The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  Mehmed was so enchanted that he demanded Dallam play for more than two hours, while the humiliated Lello was left outside, fuming, as he waited in vain to kiss the sultan’s hand.

  The recital was a triumph for Dallam. He was given gold worth £20 by Mehmed and was implored by the sultan’s advisers “to stay with them always, and I should not want anything, but have all the content that I could desire.” Then he was taken into Mehmed’s “privy chambers,” where he was allowed to draw his sword in imitation of the sultan and was offered the pick of the sultan’s harem, “either two of his concubines or else two virgins of the best I could choose my self.” To whet his appetite, he was even allowed to see the harem women by spying on them through “a grate in a wall,” where he saw “thirty of the Grand Signor’s concubines,” and “very pretty ones indeed.”

  Dallam was clearly delighted to report that the concubines wore “fine cloth made of cotton wool, as white as snow and fine as lane [muslin]; for I could discern the skin of their thighs through it.” It all proved too much for his furtive guide, who “stamped with his foot to make me give over looking; the which I was very loath to do, for that sight did please me wondrous well.”52 Dallam was the first recorded Englishman ever to see the sultan’s harem. It must have all seemed a long way from Warrington.

  Somewhat surprisingly, none of these enticements persuaded Dallam to stay, and he made plans to leave. Both Mehmed and Lello were determined to keep him, and removed him from the Hector as it was about to sail for England in December 1599 with Safiye’s gifts and diplomatic correspondence for Elizabeth. The furious organist eventually persuaded the ambassador to let him slip away under pretense of illness and travel to Zante, where he could rejoin the Hector. As he left Constantinople never to return, Dallam had one final poignant encounter. To guide him through Ottoman territory he was assigned a dragoman, whom he described as “an Englishman, borne in Chorley in Lancashire; his name Finch. He was also in religion a perfect Turk, but he was our trusty friend.”53 As he reached the Greek coast, Dallam took his leave of Finch: two men from Lancashire, briefly united as friends, standing together on the Greek coast, one, a Christian, headed west, the other, a Muslim convert who had “turned Turk,” headed back east. Dallam had spent nearly a year traveling more than thirty-five hundred miles from London to Constantinople and through Greece to meet a man born in Chorley, not much more than twenty miles away from his hometown of Warrington. We will never know what they discussed on their ten-day trek, or whether they spoke of their lives, their beliefs and the choices they had made that separated them.

  In May 1600 the Hector docked in England, with Safiye’s gifts and letters to Elizabeth. At first, all seemed well. Safiye’s translated letter acknowledged that “you sent us a coach; it has arrived and has been delivered. It had our gracious acceptance.” It also itemized the gifts sent in response: “a robe, a sash, two gold-embroidered bath towels, three handkerchiefs, and a ruby and pearl tiara.” Even more important, the elaborate exchange of gifts seemed to have had its desired diplomatic effect of persuading Mehmed to ratify the Anglo-Ottoman Capitulations. Safiye assured Elizabeth:

  I will take action in accordance with what you have written. Be of good heart in this respect. I constantly admonish my son, the Padishah [Mehmed], to act according to the treaty. I do not neglect to speak to him in this manner. God willing, may you not suffer grief in this respect.54

  Unfortunately, on closer inspection it transpired that the original letter had been so hastily written in Constantinople that it was addressed to “the king of England, may his last moments be concluded with good.”55 Safiye’s gifts paled in comparison with the lavish coach and organ sent to Constantinople. Safiye’s kira, Esperanza Malchi, who it transpired had already been accused of withholding some of the gifts dispatched to Elizabeth six years earlier, had the temerity to address a letter directly to the queen, asking whether she could send Safiye “rare distilled waters of every kind for the face and odiferous oils for the hands” and offering her services, despite being “a Jewess by faith and of a different nation from your Majesty.”56 Perhaps unsurprisingly, no record survives of any response from Elizabeth to this request for perfume and hand lotion.

  The exchange would prove to be the zenith of Anglo-Ottoman relations under Elizabeth. Although the Capitulations were agreed and Lello’s embassy was ratified, the querulous Englishman failed to reproduce the kind of friendship the increasingly pro-Venetian Safiye Sultan had enjoyed with Barton. He was also persistently outwitted by his French opposite number. He struggled on until 1607, when he was recalled to England and replaced by the more capable Thomas Glover, who was promptly accused by his vindictive predecessor of bigamy, adultery, sodomy, domestic violence and—worst of all—wearing too many jewels and feathers in the sultan’s presence.57

  In Constantinople, Esperanza Malchi’s luck ran out even before the Hector reached London. Fed up with the political control and financial corruption exercised by the harem, the Turkish imperial cavalry rose up against the Safiye Sultan and vented their fury on her confidante Esperanza. A Levant Company official named Humphrey Conisby described what happened. The cavalry

  drew the kira out of her house (this was a Jew woman most dear to the Sultana, who by such grace, with her accomplices, governed in effect, the whole empire; and was worth at her death millions). Her they hauled through the streets, forth at Adrianople Gate, and there killing her (after she had offered more for her life than their pay came to) they cut her into small pieces, every one, that could get, carrying back through the streets to their houses a piece of her flesh upon his knife’s point.58

  Safiye had sacrificed Esperanza to the mob to protect her own life, although the incident severely diminished her influence. She lived for another five years, during which she conspired with Mehmed to have his son Mahmud strangled when the youngster began to question his grandmother’s continued influence over his indolent father.

  Nothing quite so dramatic awaited Thomas Dallam back home. He got married, had six children and spent the next thirty years building some of the period’s finest organs for King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, St. John’s College in Oxford, Eton College, the Scottish Chapel Royal and the cathedrals in Norwich, Worcester and Bristol. According to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Dallam’s greatest achievement was “the consolidation of the two-manual ‘double organ’ with twelve to fourteen flue stops (without reeds, mixtures, or pedals) as the norm for English cathedrals and for larger collegiate churches during the pre–civil war period.”59 Perhaps. But he probably never forgot his grand performance in front of the sultan, his glimpse of the harem or his escape from the seraglio.

  10

  Sherley Fever

  By the end of the sixteenth century, many Londoners had heard stories of English merchants, diplomats and artisans like Edmund Hogan, William Harborne and Thomas Dallam and their adventures throughout the Muslim world. Their accounts were often circulated in random and unreliable ways, by gossip and word of mouth, in private diplomatic correspondence or handwritten manuscripts passed from hand to hand. Few of these men had sufficient social standing or financial resources to publish printed books about their travels. Dallam may not have forgotten his time in Constantinople, but there is no evidence that Shakespeare ever met this modest Lancastrian artisan or read about his organ. There was, however, one Englishman living in Islamic lands at the turn of the century who had sufficient stature to broadcast news of his exploits so widely that he could be casually mentioned in a Shakespearean comedy and everyone knew who he was. This was Sir Anthony Sherley, an English knight whose notoriety epitomized the desire and peril associated with English relations with the Islamic world in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign.

  Sherley’s name first appears on the London stage in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, early in 1601. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s most accomplished comedies and a world away from th
e crusading rhetoric of Henry V. The play is set in Illyria, on the Dalmatian coast (stretching from modern-day Croatia down to Albania). It seems to be a never-never land where near identical twins Sebastian and Viola are shipwrecked and spend their time trying to find each other in a comical reworking of Shakespeare’s earlier Comedy of Errors (set in Ephesus, an Ottoman possession since the fifteenth century). Viola cross-dresses as “an eunuch,”1 a young male page named Cesario, to secure a position of service at the court of Countess Olivia, who employs her as a go-between with Orsino, Duke of Illyria. Olivia falls in love with Viola, who in turn falls for Orsino. In the chaos of mistaken identity that ensues, the delusion of Olivia’s pompous steward Malvolio that he could marry his mistress is comically yet brutally exposed by her roguish kinsman Sir Toby Belch and his friends. The play ends with betrothals and reconciliation, though not for the humiliated Malvolio, who exits comparing himself to a bear baited by dogs, warning “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.”2

  For all its wit and humor, Twelfth Night is full of unrequited love, loss, mourning, melancholia and tragedy. Some critics have explained its darker side by noting that it was written at the same time as Hamlet, but it contains a surprising number of references to the “Orient” and the Islamic world that had preoccupied Shakespeare and his contemporaries throughout the 1590s. At the time Illyria was no fantasy, but a region of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled most of Hungary, the Balkans, Mesopotamia (modern-day Syria, Iraq and Kuwait), Egypt, Palestine, western Arabia, much of the Caucasus and western Iran. Its tributary states and semi-autonomous principalities included Transylvania, Moldavia, the Crimea, Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers.

  The reach and extent of the Ottoman Empire were clearly on Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote Twelfth Night, a play replete with references to Egyptian thieves, “the gates of Tartar,” “notable” pirates, a “renegado,” heathens and even a “new map with the augmentation of the Indies.”3 This was a reference to the Cambridge mathematician Edward Wright’s world map, made to illustrate the second edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. Wright’s map was widely celebrated as the most up-to-date of its time, incorporating the latest Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch discoveries in the East and West “Indies.”4 Shakespeare also alluded to the Ottomans in the loaded reference to Viola early in the play as “an eunuch,” a phrase the audience would have associated with Ottoman customs and mores.

  Halfway through the play, Sir Toby, his cowardly friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Fabian the clown deceive Malvolio with a fake letter from Olivia proclaiming her love for him. Fabian is so pleased with the trick that he says, “I will not give my part of this sport for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy”—a reference to the Shah of Persia.5 Later in the play, when Sir Toby goads Sir Andrew into a duel with the cross-dressed Viola, he teases him with dire threats about his adversary:

  Why, man, he’s a very devil, I have not seen such a virago. I had a pass with him, rapier, scabbard and all, and he gives me the stuck in with such a mortal motion, that it is inevitable, and on the answer, he pays you as surely as your feet hit the ground they step on. They say he has been fencer to the Sophy.6

  The terrified Sir Andrew is tricked into believing he is about to face a deadly warrior renowned for teaching swordsmanship to the fearsome Persian emperor, rather than the equally petrified Viola dressed as Cesario, who the audience knows is of course a young female servant, hardly capable of holding a rapier. Shakespeare’s audience would have recognized the allusion to two real rogues, Sir Anthony Sherley and his brother Robert, and they would have heard immediately that he was punning on the brothers’ name—“surely”—and evoking their adventures in Persia.

  By early 1601, thanks to many books and pamphlets printed with the tacit support of the vain and ambitious Sir Anthony Sherley, the Sherleys’ adventures were the subject of gossip throughout London. Sir Anthony had left England in the summer of 1598 bound for Italy, but within months he appeared with his brother Robert at the court of Shah Abbas I, the fifth Safavid ruler and grandson of Anthony Jenkinson’s old adversary, Shah Tahmasp. The Sherleys’ extraordinary enterprise was described in several travel books published just before Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night, works that claimed (among many other things) that their mission was so successful that Robert was appointed the shah’s fencing master and Sir Anthony was given a substantial pension of thirty thousand crowns a year to train the shah’s army.7

  The Sherleys were famed for their escapades and misdemeanors. Their father, Sir Thomas Sherley, was a notorious courtier who embezzled hundreds of thousands of pounds from Elizabeth’s military campaigns in the Low Countries, for which he was declared bankrupt and imprisoned in the Fleet debtors’ prison. His estate of Wiston, in Sussex, was sequestered by Elizabeth. His eldest son, named Thomas as well, an almost comically incompetent soldier and a terrible pirate, was also imprisoned for various misdemeanors in London and Constantinople. He tried (but failed) to poison himself before being elected a member of Parliament later in life. Robert, the youngest brother, was held hostage in Persia for a decade after being abandoned by Anthony. Despite such travails, Robert managed to convert to Catholicism, marry a princess, return to Europe, work for the papacy and have his portrait painted by Sir Anthony Van Dyck wearing full Persian dress before dying in Qazvin and being buried in Rome.

  Between them, over five decades, the brothers visited the Low Countries, Ireland, Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Africa, Persia, India, Greece, Russia, Newfoundland, the Caribbean, Mexico, the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. At various times they worked for English monarchs and earls, French kings, Persian shahs, Russian tsars, Ottoman sultans, Habsburg emperors (one Spanish, the other Austrian), Moroccan kings and the Venetian state. All three were knighted outside England in dubious circumstances: Thomas in Ireland, Anthony in France and Robert in Prague. Each one was associated with recusancy and embraced Catholicism at some point in his life.

  The brothers’ exploits were celebrated throughout their lifetimes and beyond in a vast number of plays, pamphlets, magazines and books. In 1625, Samuel Purchas, Richard Hakluyt’s successor as the great chronicler of England’s voyages and discoveries, wrote, “Among our English travelers, I know not whether any have merited more respect than the honorable, I had almost said heroic gentlemen, Sir Anthony & Sir Robert Sherley.” For Purchas, their adventures exceeded those of classical myth, because “if the Argonauts of old, and Graecian worthies, were worthily reputed heroical for European exploits in Asia, what may we think of the Sherley brethren, which not from the nearer Greek shores but from beyond the European world, Et penitus toto divisus Orbe Britannia [Even to Britannia, that land completely separated from the world], have not coasted a little way (as did those), but pierced the very bowels of the Asian seas and lands, unto the Persian center.”8

  By using a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, Purchas hoped to wrap the Sherleys in the mantle of heroic empire-builders, spreading the word of English decency and common sense across the globe. He saw their support of Persian military expansion as ridding the world of the troublesome Turks: “The mighty Ottoman, terror of the Christian world, quaketh of a Sherley fever, and gives hopes of approaching fates. The prevailing Persian hath learned Sherleian Arts of War, and he which before knew not the use of ordnance hath now 500 pieces of brass and 60,000 musketeers.”9 It was an early example of the belief that superior Christians brought technology to the backward orientals. Unsurprisingly, the Victorians embellished Purchas’s sentiments with romantic gusto. The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1844 lauded “those three brave Sherleys! Each separate history a romance! How proud must the old knight their father have been, living at Wiston with his noble sons! What heart-breaking partings; what sorrowful misgivings as son after son left the paternal home to seek honor and renown in distant lands!”10

  Such praise was precipitated by the Sherleys’ genius for self-promotion in their memoirs
and correspondence and by the patronage of various printed publications extolling their adventures. Not everyone was impressed. Accusations of flagrant personal aggrandizement and corruption began to circulate as early as the 1580s, and more sober recent biographical studies have uncovered a dizzying trail of betrayal, debt, embezzlement, dishonesty, espionage, heresy, privateering, incarceration, treason, drunkenness, elopement and murder wherever the brothers went.11 Of all the attacks leveled at the Sherleys, none were more consistent and vituperative than those directed at Sir Anthony. Even his biographers find it hard to admire him. One of the earliest, the renowned orientalist scholar and linguist Sir Edward Denison Ross, conceded that he possessed great courage and charisma, and “rare insight into the Oriental mind,” but concluded that he was “an inveterate and unscrupulous intriguer, being incapable of single-minded devotion to any person or cause. He had all the natural instincts of a buccaneer, and his cupidity was only equaled by his extravagance.” He “passed without compunction or regret from one employment to another and surely it is seldom that one man has served so many monarchs.” These came to seven, according to Ross’s calculations: three Protestants, two Catholic, one Sunni and one Shi’a Muslim. Not only was Sir Anthony “quick-tempered and quarrelsome,” he gave “no evidence of possessing a sense of humor.”12 A subsequent biographer managed to go even further, condemning Sherley as “a born intriguer, a complete opportunist, a man whose word could never be relied on and whose personal dishonesty leaves us gasping.”13