one of the most terrible and reviled acts in Ottoman imperial history:

  That night his nineteen new brother
s were conducted to the king Sultan Mehmed, they were the male children then living of his father, by several wives; they were brought to kiss his hand, so that he should see them alive; the eldest of them was eleven. Their king brother told them not to fear, as he did not wish to do them any harm; but only to have them circumcised, according to custom. And this was a thing that none of his ancestors had ever done, and directly they had kissed his hand they were circumcised, taken aside and dexterously strangled with handkerchiefs.2

  The Venetian ambassador added to the horror with a story of even greater pathos. “They say,” he wrote, “that the eldest, a most beautiful lad and of excellent parts, beloved by all, when he kissed the sultan’s hand exclaimed, ‘My lord and brother, now to me as my father, let not my days be ended thus in this my tender age.’ The sultan tore his beard with every sign of grief, but answered never a word. They were all strangled.” Salomon acknowledged that such a brutal act of political succession “certainly seems a terrible and cruel thing, but it is the custom”; he also conceded that the sight of all nineteen coffins—some no bigger than a doll’s—when placed next to their father’s, brought forth “the tears of all the people.”3

  Barton had taken great pains to obtain Salomon’s report for Burghley because Murad III’s death was a critical moment in Anglo-Ottoman relations. Most of Elizabeth’s diplomatic and commercial relations with the Ottomans were based on a cordial personal correspondence with Murad that stretched back over seventeen years, and more recently with Safiye Sultan, who with his death was now elevated to the role of Valide Sultan (Queen Mother). It was unclear whether Mehmed would be as sympathetic toward the English as his father had been, but the signs were not promising. Mehmed vowed to pursue the flagging Ottoman military campaigns in Hungary, but he hardly seemed like a warrior. One English merchant described him as “a prince by nature of wit and courage: but by accident, dull, timorous, and very effeminate.”4