Bible and Sword (17 page)

Even Sir Francis Bacon, the keenest mind and most learned man of his time, so far shared the general awe of the terrible Turk as to call for a new crusade against the Ottoman despot. This “cruel tyranny” he raged, “bathed in the blood of their emperors upon every succession; a heap of vassals and slaves; no nobles; no gentlemen; no freemen … a nation without morality, without letters, arts or sciences; that can scarce measure an acre of land or an hour of the day … a very reproach of human society.” They have “made the garden of the world a wilderness,” he accused, for “where Ottoman’s horse sets his feet, people will come up very thin.” This diatribe, called
Advertisement Touching an Holy War
, was published in 1623 after
Bacon’s fall from power as Lord Chancellor. It is of particular interest as anticipating almost to the very words Gladstone’s more famous “bag and baggage” speech denouncing the Turks two hundred and fifty years later.

Yet the inveterate English travelers could not be altogether put off, even by such a dire and awful picture as Bacon’s. Some were agents of the Levant Company, like John Sanderson, a merchant adventurer who traveled about the East in the years 1584–1602 and found himself eventually acting as
chargé d’affaires
when Barton was absent on campaign with the Sultan. Some were chaplains of one or another of the English “factories,” like William Biddulph, chaplain at Aleppo, whose travel diary appeared in Purchas’s collection. Others were simply tourists eager for strange sights and far-off lands. William Lithgow, a Scot, journeyed on foot throughout the Middle East over a period of nineteen years, covering, according to his own calculations, 36,000 miles. Fyne Morison, Sir Henry Blount, George Sandys, and Henry Timberlake were well-to-do gentlemen who, following the routes opened up by the Levant Company, voyaged out of curiosity to the classic lands of Greece and the Aegean, the Biblical lands of Palestine and Egypt, and the fabled wonders of Constantinople, ancient seat of the Eastern Empire.

They toured in a very different spirit from that of the pilgrim forerunners—a spirit derisive of the religious legends attached to the holy places, skeptical of miracles and relics, and almost to a man careful notetakers and diary-keepers. Their journals, published with alacrity on their return home and read avidly by the English public with its eternal curiosity about the East, did much to keep alive acquaintance with the Holy Land during a period of otherwise general neglect. At each night’s lodging the traveler sat down to write his notes of the day’s sights, to pick apart the superstitions and fables of monkish guides and try to interpret what he had seen in the new light of reason, history, and probability. Lithgow, for example, in his
Delectable
and True Discourse of an Admired and Painefull Peregrination
, remarks that the fissure in the rock on Mt. Calvary “lookes as if it had been cleft with wedges and beetles” rather than by a miracle. Timberlake, who made the tour in 1603, impressed by the barrenness of the country around Gaza, thought it improbable that the kings of Egypt and Judaea fought many great battles in that area, “there being no forrage for an army there but sand and salt water.” Sanderson was disappointed in the cedars of Lebanon, which he found “of indifferent bigness but not very hudge”; but the same trees impressed Lithgow by their grandeur. Their tops, he said, “seem to kiss the clouds.” The chaplain Biddulph typified the change from devout pilgrim to critical reporter when he classified the sights and stories of Jerusalem as “Apparent Truths,” “Manifest Untruths,” and “Things Doubtful.” Passages like these exemplify the new inquiring spirit of the Renaissance tourist.

Factual detail was a characteristic of all their accounts. The better to enable his readers to visualize Palestine, Timberlake compares the distances between places of the Bible and familiar distances at home. “The river Jordan (the very nearest part thereof) is from Jerusalem as Epping is from London.… The Lake of Sodom and Gomorra is from Jerusalem as Gravesend is from London.”

The homebound public could never be satiated. They loved every inch-by-inch detail—possibly the reason why the travelers kept such voluminous journals. It was expected of them. In the
English Traveller
, a play by the prolific Jacobean dramatist Tom Heywood, staged in 1633, the title character entertains his friends with tales

The natural features and local customs of the country interested these travelers far more than the religious traditions. Sanderson refused even to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, “by reason I had a great controversie with the Popish friars.” Lithgow ridiculed the antics of the Greek and Latin Catholic friars worshiping and kissing the “wooden portrait of a dead corpse representing our Saviour, having the resemblance of five bloody wounds.” He called the ceremony a “singular dottage of the Romish folly,” noting with approval how the Turks derided the spectacle, “laughing them to scorne in their faces.” The adventurous Timberlake even preferred prison to accepting the help of the Greek Patriarch. Becoming entangled in some scrape with the Turks, he was advised to declare himself a Greek in order to acquire the Patriarch’s protection, but he refused “because I protested that I would rather be protected by the Turk than by the Pope or himself.” A friendly Moor who had traveled on Timberlake’s ship eventually interceded and procured his release.

Yet the aura of the Holy Land sometimes overtook even these determined skeptics. Fynes Morison found his mind filled with “holy motives” on first touching Palestine’s soil, and his brother Henry, though a thorough Protestant, instinctively fell upon his knees in the traditional pilgrim attitude and kissed the ground, so impetuously in fact that he bumped his head and “voided much blood at the nose.”

Few among the travelers of this period showed any curiosity about the original inhabitants of the Holy Land. The position of the Jews was already as bad under Ottoman rule in the Levant as it was under Christian rule in Europe. In any Moslem city, according to Hakluyt, “the surest lodging for a Christian … is in a Jew’s house, for if he have any hurt, the Jew and his goods shall make it good, so the Jew taketh great care of the Christian for fear of punishment.”

John Sanderson, factor of the Levant Company, gives an account of a journey in 1601 in company with seven
or eight Jewish merchants from Smyrna, Damascus, and Constantinople. The chief of these was “Rabby” Abraham Coen, “who favored and much regarded me,” fortunately for Sanderson, a quarrelsome man who was forever getting into trouble with “Popish friars” and “villainous Moores.” On several occasions Rabby Abraham managed to save Sanderson from the consequences of his irritable temper and once even bought his way out of gaol, where Sanderson had been put by “the grisly Turke and his rascally terrible attendants.” No doubt some of the 10,000 or 12,000 ducats that “my ritch companion Jews” had sewed into the quilted undergarments of his servants on leaving Damascus, for fear of “theeves who abound in those countryees,” were used to effect Sanderson’s release.

Sanderson records during the journey many visits to his companions’ houses of worship and “coledges or scoles of lerninge” and how his fellow travelers were forever buying “holie books of the declaration of their law,” enough to load two or three pack mules. He tells how the Jews endow their “great doctors and scoles” with a yearly stipend, how they try at least once in a lifetime to visit Palestine or send their bones there to be buried, how the “graver and better sort of Jewes” who were his companions never discussed religion for fear of displeasing him, but that from others he learned their opinion of Christians, whose most learned men could not expound the letter A, whereas Jewish scholars could write whole volumes on the first letter only.

It was his companions’ custom, he noted, to give alms to needy fellow Jews wherever met; Rabby Abraham at Sefet gave 2,000 dollars (sic) and 1,000 at Jerusalem, and the others according to their ability. Indeed Rabby Abraham “was so respective, kind and courteous that never in any Christian’s company of what degree soever, I ever did receive better content.” They parted company with moist eyes. “A most devout, zealous, and softhearted man he was. I cannot speake too much good of him in regard to his great humanitie and extraordinarie charitie, his measure
being more in those performances than is to be found in many of us Christians.”

One final word Sanderson has left us of a people already 1600 years old in exile. “They know, they said, that Jerusalem shall be built againe and their Messias come and make them princes, as they have bine in time past, but then to govern all the wourld.”

The year after Sanderson’s return home Queen Elizabeth died, forcing upon the Levant Company the necessity of obtaining a new charter from the new sovereign. So the long-drawn-out quarrel over the responsibility for maintaining and paying an ambassador began all over again with James, the first Stuart. If there was one thing in which the Stuarts equaled the Tudors, it was in being tight-fisted. And James, with his limited views, saw no reason for keeping an ambassador to the “heathens” at all. The Turkey Merchants for their part, most of whom now had funds tied up in the new India Company, were unwilling to continue carrying the expense; but as they could get their charter on no other terms they were forced to acquiesce even in the Crown’s right to name the ambassador, whom the company paid. Finally in 1605 a charter was granted to “The Governor and Company of Merchants of England Trading into the Levant Seas.” Each time it came up for renewal the old dispute was revived, and as shortage of funds was a chronic condition of the Stuarts they could never be got to assume full responsibility for the embassy.

Whether wholehearted support from the Crown would have many any difference in the eventual decline of the Levant trade is questionable. There is no doubt that the aggressive commercial policy pursued by Colbert, first Minister of the French Crown under Louis XIV, succeeded in drawing much of the Turkey trade from England into French hands. Beginning in the seventeenth century France began to assume the role of England’s rival that had been filled by Spain in the sixteenth century. When England’s new and firmly Protestant king, William of
Orange, brought to an end the Stuart century of popish plots, French mistresses, and royal longings for Catholic connections, he inevitably ushered in the period of wars with France that began in the seventeenth century, lasted throughout the eighteenth, and carried over into the nineteenth century, until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. During England’s wars with Louis XIV Turkey was won over as an ally by the French, and in the intervals of peace French goods replaced English. Following the disruption of French trade resulting from the French Revolution, England’s Levant trade enjoyed a brief revival, but its day was past. By now British energy and money, withdrawn from the West since the loss of the American colonies, was fully diverted to India. The theories of free trade proclaimed by Adam Smith marked a new era in which the protected trade of chartered companies was an anachronism. Mercantilism was dead. The century of imperialism had opened. The Levant Company, after a century of half-life in the shadow of its greater scion, the East India Company, languished to a final demise; and in 1825 its charter was terminated.

I
N THE YEAR
1649, the very peak and mid-point of Puritan rule in England, two English Puritans of Amsterdam petitioned the government “That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Izraell’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for an everlasting Inheritance.” The petition further requested that the Jews “may again be received and permitted to trade and dwell amongst you in this Land.”

What moved Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, authors of the petition, to ask not only that England assist in the restoration of Israel to Palestine but also repeal Edward I’s act of banishment, which had been in force for some three hundred and fifty years? To understand their motive one must realize the transformation wrought by the Bible acting through the Puritan movement. It was as if every influence on thought exerted today by press, radio, movies, magazines were equaled by one book speaking with the voice of God, reinforced by the temporal authority of the Supreme Court. Particularly the Old Testament, with its narrative of a people unalterably convinced of having been chosen by the Lord to do His work on earth, governed the Puritan mind. They applied its narrative to themselves. They were the self-chosen inheritors of Abraham’s covenant
with God, the re-embodied saints of Israel, the “battle-ax of the Lord,” in the words of Jeremiah. Their guide was the prophets, their comfort the Psalms. Their devotion, their obedience, their inspiration were owed not to the Heavenly Father of Jesus, but to Jehovah, the Lord God of Hosts. Scripture, the word of God revealed to His chosen people, was their command, on the hearth as on the battlefield, in Parliament as in church.

In the period covered by previous chapters, up to 1600 let us say, Palestine had been to the English a land of purely Christian associations, though lost to the Christian world through the unfortunate intrusion of Islam. Now it came to be remembered as the homeland of the Jews, the land carrying the Scriptural promise of Israel’s return. Interest now centered on fulfilling the Scripture. Starting with the Puritan ascendency, the movement among the English for the return of the Jews to Palestine began.

The movement was not for the sake of the Jews, but for the sake of the promise made to them. According to Scripture the kingdom of Israel for all mankind would come when the people of Israel were restored to Zion. Only then would the world see the advent of the Messiah or, in Christian terms, the Second Advent. The return was visioned, of course, only in terms of a Jewish nation converted to Christianity, for this was to be the signal for the working out of the promise. Such was the hope that animated the Cartwrights, as they plainly stated: “Your Petitioners being conversant in that City [Amsterdam] with and amongst some of the Izraell race called Jews … by discourse with them and serious perusal of the Prophets, both they and we find that the time of her call draweth nigh; whereby they together with us, shall come to know the Emanuell, the Lord of Life, light and Glory.… For the glorious manifestation thereof and pyous meanes thereunto, your Petitioners humbly pray …” and so follows the passage already quoted.