The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (27 page)

The Battle of Alcazar
was not Peele’s only foray into contemporary events. He also produced a poem entitled “A Farewell Entitled to the Famous and Fortunate Generals of our English Forces,” dedicated to Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake, written in anticipation of the Portuguese Expedition’s departure in the spring of 1589. Where
The Battle of Alcazar
had shown Catholic Portugal destroyed by its ill-fated Moroccan adventure, Peele’s poem imagined an English Protestant crusade taking on the might of Spanish Catholicism. He describes the fleet leaving “England’s shore and Albion’s chalky cliffs” as they head for “the spacious bay of Portugal” and the “golden Tagus.” Bidding farewell to all they hold dear, Peele glances backward at his own recent play alongside those of Marlowe and Greene:

Bid theaters and proud tragedians,

Bid Mahomet’s poo, and mighty Tamburlaine,

King Charlemagne, Tom Stukeley, and the rest,

Adieu. To arms, to arms, to glorious arms!

With noble Norris, and victorious Drake,

Under the sanguine cross, brave England’s badge,

To propagate religious piety.
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Peele invokes the evocative image of a “sanguine” red cross, the traditional symbol of Christian militancy since the time of the Crusades, in anticipation of an English victory as part of a wider religious crusade that will “propagate religious piety.” Clearly, the hope was that Drake and Norris’s heroic exploits would eclipse those of Tamburlaine.

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By January 1589, preparations for the Portuguese Expedition were beginning to show signs of strain. The Dutch and English commanders in the Low Countries quarreled over how many troops could be spared. The final number of 1,800, excluding cavalry, was half of Norris’s original request, as was the eventual supply of arms and munitions. Popular enthusiasm for the venture throughout the southeast of England swelled the army’s numbers to nearly 20,000, but many of these were inexperienced adventurers who all needed feeding, adding to the financial headaches. Running out of money but determined to continue, Drake and Norris issued the order for their fleet of 180 vessels to leave Plymouth on April 18, 1589, with provisions to last them less than a month.
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On board were Don António and the returning Moroccan ambassador Bilqasim, disguised as a Portuguese nobleman. It was yet another awkward alliance of Portuguese Catholics and Moroccan Muslims, with echoes of Alcácer-Quibir, but this time the intention was to overthrow Lisbon rather than Marrakesh.

Things went wrong almost immediately. Despite Elizabeth’s orders to attack the Spanish fleet at Santander, Drake and Norris plundered La Coruña on the northwestern Spanish coast instead, wasting valuable time and manpower and alerting the Spanish. Elizabeth was furious, complaining bitterly that “they went to places more for profit than for service,” but she was powerless to change their course.
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By the time the fleet reached Lisbon in May, the city was heavily defended. The promised revolt in support of Don António never materialized and the siege soon turned into a fiasco, as the English forces dwindled to just 6,000 in the face of sickness and desertion. In late June the English withdrew and made their way home, having failed to achieve any of their objectives after losing a huge number of men (an estimated 11,000 died) and a great deal of money. Drake and Norris were in deep disgrace and Don António returned to England yet again, his last opportunity to regain the Portuguese throne apparently gone, while Bilqasim exploited the chaos to discard his Portuguese outfit and slip away to Marrakesh.

Elizabeth’s best chance of ending the Spanish military threat for a generation failed, lost in the face of mismanagement, greed and mutual recriminations. The queen blamed everyone for the expedition’s ignominious end, including al-Mansur, who was accused of duplicity in failing to support the fleet during the critical attack on Lisbon. In August al-Mansur wrote to Drake and Norris, protesting weakly that he had not been informed of the fleet’s departure from England, and so was unable to help them. The truth was that al-Mansur’s support could not have saved the disastrous campaign and that his sudden withdrawal was not duplicitous but pragmatic, as it transpired that the Moroccan was not the only ruler holding hostages. After the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir, Philip II had taken charge of two Moroccan princes who had fled the fighting: Mulay al-Shaykh, the son of Abu Abdallah Muhammad II, and al-Mansur’s nephew Mulay al-Nasr. As news of the Anglo-Moroccan alliance reached Philip, he moved the princes to Seville, a veiled threat to send them back to Morocco, where they would undoubtedly have unleashed a civil war. In the face of such an imminent challenge to his rule, al-Mansur’s dream of
reconquista
dissolved almost immediately. To reward him, Philip agreed to return the strategically important towns of Asilah and Larache on the Moroccan coast.
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By the autumn of 1589, Catholic Spain, Protestant England and Muslim Morocco were locked in a three-way power struggle, each side playing off the others in a complex dance of politics, religion, money and military one-upmanship, with the first round going to the wily Philip.

Still, the English refused to give up on a Moroccan alliance. Faced with the collapse of the Portugal Expedition, Don António had sent an envoy named John de Cardenas (alias “Ciprian”) to Marrakesh in order to plead with al-Mansur to give him money to support his claim to the Portuguese throne. Cardenas was a double agent who was also working for Walsingham, and in October 1589 he wrote a long letter to his English paymaster providing a remarkably frank assessment of the political situation and of al-Mansur’s intentions. He appears to have been made of far sterner stuff than predecessors like Hogan and Roberts. As a spy rather than a merchant or a soldier, he had greater experience of the slipperiness of rulers, although he was not without his own braggadocio.

Cardenas reported to London that he had been kept waiting nearly a month before meeting al-Mansur, complaining that when the Moroccan sultan finally entered his presence, he was “twice or thrice interrupted in the midst of my tale; which had been clean cut off, if I had not resolutely insisted to be suffered to say what I had to say. I delivered my message to the Moor, urging him, by all the reasons I could, to the performance of his promise” to assist Don António and Elizabeth in their anti-Spanish league. Al-Mansur responded by offering what Cardenas dismissed crisply as “his pretended forward disposition to assist the king of Portugal.” As far as Cardenas was concerned, al-Mansur had failed “to perform what he had promised” and “went about to fill my ears with wind only.”

Cardenas claimed rather grandly to have issued the Moroccan ruler with an ultimatum: unless he committed to financing another military strike against Portugal by the winter, “I would take his delay thereon for a plain refusal.” Boasting that he had “driven him to the wall,” he extracted al-Mansur’s agreement “to take a final resolution in the matter.” Subsequent events suggest that Cardenas’s bluster had absolutely no effect on al-Mansur. Just days later the frustrated spy reported that the Moroccan’s “former promise made to me was performed only by sending his Jew without unto us,” an unnamed official offering yet more vague assurances of political support.
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Cardenas then turned on al-Mansur for the way he conducted business. “The Moor,” he protested, “doth rob the Jews” by demanding that they run the sugar mills for hardly any profit, leading them to default on their contracts with English merchants. The English were not exempt from criticism. In a withering attack, Cardenas excoriated the English merchants for having “been the causes of their own harm and spoiling of the trade,” because they had “bred a glut of and discredit of their commodities, and partly also by outbidding one another in the price of Barbary commodities through the envy and malice that reigneth among them.” He took a swipe at Protestant Elizabethan foreign policy by reflecting that it was “to be lamented that Christians should furnish the sworn enemies of Christ with iron, with brimstone, handguns, with firelocks, with swordblades, and such like.”
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Although Cardenas had been sent to Marrakesh to resurrect the faltering Anglo-Moroccan alliance, he had a cynical view of al-Mansur’s promises. As far as he was concerned, “the Moor doth not purpose the performance of his promise, I judge by his ill usage of me . . . whereunto I may add the natural hatred he beareth to Christians, and his cowardly and extreme covetous disposition.” He denounced al-Mansur for trying to draw Elizabeth into a war in which he never had any intention of participating: “the proof hereof appeareth both by the untruth of some of his promises, which his country cannot perform, and by the consideration of his own estate and disposition: for how can it agree with reason that the cowardliest man in the world, another Sardanapalus in life, a man generally hated of his subjects, should hazard himself and his fortune at home to undertake a needless and endless war abroad?”
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Sardanapalus was a semifictional Assyrian ruler renowned for his licentiousness and indolence—a byword for oriental despotism who could have stepped right out of a scene from Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
. Cardenas’s insistence on calling al-Mansur “the Moor,” and his repeated references to his ability to “perform” his “role,”
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suggest that he had been watching Scythians, Turks and Moors on London’s stages before he left for Marrakesh. What is certain is that by the beginning of the 1590s, the concept of “the Moor” had infused the language not just of Elizabethan theater but of diplomacy too.

When Cardenas’s report reached London, Elizabeth reacted with a fury born of impotence. In August 1590 she wrote to al-Mansur complaining about his bogus friendship. Not only had he failed to support the English during the disastrous attack on Lisbon, but his promise of money and offer to free English captives had failed to materialize. In an uncharacteristic fit of pique, Elizabeth threatened to go over his head to the Ottoman sultan. “If you would not grant us what we so reasonably ask from you, we will have to pay less attention to your friendship,” she wrote in exasperation. “We know for sure also that the Great Turk, who treats our subjects with great favor and humanity, will not appreciate your maltreatment of them in order to please the Spaniards.”
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Sounding more like a childish taunt than a diplomatic maneuver, it was nevertheless a revealing comment: she assumed that al-Mansur dreaded the Ottomans far more than he feared Spain.

Elizabeth had in fact already written to Murad, but the wily Moroccan ruler brushed off the threat of an Ottoman intervention, writing back a delightfully patronizing letter mollifying the queen and assuring her of his love and friendship. By January 1591 even Murad was becoming annoyed by al-Mansur’s behavior. In one of his letters to Elizabeth he confided his irritation with the “faithless prince of Fez.”
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Al-Mansur seemed to be indifferent to such threats. He was far too preoccupied with the fulfillment of a messianic project that had exercised him since his accession: extending his empire into the Muslim kingdom of Songhai, in modern-day Niger. When Elizabeth’s letters reached him in the autumn of 1590, his army of 5,000 soldiers including Moriscos,
renegadoes
and European mercenaries had already set off to cross two thousand miles of the Saharan desert to march on Gao, on the Niger River. On March 13, 1591, the Moroccan troops, equipped with muskets, massacred 80,000 Songhai warriors armed with only lances and javelins. As the Songhai soldiers fell, they reportedly shouted, to no avail, “We are Muslims, we are your brothers in religion.”
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The Moroccan victory brought al-Mansur vast wealth. He now controlled a key stretch of the trans-Saharan trade route, generating an annual tribute from the Songhai of 1,000 slaves and 100,000 gold pieces.
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European merchants flocked to Marrakesh in droves as gold poured into the imperial capital. Politically and financially, al-Mansur seemed more secure than ever. He wrote to Elizabeth apologizing casually for not having done so earlier, excusing himself due to the small matter of the invasion of Songhai, but promising her that the money rolling into his imperial coffers would help their joint effort to defeat the Spanish. His victory was chronicled by his court historians in terms that illuminated his rivalry with the Ottomans: al-Mansur was now regarded as the Mahdi, the legitimate heir of the caliphate descended from the Prophet Muhammad (unlike the Ottoman sultan), who would unify Islam and lead a holy war against Christianity. If New World gold and silver had enabled Catholic Spain to fight Protestants and Muslims throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, gold from central Africa would be used to confer imperial and religious legitimacy on al-Mansur. The English were of course oblivious to these quasi-spiritual claims, but Elizabeth appreciated that al-Mansur’s success in Songhai, in contrast to her own military failure, meant she needed his support more than ever.

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While Elizabeth struggled to impose her will in Marrakesh and made more lasting inroads in Constantinople, London’s printing presses lit up with diplomatic reports, travelers’ tales and sermons chronicling epic military victories and heroic defeats far from home. Stories of gold plundered from fabled African empires, captive princes, ransomed slaves, political skulduggery and apocalyptic claims of universal empires were the raw material that quickly became a recipe for theatrical success in London’s commercial playhouses. A mixture of faith, ambition and exoticism was staple theatrical fodder, as almost every Elizabethan dramatist attached to an acting company began to include despotic sultans, deceitful Moors, renegade Christians, murderous Jews and vulnerable princesses in his plays. An endless variety of pagans, converts, apostates and atheists paraded the power of their beliefs (or lack thereof) onstage, as these formerly marginal characters became a ticket to commercial success.