The garrulous Sherley was himself partly responsible for these damning assessments. Unlike so many anonymous travelers to the Muslim world, he left behind a mountain of correspondence, pamphlets, and even a rambling vainglorious memoir entitled Sir Anthony Sherley His Relation of his Travels into Persia (1613). Although it is often difficult to extract the facts from Sherley’s fanciful self-fashioning, supporting evidence reveals his opportunism from an early age. Like most young aristocratic Elizabethan men, Anthony Sherley went to fight the Spanish in the Low Countries, along with his father and elder brother Thomas. By 1586 they were all serving there under the Earl of Leicester, but his father began embezzling money from the war effort, and the Spanish slaughtered his brother’s company one night after the foolish Thomas had spent all day drinking with them. With his father and brother in disgrace, Anthony went on to distinguish himself in battle—bravery was one virtue he did not lack—and after Leicester’s death he attached himself to Elizabeth’s new favorite, the equally intemperate Earl of Essex.
In 1591 he joined Norris’s expeditionary force to France, where the French king Henry IV awarded him a knighthood of the Order of St. Michel. Sherley was delighted, but when Elizabeth heard he had accepted a foreign honor without her permission she threw him in jail. Sherley refused to relinquish the title with characteristic verbosity, insisting that “this matter concerned his reputation, more dear to him than his life, and that his life and all that he had was at Her Majesty’s commandment, and that he had rather lose his life than lose his reputation, desiring rather to die than live with disgrace, which he accounted the yielding up of this would bring him.”14 He was marched straight back to jail. A compromise was reached and he was released, but from then on he would only ever answer to the title of Sir Anthony.
A spell in prison seems to have done nothing to temper Sherley’s ambitions. Almost immediately he incurred the queen’s wrath again by secretly marrying Essex’s cousin, in 1594, and he was exiled from court. He turned to privateering and in 1596 persuaded his father to channel an exorbitant amount from the war effort in the Low Countries to outfit a fleet of ships to attack the Portuguese island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea. It was an ill-fated expedition from the outset. Bad weather and illness forced Sherley to abandon his initial plans and launch a feeble attack on the Cape Verde Islands. Fearing a Portuguese counterattack, he made the ludicrous decision to cross the Atlantic and head for the Caribbean. In early 1597 the fleet tried unsuccessfully to plunder Dominica and Jamaica, but was beset by mutinies and limped home empty-handed via Newfoundland. By June Sherley was back in England, poorer than when he had left and overshadowed by Essex’s success in Cadiz. In an attempt to recoup some money and escape from his estranged wife, he joined Essex and Raleigh’s unsuccessful summer expedition against the Spanish-held Azores, alongside the young poet John Donne. He returned in October 1597, impatient for his next escapade.
As one adventure ended, another opened up. Late that year, Essex sent Sherley to Ferrara in a misguided scheme to help Cesare d’Este, the last surviving member of the city’s ruling dynasty, hold on to the duchy in the face of Pope Clement VIII’s claims. Essex hoped to tie up Spanish and papal forces in the crisis that would otherwise be turned against England. Sherley was the obvious choice to bribe, flatter and generally cause chaos, and in early 1598 he slipped out of London without the queen’s permission, leading a party of twenty-five volunteers. He would never set foot in England again. Not satisfied with a substantial budget of £8,000 from Essex, before he left Sherley duped his father out of jewels worth more than £500. Sir Thomas, having only just been released from debtors’ prison, wrote to the ailing Lord Burghley on December 30, declaring that “against my will I am driven to complain of the cruel dealing of Anthony Sherley toward me” and protesting about the theft of the jewels. “When my man called then, Anthony had gone out of town, we hear, with purpose to go beyond the seas, but whether with the Queen’s license, or not, I do not know. After wounding my estate by his voyage [for São Tomé] he has now the more undone me in my present desperate state by thus cozening me of the money which I am in no way able to repay. . . . For this indeed is wickedness to add to the affliction of his poor aged parents.”15 So much for the proud old knight and his noble sons.
In January 1598 Sherley crossed the Channel and traveled with his party on to Germany, where he learned that Don Cesare had fled Ferrara, which was now under papal control, apparently bringing his mission to an end before it had begun. Seemingly unconcerned, Sherley made instead for Venice in search of even greater opportunities. The city’s network of spies and informants was abuzz with the arrival of the pompous Englishman and his intentions. In March 1598 one wrote:
Here, one finds a gentleman named Sherley. . . . He passed through Holland while on his way here, and he was (or so he says) well-regarded and received there. Nevertheless, he hardly speaks better of the Estates [the Dutch Calvinists], and, on the contrary, he unceasingly extols the greatness of Spain, and even more that of the Pope, and says that he has received great offers from the one and the other. . . . If he were wise and of good counsel, he would talk less and would be more feared. . . . He is a spendthrift who has spent all his means, and those of his father who he has ruined, and he lives here on what he has borrowed.16
These comments distilled the characteristics that Sir Anthony displayed throughout his life: the profligacy, boastful claims, suspect religious and political allegiances, empty threats and unscrupulous opportunism.
It did not take long for Sherley to spot an opportunity. Venetian overland trade with southeast Asia had been hit hard by the Portuguese discovery of a sea route to the same markets following Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in 1497–1499. Since Portugal’s annexation by Spain in 1580, Philip II’s empire had monopolized the seaborne eastern trade. Its Portuguese fortress at Hormuz on the Persian Gulf controlled maritime traffic in and out of the gulf and much of the Red Sea, which was ruining Venice. However, in 1597 news reached London and Venice that a Dutch fleet had broken the monopoly by sailing to Java via the Cape of Good Hope and returning to Holland with a consignment of spices and pepper. Essex, always keen to develop an international strategy that would expand his political influence and challenge Spain, began to explore the feasibility of an Anglo-Dutch maritime alliance that could establish seaborne and overland relations with Persia and break the Iberian stranglehold over the region. The result was an Anglo-Dutch-Persian coalition capable of challenging the dominance not only of the Spanish and Portuguese but also of the Ottomans.17
This put Essex at odds with Elizabeth’s pro-Turkish policy, but his more militant advisers were pushing him to challenge the queen’s foreign policy. The Essex faction’s increasingly bellicose strategy would, as we will see, culminate in one of the most serious crises faced in the course of Elizabeth’s reign; however, it also found itself in an unlikely alliance with Catholic sympathizers like the Sherley family, unhappy with Elizabeth’s Anglo-Ottoman friendship. It was this unlikely association that gave the restless Sir Anthony his next glorious opportunity: in the late spring of 1598, he would strike out for Isfahan and befriend the Shah of Persia.
It is unclear who first proposed the venture. In his Relation Sherley naturally claimed that it was his idea, sanctioned by Essex, who, he wrote, “proposed unto me (after a small relation, which I made unto him from Venice) the voyage of Persia.” He described the decision in his characteristically prolix and neologistic style as “a profitable experience of my seeing those countries, limiting upon the king of Spain’s uniall [united] parts, and answering to her majesty’s merchants’ trade in Turkey and Muscovy; and besides, being not unlikely but some parts might have been found fit for the Indian navigation, then principiated [initiated] in Holland, and muttered of in England.” He could not resist adding that he was plotting “some more private designs, which my fortune, being of the condition, which my persecutions have brought it unto, counsel
leth me not to speak of.”
Other evidence suggests that the wily Venetians had planted the seed of a Persian adventure in Sherley’s overactive imagination. Using the hyperbolic terms Sherley loved, the Venetian statesman Giacomo Foscarini encouraged him to go because it would be “beneficial to all Christendom and in particular to Venice, which by the traffic overland from thence was mightily enriched before the Portugals were lord of those parts.” It was undoubtedly no accident that Sherley was subsequently introduced to a Persian merchant who told him about “the royalty of the Sophy, his king, which pleased Sir Anthony very well.” He also met “a great traveler, newly come from to Venice from the Sophy’s court, whose name was Angelo [Corrai], born in Turkey, but a good Christian, who had traveled sixteen years, and did speak twenty-four kind of languages.” Corrai also appealed to Sherley’s vanity, telling him “of the worthiness of the King of Persia, that he was a gallant soldier, very bountiful and liberal to strangers, and what entertainment he had at his court; assuring Anthony that, if he would go thither, it would be greatly for his advancement.”18
Sherley needed little further encouragement, and in May 1598 he left for Persia. His small entourage included Angelo Corrai as guide and interpreter, a Frenchman named Abel Pinçon (a spy working for Burghley), several English gentlemen, including George Mainwaring and William Parry (both of whom survived to write about their adventures), and his brother Robert. Their elder brother, Thomas, was unavailable, having extracted money from his long-suffering father and Burghley to fund a privateering adventure off the Portuguese coast that was to prove disastrous.
Even before he left Falmouth, one of Thomas’s six ships sprang a leak, another was damaged and several of its crew were killed by a botched cannon salute. A mutiny in which four hundred sailors absconded forced him to sell four ships and sail with just two. If his departure was a farce, the outcome was an embarrassment. He tried to attack the southwest coast of Spain but anchored too far offshore and the landing party got stuck on a sandbar at the entrance to the bay. He finally abandoned the whole humiliating affair and returned home—to the scorn of the diarist John Chamberlain, who sneered that Thomas Sherley’s only achievement was “two or three peasants to ransom, of whom when he saw he could raise nothing [for them] he would not bring them away for shame.”19
A talent for logistics clearly did not run in the family. As Sir Anthony left Venice, he left behind him the inevitable debts. He also failed to muster sufficient provisions (although the two may have been related). Within weeks of his departure for Zante, he ran out of food. He begged for provisions from the Italian passengers, but it was a group of Persians who came to his rescue and shared their food. The enraged brothers took their revenge on one unfortunate Italian, accusing him of slandering the queen. Sir Anthony ordered him to be beaten brutally, and when the captain intervened, Sir Robert attacked him. It was symptomatic of their behavior all the way to Persia. On arrival in Zante, Sir Anthony wrote to “foggy” Henry Lello in Constantinople, insisting that he was heading for the Red Sea on the queen’s official business while posing as an English merchant. He demanded that the hapless ambassador send him passports and money to enable him to travel unmolested through Ottoman territory.
Over the next six months Sherley lied, bullied and borrowed his way across Ottoman territory, traveling through Crete, Tripoli and Aleppo, where he obtained more money from the English consul. News of his behavior was already reaching London, where in December 1598 John Chamberlain noted, “Sir Anthony Sherley has wrung £400 from our merchants at Constantinople, and has scraped together £500 more at Aleppo, with which he has charged Lord Essex by his bills, and is gone away to seek his fortune.”20 As old Levant hands like William Harborne knew, Sherley’s route was a dangerous one, and his retinue faced repeated harassment from the Turks they met along the way. While in Aleppo, George Mainwaring recounted that “to my hard fortune, I met with a Turk, a gallant man he seemed to be by his habit, and saluting me in this manner: took me fast by one of the ears with his hand, and so did lead me up and down the streets.” As onlookers watched, laughed and threw stones at Mainwaring, the Turk “gave me such a blow with a staff, that did strike me to the ground.” Once Mainwaring had returned to the safety of the English consul’s house bloody and beaten, the resident Janissary sought out the Turk, and “ran fiercely at him, and threw him on his back, giving him twenty blows on his legs and his feet, so that he was not able to go or stand.” Such attacks, a reflection of the fragile nature of English relations with the Turks, occurred, so Mainwaring claimed, “diverse times.”21
In early September 1598, as Sherley’s retinue prepared to leave Aleppo, they were probably unaware of events at the other end of the Mediterranean that would have a significant impact on Europe’s balance of power and Sir Anthony’s own future. The seventy-one-year-old Philip II lay dying in the Escorial just outside Madrid, riddled with fever, gout and septicemia. With characteristic diligence the king worked up until the end, signing one peace treaty with France and proposing another with England even as he lay dying. He finally expired on September 13 after ruling Spain for more than forty years. His undistinguished son, Philip III, succeeded him. The new king possessed little appetite or ability to match his father’s tireless global vision of Spanish imperial reach and oversaw a period of drift and decline in imperial affairs.
As Philip II passed away, Sherley’s entourage struck out eastward, traveling through Al Fallujah before reaching Ottoman-controlled Baghdad at the end of the month. News of his unofficial embassy quickly spread, and English merchants refused to honor his debts unless assured that Elizabeth or Essex had sanctioned his trip. Even worse, Baghdad’s suspicious Turkish governor impounded Sherley’s goods, and in November the Englishman and his party fled after a tip-off from a sympathetic Florentine merchant that they were about to be arrested on orders from Constantinople. They were pursued by a party of Ottoman Janissaries whom they shook off as they traveled toward Persian territory with a group of Shi’a pilgrims returning from Mecca. As they went, George Mainwaring reported, they “saw many ruinated places which Tamberlane had conquered, as we were told both by the Jews and the Turks, for his name is had in memory among them to this day.”22
They traveled through Raqqa, where they had a run-in with some Turks, before reaching Babylon. William Parry assessed that its tower, which he called “Nebuchadnezzar’s Tower,” was “about the height of St. Paul’s.” When they finally crossed into Persian dominions, Parry “thought we had been imparadised, finding our entertainment to be so good and the manner of the people to be so kind and courteous, far differing from the Turks.”23 Finally, on December 1, 1598, the group reached the Safavid Persian city of Qazvin.
Sherley could not have timed his arrival better. Thirty-six years earlier, when Anthony Jenkinson was the first Englishman to enter the city, Shah Tahmasp had just concluded a peace treaty with the Ottomans and thus had no interest in an alliance with Christians. Jenkinson was promptly expelled. Sherley arrived just as Shah Tahmasp’s grandson, Shah Abbas, ended years of internecine conflict by defeating the Safavids’ sworn enemies the Uzbeks. The shah was now ready to confront the Ottomans once more. He had overseen a remarkable transformation of the Safavid Empire since his accession in 1588, at seventeen. Ottoman expansion in the west and Uzbek depredations in the northeast meant that he had inherited a kingdom riven with factional rivalries and reduced drastically in size and stature since the glory days of Shah Ismail. A pragmatic and ruthless leader, Shah Abbas understood that if he was to survive and his kingdom to prosper, he must somehow end division, reorganize the army and recover lost territory. He immediately made a strategic peace treaty with the Ottomans, quashed internal dissent and created a new standing army with musketeers and an artillery corps. He also took the bold decision to move his imperial capital from Qazvin to the more central Isfahan. That city underwent a period of enormous urban renewal: Shah Abbas supervised the building of one o
f Islam’s greatest capitals at a time when other great Muslim cities like Marrakesh were being redesigned on a grand scale. Isfahan’s transformation included new palaces, mosques, bazaars, madrasas, baths, forts, gardens and public avenues, earning it the epithet Esfahān nesf-e jahān ast (“Isfahan is half the world”—the other half being paradise).24
In the spring of 1598, as work began on his new capital, Shah Abbas had made his move against the Uzbeks. He marched out of Isfahan in April, and on August 9 his army of 10,000 soldiers defeated the Uzbeks at the Battle of Rabat-i-Pariyan, seizing Herat, Nishapur and Meshed. As he returned to Isfahan at the head of a triumphal procession, he heard of Sherley’s arrival. He ordered a steward by the name of Marjan Beg to present Sherley with twenty gold pounds to sustain him until he was called for. Mainwaring observed with relief that Marjan Beg was pleased with Sherley’s typically contemptuous response: “Sir Anthony, according to his princely mind, turning the money over with his foot, returned this answer: ‘Know this, brave Persian, I come not a-begging to thy king, but hearing of his great fame and worthiness thought I could not spend my time better than come to see him, and kiss his hand, with the adventure of my body to second him in his princely wars.’”25
Sherley’s rhetoric of fame, adventure and contempt for wealth seems to have captured the ethos of the Persian court. Mainwaring notes that Marjan Beg responded to Sherley’s bravado, “Pardon me, brave stranger, for now I see thou art a prince thyself, for so it seemeth by thy princely answer.” Sherley demurred, but was finally being given the regal treatment he felt he deserved. Equally thrilling, it was time to dress up. His party was “furnished with apparel and horses” and prepared for a meeting with the shah.26
The Sultan and the Queen Page 27