Adding to the torment were the hordes of rats that had multiplied over the months of the voyage and made themselves at home throughout the ship, including in the ambassador’s cabin. “All their aggressiveness,” Silva y Figueroa wrote in his journal,
could have been endured, even with the constant screams that filled the night, had it not been for the attraction they felt for human flesh, especially at night, when whole troops of them, great and small (and the hotter it was the more there were) came out and roamed over the beds and faces of the passengers, not only causing annoyance and infection by their vile smell but also shamelessly biting many persons on their feet, hands, and faces, and any other parts that they found uncovered.
The ship finally touched land in Goa late in the fall, seven months after leaving Lisbon. Here, amid relentless heat, Silva y Figueroa met a chilly reception from the Portuguese authorities. Spain and Portugal had been united under one crown since 1580, but in this distant locale that union did not diminish the Portuguese viceroy’s hostility to Spaniards. Despite the king’s express instructions, the viceroy flatly refused to supply a ship to carry the ambassador on to Hormuz. Silva y Figueroa was forced to pass two full years in Goa before he managed to charter passage for himself on a small merchant vessel sailing out of Bassein (present-day Mumbai).
Contributing to the viceroy’s indifference or hostility to Silva y Figueroa’s mission was the increasing presence of the English in the region. It was becoming apparent that the days of Portuguese domination in the Indian Ocean were drawing to an end. This was an impression the viceroy, understandably, wished to undo. He figured a decisive sea victory over the English would reestablish Portuguese status. He fitted out an impressive armada of six galleons, two ships, two galleys, and sixty frigates bearing 2700 soldiers in addition to the sailors themselves. The armada shipped out under the personal leadership of the viceroy. Unfortunately, it was insufficiently provisioned for such a large body of men. The armada ran through its victuals before it could inflict serious harm on any English ships, and it had to hangdoggedly return to Goa.
Over the years Shah Abbas had grown weary of endless promises from Spain, the Vatican, and the Empire that they would assist in an assault on the Ottomans, and he was annoyed by the harassment of Persian merchants and high tariffs leveled against them by the Portuguese in Hormuz. Hormuz, an island commanding the entrance to the Persian Gulf, was of high strategic importance, but it depended on supplies of water from Bahrain and the mainland. The Persians overran the Portuguese outposts there and cut off these supplies. Arriving at Hormuz during this ominous atmosphere in April, the ambassador was forced to spend the summer there, impeded by the same Portuguese hostility he had encountered in Goa. Not until October did he manage to obtain passage on a camel caravan headed to Isfahan. He was still traveling with the huge load of presents whose assembly had caused his initial delay, as well as an entourage of about a hundred people. Because of the heat his party traveled at night, stopping in caravanserai during the daytime. It was November by the time they reached the mountainous region near the city of Shiraz, and now they were held back by cold weather. They were forced to remain there until the following spring.
On setting out that spring Silva y Figueroa suddenly found himself deprived of his Armenian interpreter, whose decapitated body turned up lying by the road; neither his head nor his murderer were ever discovered. A complaint lodged with the Persian government went unanswered.
Jahangir’s Dream of the Visit of Shah Abbas, 1618–1620, by Abul Hasan. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 45.9
Visual imagery played a role in international relations. The Mughal painter Abul Hasan makes a statement about the relative status of Jahangir and Shah Abbas in this painting. Diplomats had to be sensitive not just to practical concerns but also to issues of prestige.
The ambassador did not reach Isfahan until May. Here, grouchy by nature or as a consequence of his long, difficult journey, he displayed a lack of flexibility about foreign customs that would render him a not entirely effective ambassador — but this scarcely mattered since he had been given an impossible assignment. He was informed by the Persians that all ambassadors must dismount from their horses and prostrate themselves before the royal palace as they went past it. This Silva y Figueroa flatly refused to do, insisting that he would honor the Persian ruler with the same gestures of respect that he would show to a European monarch and nothing more. While the Persians one by one kissed the threshold of the palace, the ambassador and his Spaniards remained seated on their horses. They did remove their hats, which must have seemed odd to the Persians, who left their turbans on even in the presence of the shah.
Shah Abbas, as it turned out, was not at the time present in his capital, having removed himself to the city of Kasvan. So the ambassador set out once again, arriving in Kasvan in mid-June, decked out in an elaborate formal costume that made it difficult for him to bend his knees and caused him to sweat profusely. The first order of business was making arrangements for the delivery of the diplomatic presents, which Silva y Figueroa proposed to send in advance of his audience. Shah Abbas would not hear of this, however, and insisted that they be broken up into multiple parcels to be carried in great show by no fewer than six hundred porters, a prospect that annoyed the impatient Spaniard.
Shah Abbas’s proposal to make a show of the gift-giving was probably calculated to impress the Ottoman envoy who had arrived at his court just a few days before Silva y Figueroa. Under the leadership of Grand Vizier Kara Mehmed Pasha — called “The Ox” behind his back on account of his stocky build — the Turks had invaded Persia in 1616, penetrating as far as Yerevan in Armenia. The story is told that Mehmed Pasha and his aides were in a field tent planning strategy when an ox stuck its head through the flaps of the tent and stared intently at the Grand Vizier. His aides could barely suppress their laughter, but the formidable Mehmed was not amused. “Do you know what that animal has just said to me?” he asked. He answered his own question: “He said, ‘I see who you are, but who are these jackasses around you?’”
Shah Abbas got the best of this strongman. He wisely avoided direct engagement: he left the city of Yerevan to its own defenses and instead attacked the Ottoman army’s supply line. The strategy was successful, and Mehmed Pasha was forced to retreat. The retreat cost him his position as Grand Vizier, and within a few years he would be dead, strangled by a young janissary who had resisted his sexual advances. Under the circumstances, the Ottomans had temporarily been in no position to launch a new invasion. But now, under a new Grand Vizier, Turkish-Persian tensions were again heating up. The Turkish envoy represented a much more pressing concern to Shah Abbas than did anything concerning the Spanish or Portuguese. He hoped to avoid renewing conflict without having to relinquish any of the disputed territory.
The porters were garbed in the best outfits that could be found, and the party paraded through the town to the shah’s garden. Here the Spaniards were told to sit on carpets spread out under a large tree and await the shah’s appearance. After some time Silva y Figueroa, again uncomfortable in his constricting starched outfit, sent an indignant message demanding to be received immediately. He was then conducted to a pavilion, where the shah greeted him and instructed him to sit back down, this time on a carpet inside the pavilion. Encumbered with a long ceremonial sword in addition to his tight-fitting pants, the elderly ambassador found squatting on the carpet an excruciating experience. At last, two hours after sunset, dinner was served. The ambassador could scarcely conceal his contempt for the offering of chicken, mutton, rice, melons, and plums, though he did admire the table service, which was entirely made of gold. Already wobbly from hours of squatting, he was further destabilized by being obliged to partake, though he was a teetotaler, of wine that was poured out in copious quantities. By midnight, some eight hours after the beginning of the ceremonies, the weary ambassador’s agony outweighed his sense of diplomatic etiquette, and he cried out that if he were not allowe
d to retire he would suffocate. He was allowed to outstretch his creaky limbs and depart.
He had not succeeded in discussing any affairs of state. That was not a discussion that Shah Abbas was in any hurry to have, for, having taken Bahrain and the coastal areas at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, he had little to fear from the Portuguese and their lonely outpost in Hormuz. Though charged with pressing for the return of those territories, Silva y Figueroa had not not been provided with inducements to make this happen, apart from empty promises of cooperation against the Turks. The shah had little expectation of military assistance from Spain. For years its assurances of action had proven hollow.
The presence of a deputation of Englishmen to the Persian court, Silva y Figueroa rightly judged, made his prospects even less promising. The first English Company ship visited Persia in 1616. The overture originated not in England but in India. English merchants had set up shop in Surat on India’s northwest coast, having been encouraged by an initial exchange of goods there. But subsequent goods delivered to Surat turned out to be hard to move, and the English began looking around for other markets. They observed that the Portuguese control of the Persian Gulf was lax, and growing weaker. Silva y Figueroa had hoped to prevent the English from being received by Shah Abbas, but in his slow movement to the capital he had been passed by a swifter-moving English agent, who had got there first.
For three weeks the ambassador pressed for a meeting without results. Eventually he managed to surprise the shah while he was moving from one place to another, and he obtained an impromptu audience. The result was unsatisfactory, for Shah Abbas immediately went on the attack, demanding to know why the Europeans left Persia to fight the Turks all alone, why the pope could not unite the Christian powers, and why Spain limited itself to chasing a few corsairs around the western Mediterranean. He steered clear of the question of Hormuz and the gulf, and Silva y Figueroa was unable to bring it up. He considered his mission still unfulfilled.
The Mughal Embassy to the Safavid Court, nineteenth-century copy of an early-seventeenth-century original by Bishandas. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 16 × 27 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, formerly in the collection of Sir William Rothenstein, S.S. 219-1951.
In 1613 the Mughal emperor Jahangir sent an embassy under Khan Alam (Mirza Barkhurdar) to the Safavid court of Shah Abbas. He included a painter with the entourage, saying, “When I sent Khan Alam to Persia, I sent with him a painter named Bishandas, who was without equal in drawing likenesses, to take the likeness of the shah and his chief statesmen.” On the Persian side the artist Rizza-yi Abassi also documented the meeting of the diplomats.
The embassy did not return to the Mughal court until 1620. During the early modern period both artists and diplomats often made journeys that were long in both distance and duration.
Later the ambassador managed another conversation, in which he insisted on discussing the Hormuz situation and the Persian attack on its mainland supply bases. Because the Portuguese had exercised control over those regions through vassal kingdoms rather than directly, Shah Abbas was able to assert that he had made no move against Spain and Portugal, but only against those local kingdoms, who, he said, had taken land that rightfully belonged to Persia. The ambassador indignantly answered that Portugal had been in effective possession of the territories for a hundred years, and the shah could not claim they belonged to Persia. At which point the shah declared the discussion concluded.
There the matter stood for two more fruitless years. When at last he was given leave to return home, Silva y Figueroa suffered a debilitating attack of dysentery, delaying his journey to Hormuz. Arriving there, he again found the Portuguese in a state of panic over rumors of an impending attack from combined Persian and English forces (the fear was justified, and the assault would occur two years later). Pointing to the presence of English ships nearby, the Portuguese refused to take Silva y Figueroa to Goa. He was forced to spend another half year in Hormuz before he was able to find a local pilot who would convey him to India.
Back in Goa he encountered the same hostility that had met him on his outward trip, and he spent another half year before embarking in a small and rather rickety vessel that was bound for Lisbon. This ship got as far as Mozambique before it gave every indication of breaking apart, and it was forced to return all the way to Goa. There it deposited the poor ambassador, who had to cool his heals for another two years nine months. Goa was at the time suffering from a plaguelike epidemic. The Portuguese remained hostile. Silva y Figueroa was now more than seventy years old.
In 1622 the Persians and English defeated Hormuz, whereupon English and Dutch ships blockaded Goa. Silva y Figueroa’s mission had achieved nothing. In 1624, eleven years after being appointed for his mission, he set sail for Lisbon. He never reached home. After the ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope, with a final entry estimating the vessel’s position, his journal came to an abrupt end — he had died of the “mal de Loanda.”
Sometimes it was hard to distinguish between ambassadors and adventurers. Such was the case with Anthony and Robert Sherley, who together with their brother Thomas figured prominently in relations between Europe and West Asia. In 1616 each of the three found himself in a different part of the world. Thomas, fifty-two years old, was in England, and likely in debtor’s prison in London — at least, he is known to have been in King’s Bench Prison in 1615 and Fleet Prison in 1617. Anthony, fifty-one, seems to have been in either Madrid or Granada. Robert, the youngest, was thirty-five; he was in Goa on the western India coast, waiting for passage to Lisbon. Each of the brothers was at his core an adventurer, with varying admixtures of soldier, diplomat, and con man mingled in, and each had followed a unique route to his present location.
They were the sons of Sir Thomas Sherley, senior, of the Sussex Sherleys, a somewhat down-on-its-heels family of good lineage. As a young man the first of the brothers fought in Ireland and the Netherlands. Already by this time he, like the father whose name he shared, was having difficulties with debt and, perhaps as much to escape his creditors as to raise funds, he determined on a career as a privateer. Obtaining some ships and a crew not overburdoned by scruples, he attacked shipping in the North Atlantic and conducted raids on fishing villages along the coast of Portugal. The profit from these predations, however, does not seem to have gone far beyond covering his costs — on one occasion he had to borrow money using his ship as security in order to limp home in the damaged vessel. An observer reported on his return home from another one of his expeditions:
Sr Thomas Sherley is returned with his navy royal, and yesterday … posted to the Court, as though they had brought tidings of the taking of Seville or some such town, whereas God knows they have sacked but two poor hamlets of two dozen houses in Portugal, the pillage wherof he gave to his army, reserving to himself only two or three peasants to ransome, of whom when he saw he could raise nothing, he would not bring them away for shame.
Undaunted, or desperate, Thomas decided to expand his range into the Mediterranean, where he hoped to obtain more valuable prizes. He attacked several vessels and lost fifty men in a fruitless attack on a Flemish ship.
As protests rained in from the various capitals of Europe, the English foreign office sought to defuse an international incident by promising to apprehend and punish him. Perhaps with a mind to putting distance between his fleet and possible pursuers, Thomas continued east at the command of three ships and attacked a Turkish vessel, but this proved a difficult battle, in which he lost a hundred men. To make matters worse, the spoils proved unequal to the high cost of the battle, and his rough crew grew mutinous. By the next day one of his ships had disappeared, and a second followed a few days later.
To restore a happy mood aboard his lone remaining vessel, Thomas quickly attacked the Greek island of Kea, but this venture turned out even worse than its predecessors — he was captured along with a few of his companions. The rest of the crew made it back to ship, where they remained in harbor for t
hree days, weighing a possible rescue of their captain against the risk to their persons. In the end they simply sailed off.
The unfortunate Thomas was removed to a Turkish prison where he was held in chains awaiting ransom. Suspecting he might be worth more than they had initially demanded, his jailers put him to the rack to discover his identity. When they found out that he was the brother of the notorious Anthony Sherley, who they knew was inciting Shah Abbas of Persia to attack Turkey, he was treated more harshly, and his ransom was raised.
Queen Elizabeth had no use for the Sherleys and would not have minded seeing all three in Turkish prisons, but on assuming the throne James, who had corresponded with the Sherleys while still in Scotland, took a different tack (to the chagrin of Robert Cecil, his cold-blooded secretary of state). The king’s personal intercession, along with a hefty ransom, won Thomas his release after about three years in Turkish captivity.
Back in England, Thomas discovered that he had new enemies. By stirring up trouble with Turkey he had complicated matters for the merchants of the Levant Company, whose fortunes depended on the smooth delivery of goods across Ottoman realms (both Anthony and Robert would later make great efforts to shift the Levant trade to maritime routes). The company spread the rumor that while in prison Thomas had “turned Turke” (converted to Islam), and he was carried off to the Tower of London.
He petitioned Cecil for pardon, writing “I have done nothinge out of malis, but have offended through weakness and ignorans.” The charge of turning Turk didn’t stick, and he was released. Twice married and with eighteen children, he was still obligated for the debt of seven thousand pounds that had been paid out as his ransom. While his brothers attained international notoriety, he remained forgotten, nagged by a plethora of petty troubles, and he grew morose and bitter.
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