The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  If the two Serene Majesties should forge this alliance, they could also wrest the East and West Indies from the Spanish, thus strengthening both Her Serene Majesty and the Emperor and weakening the King of Spain, because his strength as King of Spain comes solely from his control of the Indies.

  The Emperor would meet the needs of Her Serene Majesty’s fleet in terms of wheat, munitions, gunpowder and provisions, as well as infantry and money. He would be best placed to supply the infantry because his people would be better accustomed to the heat of the Indies. Indeed, His Majesty the Emperor has conquered a very powerful kingdom on the River Niger in Guinea in which he has won land spanning ninety days’ march and taken eighty-six thousand towns and cities and supplied them with all they need, as well as soldiers and munitions; and his people have borne the great heat of the hot climate there.16

  Al-Mansur’s relations with Elizabeth now led him to believe he could rid the world of Catholic Spain altogether. It seems ridiculously far-fetched, but the response of Elizabeth’s advisers suggests that any proposal from a Muslim ruler that threatened to open up a new front against the Spanish was given serious consideration.

  In the end the queen and her advisers demurred over the proposed alliance. Perhaps they feared fracturing their close commercial and diplomatic ties with the Ottomans. Instead they countered with their own offer. They seem to have believed that al-Annuri was not originally from Fez as Thomson believed, but was a Morisco who had “reverted” to Islam. Cecil knew that al-Mansur regarded the allegiance of the Moriscos with deep suspicion, even though they hated the Spanish as much as the Moors did. Based on this assumption, Elizabeth’s advisers offered al-Annuri the opportunity to join the English forces in their ongoing campaign against Spain, which was at this point primarily waged at sea rather than on land.

  At least one of the ambassador’s party, the translator Abdullah Dudar, was unquestionably a Morisco (or “Andalusian”) whose native tongue was Spanish, and it appears that he and Hajj Musa led some kind of revolt against al-Annuri, possibly because they were interested in accepting the English offer. On October 15, the indefatigable diarist John Chamberlain observed, “The Barbarians take their leave some time this week to go homeward; for our merchants nor mariners will not carry them into Turkey, because they think it a matter odious and scandalous to the world to be too friendly or familiar with infidels.” Then, exhibiting the contradictory approach of so many Englishmen toward the Moors, Chamberlain continued, “But yet it is no small honor to us that nations so far remote, and every way different, should meet here to admire the glory and magnificence of our Queen of Sheba.”17 The Old Testament story of the oriental Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon is inverted by Chamberlain, who sees Elizabeth as an aged Sheba awaiting visitations from the other side of the world. Six days later, Chamberlain noted, “The Barbarians were yesterday at court to take their leave and will be gone shortly; but the eldest of them [Hajj Musa], which was a kind of priest or prophet, hath taken his leave of the world and is gone to prophesy apud inferos [in Hell] and to seek out Mahound their mediator.”18

  Chamberlain’s rather poor joke was followed by subsequent reports with far darker accusations. The London chronicler John Stow wrote, “They poisoned their interpreter being born in Granada, because he commended the estate and bounty of England. The like violence was thought to be done unto their reverend aged pilgrim [Hajj Musa], lest he should manifest England’s honor to their disgrace. It was generally judged, by their demeanours, that they were rather espials than honorable ambassadors, for they omitted nothing that might damnify the English merchants.”19

  Had al-Annuri murdered rebellious members of his party on the Strand and then ordered a hasty departure? Or were the rumors of murder and insurrection malicious slanders resulting from disagreements between various commercial and political factions? As speculation grew, the Privy Council was debating action against English merchants artificially inflating the price of Barbary sugar, while petitioning the Levant Company to cover the costs of transporting the Moroccan delegation to Aleppo.

  Elizabeth responded to al-Annuri’s overtures for a full-scale military alliance with a studiedly noncommittal letter to al-Mansur, thanking him for his “many effusive expressions of true kindness,” and hoping that “these letters of ours will communicate our deepest gratitude.” She reminded al-Mansur, “We have always been keenly aware of the great esteem in which Your Majesty holds our longstanding correspondence over many years regarding trade and agreements between our subjects,” but then she raised the issue of “some considerable monies owed to several of our subjects, who, along with their merchants, have been treated most harshly” in Morocco. She thanked him for the release of the Dutch merchants, pointing out that it emphasized “our undertaking to safeguard the wellbeing of those who, like ourselves, recognize the name of Jesus the Redeemer and Savior of all men.”

  This was hardly an attempt to encourage an Anglo-Moroccan alliance against Spain. She went on to hint at the conflicts raised by the embassy, both among its members and within the wider London community. “We have,” she wrote, “taken Your Majesty’s request for ships to convey your ambassadors to Aleppo into great consideration and we are loath to refuse this or any other greater courtesy.” However, she admitted, “we have been informed and advised that such an operation would entail many inconveniences and difficulties both to our ships and to the ambassadors themselves, out of respect to very many great concerns. We have therefore been so bold as to inform your ambassadors of these circumstances and ensure them that Your Majesty will not find any fault with them for having followed our wishes and instructions.”20 The disgruntled merchants of the Levant Company had refused to pay for al-Annuri’s official onward journey to Aleppo. Regardless of what was happening behind closed doors on the Strand, the Moroccans seemed to be heading home.

  And yet a month later, on November 17, 1600, al-Annuri and his remaining entourage were still in London, publicly celebrating the Accession Day festivities held in Whitehall marking the anniversary of Elizabeth’s reign. Al-Annuri was instantly distinguishable from the crowd thanks to his long black robe, white linen turban and richly decorated steel scimitar. His appearance and demeanor marked him out as a traveler of obvious stature, but also as an exotic stranger.

  Al-Annuri took his place beneath a canopy at one end of the yard, along with his retinue, to watch a jousting match between some of England’s most famous lords and knights, who entered to the blare of trumpets, some dressed in armor, others in elaborate disguises, accompanied by attendants reciting songs and verse. Thousands of Londoners came out to see the spectacle—“so great an assembly of people,” wrote John Stow, “as the like hath not been seen in that place before.”21

  Had he glanced up, al-Annuri would have glimpsed the queen and her ladies watching the entertainment from the windows of one of the palace galleries. From this distance he might not have seen her blackened teeth, “a defect,” the German traveler Paul Hentzner wrote, that “the English seem subject to, from their great use of sugar.”22 Elizabeth’s importation of Moroccan sugar since the beginning of her reign led to a passion for candied fruits, which had taken a terrible toll on her teeth. The French ambassador, Monsieur de Boissie, and his Russian counterpart, Grigorii Mikulin, had both been honored with seats next to Elizabeth, but al-Annuri and his followers had been relegated to standing among the queen’s subjects.

  Exactly forty-two years had passed since Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, a date she celebrated every year with a carefully staged ceremonial entrance into London. Across the kingdom the day was marked by sermons, public feasts, bell ringing, prayers and bonfires designed to celebrate the rule of the Virgin Queen. The plans for the Tilts in 1600 were meant to show a kingdom at peace. The queen’s chief adversary, King Philip II, had died two years earlier, and although England was still officially at war with Spain, the threat of invasion had receded. But behind the tiltyard�
��s glittering façade and noisy display, the seemingly unalterable edifice of more than four decades of Elizabethan rule was starting to crumble.

  At some point around this time al-Annuri sat for his portrait. Perhaps this event and the delay in the embassy’s departure were not unconnected. The portrait appears to have been designed to mark a specific diplomatic event—al-Annuri’s formal appearance at the Whitehall celebration, or possibly a formal treaty—with its date of “1600.” Al-Annuri’s Anglicized name and his age (“42”) are inscribed on the left, and his title (“Legate of the King of Barbary to England”) on the right. The painting appears to have been tied to Elizabeth’s Accession Day triumphs in some way, as it was surely no coincidence that al-Annuri’s age, marked so prominently on the painting, was the same as the length of Elizabeth’s reign. The portrait could have been painted in response to Elizabeth and Cecil’s attempts to commemorate some aspect of his visit, anticipating an Anglo-Morisco alliance or anti-Spanish union that stopped short of full-scale invasion. Who commissioned or painted his likeness remains a mystery, but the portrait offers a tantalizing glimpse of its subject and is remarkable as the earliest surviving portrait of a Muslim painted from life in England. Its existence is surprising, given Islam’s official injunction against figurative images—all the more so because, more than many other Muslim rulers, al-Mansur observed the Islamic Hadith injunction against figurative representation, never showing his face and speaking in public from behind a veil.

  On the same day that al-Annuri watched Elizabeth’s anniversary festivities, the queen’s printers published A Geographical Historie of Africa, written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought vp in Barbarie, by John Pory. The “More,” or Moroccan, of Pory’s title was better known to his Christian readership as Leo Africanus, though his given name was al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan. A Muslim born in Granada, al-Wazzan had grown up in Fez and been captured by Christian forces while crossing the Mediterranean in 1518. He converted to Catholicism in captivity and wrote his description of Africa in Rome in the 1520s; it was subsequently published in Latin, Italian and French before Pory translated it into English. Pory dedicated the book to Robert Cecil, suggesting that it was particularly timely, “in that the Moroccan ambassador (whose king’s dominions are here most amply and particularly described) hath so lately treated with your honor concerning matters of state.”23 Pory’s book provided the queen’s ministers with crucial information on a Muslim ally with which England was about to ratify a formal alliance.

  Elizabeth would not countenance a full military alliance with the Barbary kingdom, but she would consider doing what her sailors did best and raid the Spanish fleet in the Caribbean, if al-Mansur would keep his promise to cover the costs. Agreeing to such a plan was evidently beyond al-Annuri’s authority, and by January 1601 negotiations seemed to have stalled just as public hostility toward the Moroccans grew more pronounced.

  One of Cecil’s spies, Philip Honeyman, provided one possible explanation for this hostility, with the claim that al-Annuri’s mission was “to learn here how merchandise went, and what gain we made of their sugars, that he might raise the prices accordingly. The merchants took little pleasure in his being here.”24 John Stow offered yet another perspective:

  Notwithstanding all this kindness shown them together with their diet and all other provisions for six months space wholly at the queen’s charges, yet such was their inveterate hate unto our Christian religion and estate as they could not endure to give any manner of alms, charity or relief, either in money or broken meet, unto any English poor, but reserved their fragments and sold the same unto such poor as would give most for them. They killed all their own meat within their house, as sheep, lambs, poultry and such like, and they turn their faces eastward when they kill any thing; they use beads, and pray to Saints.25

  Having scorned the Moroccans’ religious practices, Stow went on to doubt the sincerity of their commercial activity:

  Whereas the chief pretense of their embassy was to require continuance of her majesty’s special favor toward their king, with like entreaty of her naval aid, for sundry especial uses, chiefly to secure his treasure from the parts of Guinea, yet the English merchants held it otherwise, by reason that during their half year’s abode in London they have used all subtlety and diligence to know the prices, weights, measures and all kinds of differences of such commodities, as either their country sent hither, or England transported thither.26

  After nearly six months the diplomatic, religious and commercial tensions that arose from the Moorish embassy’s presence finally brought it to an end. With no military or diplomatic agreement in sight, and London’s Barbary and Levant merchants increasingly unhappy about the commercially sensitive intelligence they believed al-Annuri was gathering, it was time for them to leave.

  As they began to plan their departure, events conspired to hasten it. In late January, Elizabeth issued a proclamation with a direct bearing on al-Annuri’s retinue. It read:

  Whereas the Queen’s majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects, greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great number of negroes and blackamoors which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain; who are fostered and powered here, to the great annoyance of her own liege people that which covet the relief which these people consume, as also for that the most of them are infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel: hath given a special commandment that the said kind of people shall be with all speed avoided and discharged out of this her majesty’s realms.27

  The proclamation was a sign of the deteriorating political situation in England. The country was in a state of famine due to poor harvests and the devastating impact of enclosures. Elizabeth’s grip on power was slipping, and her immediate response was that of political leaders since time immemorial when faced with a crisis: attack economic immigrants, refugees fleeing religious persecution and “aliens,” even though in this case it made little sense considering the commercial benefits of her long-standing alliance with Morocco. Nor were the proclamation’s proposed deportations of blacks and Moors quite what they seemed. Elizabeth had “appointed Casper van Zenden, merchant of Lubeck, for their speedy transportation.” Van Zenden was a particularly unscrupulous character who four years earlier had hit on the idea of deporting black slaves and selling them in Spain. It was none other than a bankrupt Sir Thomas Sherley the elder who, spotting a lucrative business opportunity, petitioned Cecil to grant van Zenden the license in 1601, presumably in return for a percentage of the unsavory profits.28

  Whether or not Elizabeth’s proclamation had any bearing on al-Annuri’s decision to go, within weeks of its publication he and his retinue had slipped quietly away. By February 27, 1601, they were back in Morocco. Al-Mansur’s subsequent letters to Elizabeth reveal that al-Annuri’s loyalty to him remained unshakable and also clarified the confusion over his origins. Al-Mansur wrote in May explaining that “the Andalusian came before our high Porte and relayed to us all your intentions and plans which you had discussed with him and conveyed to him. We listened with attentive ears until we understood them all, and became alert to all you had plotted.” Confirming that al-Annuri was a Morisco (or “Andalusian”), al-Mansur explained with obvious satisfaction that he knew all about Elizabeth’s covert scheme to recruit the Spanish-born Muslims in the ambassadorial party for a separate English-led attack on Spain. He would not countenance any Anglo-Morisco alliance because, as he explained to Elizabeth, he feared that the Moriscos might revert back to Christianity, or as he put it, “we fear that they may be swayed [against us] by the enemy,” the Spanish.29

  Nevertheless, al-Mansur hoped Elizabeth might still agree to a joint venture against the Spanish in the Americas. He reminded her, “You say the fleet to be employed in that action shall need treasure for
the charge to the value of £100,000, and that we should assist you therewith in secret, that the Spaniard may not come to the knowledge thereof.” He told her that the money “is ready and provided”; all she needed to do was send “a strong and tall ship, and some person of account” to collect it. His other concern was the Muslim colonization of the Americas. “For our intent,” he wrote blithely, “is not only to enter upon the land to sack it and leave it, but to possess it and that it remain under our dominion for ever and—by the help of God—to join it to our estate and yours.” He concluded grandly, “If your power and command shall be seen there with our army, all the Moors will join and confederate themselves—by the help of God—with us and you.”30 This was the first and last time that a Protestant-Muslim confederation was proposed to rule Latin America.

  Elizabeth was sufficiently interested in using al-Mansur’s forces to threaten Spain to praise al-Annuri for his “utmost discretion,” and send her agent Henry Prannell to continue negotiations in Morocco.31 But any real hopes for an attack on Spain had died with Essex: the political will and much of the queen’s personal strength were gone. The court’s interest in a Moroccan alliance for political and commercial reasons seemed to have reached an impasse.

  • • •

  Despite the receding enthusiasm for an Anglo-Moroccan alliance at the highest political levels, interest in the Moroccan delegation beyond Elizabeth’s innermost circle was intense. Writers continued to publish histories and translations of Christianity’s fraught relationship with Islam, while dramatists exploited the combustible mix of politics, religion and espionage generated by Elizabeth’s Muslim alliances.

  In the spring of 1600, a lawyer named Ralph Carr published The Mahumetane or Turkish Historie, a translation of various French and Italian accounts of the origins and rise to power of the Ottomans. It ranged across Islamic history, beginning with the Prophet Muhammad—described as “a gentile and very idolater”—and culminating in lengthy descriptions of the recent conflict in Malta and “the war of Cyprus, held betwixt the Turk and Venetians, some thirty years ago.”32