The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (32 page)

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
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The speech’s conclusion also reminds the audience that Shylock is a creation of Venice’s society and its Christians, and he is no better or worse than they are:

If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
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Shylock is just as vicious and acquisitive as Antonio, a point made inadvertently by Portia when she enters the courtroom dressed as a lawyer and, unable to distinguish between them, asks, “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?”
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Portia refers to Shylock contemptuously as “Jew” on no fewer than ten occasions during the courtroom scene. But he is not the only alien who feels her wrath. Under the terms of her father’s will, she can only marry the man who identifies which of three caskets of gold, silver and lead contains Portia’s portrait. The play’s second scene opens with her recalling those suitors who have already failed, including an arrogant Italian, a drunk German, a capering Frenchman, a badly dressed Englishman and a quarrelsome Scot. It is then announced that a new suitor is about to try his luck: the Prince of Morocco. Upon hearing this Portia immediately recoils, joking, “If he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me [hear confession] than wive me.”
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But when Morocco enters he is not what the audience might expect. He is a tawny Moor dressed in white, who sounds more like Tamburlaine than Aaron. In a speech that anticipates Shylock’s plea for humanity he asks Portia:

Mislike me not for my complexion,

The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,

To whom I am a neighbor and near bred.

Bring me the fairest creature northward born,

Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles,

And let us make incision for your love

To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.
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Having created an evil blackamoor in the shape of Aaron, Shakespeare now produced his opposite, a virtuous, heroic tawny Moor, one who has no apparent qualms about marrying into the Christian world of Portia’s fictional Belmont. His religion is never mentioned, but he retains an element of sexual frisson sometimes associated with Moors, boasting to Portia:

I tell thee, lady, this aspect of mine

Hath fear’d the valiant; by my love I swear

The best-regarded virgins of our clime

Have loved it too: I would not change this hue,

Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen.
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His virile boastfulness turns into fantasy when he swears to win Portia:

By this scimitar

That slew the Sophy and a Persian prince

That won three fields of Sultan Solyman.
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The audience would have known that nobody had been able to slay a Persian ruler and defeat the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. Nevertheless, here was a Moroccan warrior claiming to have defeated Ottoman and Persian forces, bearing a striking resemblance to al-Mansur. Officially al-Mansur’s diplomatic and military overtures were known only to Elizabeth’s innermost circle, but one wonders how far awareness of the Anglo-Moroccan rapprochement had spread into the public domain.

In any event, Morocco’s suit fails: he chooses the wrong casket and Portia ushers him hastily off the stage and out of the play with the devastating couplet:

A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go.

Let all of his complexion choose me so.
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There is no real reason that a Prince of Morocco should be in a romantic comedy about Venetian merchants and Jewish moneylenders. But Shakespeare had at least two precedents for putting Muslims into plays about conflicts between Jews and Christians. In Wilson’s
Three Ladies of London,
the honorable Jewish moneylender Gerontus complains to a Turkish judge about the hypocrisy of the villainous Christian merchant Mercadorus, while in Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta
Barabas forms a murderous alliance with the Turkish Ithamore. As usual Shakespeare took the middle way, putting a Jew and a Moor onstage who are not saints, but are expelled ruthlessly as soon as they threaten to challenge the status quo.

At a theological level, Christendom had always seen Muslims and Jews as apostates who denied Christ as the son of God, heretics representing two sides of the same religious error. At a commercial level, they were intimately related too: Jews acted as mediators in most mercantile transactions with the Muslim courts in Morocco, Turkey and Persia. In fact, the English had much greater experience of Jewish merchants, moneylenders and political intermediaries in Morocco in the 1590s than in Venice. The highly publicized case of the Moroccan Jewish sugar baron Isaac Cabeça’s insolvency in 1568 and the subsequent trials in the High Court of Admiralty and Chancery would have been far more familiar to Londoners watching Shakespeare’s play than any Venetian merchant’s activities. Shylock is not an attractive character, but Shakespeare deliberately chose to move away from purely villainous stereotypes with the more ambiguous Shylock and Prince of Morocco. The exigencies of politics and trade made alliances with Jews, Turks and Moors necessary. While everyone profited, everything was fine, but when trouble arrived, the laughter stopped and one side was often pitted against the others. By the end of Shakespeare’s play, the audience is in the uncomfortable position of being as repelled by its self-righteous Christians as by its haughty Moroccan and vindictive Jew. Within just over two years of Marlowe’s death, Shakespeare had modulated his murderous eastern characters to produce a far more subtle theater of complicity, where Moors, Jews and Christians—and even the audience—were all equally culpable.

In July 1597, a year after Shakespeare wrote
The Merchant of Venice,
the Barbary Company was quietly dissolved. Its charter had expired and the regulated trade seemed to have made little difference to the trade’s uneven profitability. It was proving difficult to recover debts from the Moroccan merchants, and the English merchants had flooded the market with cloth in return for expensive sugar. The Levant merchants were already complaining about the effect of the badly organized Barbary trade on English commerce across the Mediterranean. As early as 1591, one group had written to Burghley complaining that the Barbary merchants “have brought our English cloth there into contempt, and advanced their dross and base sugars to high price, and so not only spoiled and overthrown that trade, but undone themselves and many an honest merchant.”
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Regulation had clearly failed, and private trade seemed to promise better returns.
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The dissolution of the company made no discernible difference to the Barbary trade throughout the late 1590s as it returned to private hands operating outside state control. It was now every man for himself in Morocco. With the plans for a formal alliance stalled and the crown’s interest in the trade waning, Elizabeth and her advisers turned their attention more fully toward the Ottoman Porte in Constantinople.

9

Escape from the Seraglio

On January 15, 1595, Sultan Murad III died in the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople. In keeping with Ottoman tradition, his death was kept secret until his heir, the crown prince Mehmed, could reach Constantinople and ensure a smooth transition of power. Four weeks later Edward Barton forwarded a letter to Lord Burghley from a man whom he called a “curious Jew” describing “what here hath lately passed,” the “death of the late Sultan Murad III and success to this empire of Sultan Mehmed III.”
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The letter was written by a Portuguese Jew named Alvaro Mendès, better known to the Ottoman court as Salomon Aben Yaèx, an associate of Barton’s with privileged access to the imperial
divan
. Mendès reported that on January 27 Mehmed had arrived from Manisa near the Aegean coast to claim the throne and bury his father in Hagia Sophia. What followed next has became one of the most terrible and reviled acts in Ottoman imperial history:

That night his nineteen new brothers were conducted to the king Sultan Mehmed, they were the male children then living of his father, by several wives; they were brought to kiss his hand, so that he should see them alive; the eldest of them was eleven. Their king brother told them not to fear, as he did not wish to do them any harm; but only to have them circumcised, according to custom. And this was a thing that none of his ancestors had ever done, and directly they had kissed his hand they were circumcised, taken aside and dexterously strangled with handkerchiefs.
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The Venetian ambassador added to the horror with a story of even greater pathos. “They say,” he wrote, “that the eldest, a most beautiful lad and of excellent parts, beloved by all, when he kissed the sultan’s hand exclaimed, ‘My lord and brother, now to me as my father, let not my days be ended thus in this my tender age.’ The sultan tore his beard with every sign of grief, but answered never a word. They were all strangled.” Salomon acknowledged that such a brutal act of political succession “certainly seems a terrible and cruel thing, but it is the custom”; he also conceded that the sight of all nineteen coffins—some no bigger than a doll’s—when placed next to their father’s, brought forth “the tears of all the people.”
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Barton had taken great pains to obtain Salomon’s report for Burghley because Murad III’s death was a critical moment in Anglo-Ottoman relations. Most of Elizabeth’s diplomatic and commercial relations with the Ottomans were based on a cordial personal correspondence with Murad that stretched back over seventeen years, and more recently with Safiye Sultan, who with his death was now elevated to the role of Valide Sultan (Queen Mother). It was unclear whether Mehmed would be as sympathetic toward the English as his father had been, but the signs were not promising. Mehmed vowed to pursue the flagging Ottoman military campaigns in Hungary, but he hardly seemed like a warrior. One English merchant described him as “a prince by nature of wit and courage: but by accident, dull, timorous, and very effeminate.”
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Barton needed to act quickly if he was to retain Ottoman favor. He hoped that by sending Salomon’s letter to London, Burghley would see the wisdom of dispatching a suitable gift to the new sultan to cement his diplomatic position. Unfortunately, the Privy Council was somewhat dilatory in its response. With no present forthcoming, Barton felt obliged to show his support for the new sultan by accompanying him on a military campaign the following year against Archduke Maximilian’s Catholic armies in Hungary.

Barton set out for Hungary with Mehmed’s army in June 1596, accompanied by a large retinue paid for by the sultan. He observed the Ottoman campaign and even sent Burghley a detailed account of the dramatic victory over the Austrian-Hungarian Habsburg forces at Keresztes, in northern Hungary, in October 1596.
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When news of Barton’s presence spread throughout Europe and Russia, Elizabeth was forced to go on a diplomatic charm offensive, sending embassies as far as Prague and Moscow to deny that she had “incited the most loathsome enemy of the Christian name to wage war on Christian princes.”
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Nevertheless, the alliance with the Ottoman Porte endured because of its importance. Qualms about the relationship ranged from the obvious religious differences to fears about Ottoman imperial ambitions and distaste for their fratricidal approach to political succession, but none of this was enough to derail it. The partnership had far-reaching consequences both diplomatically and economically. While the sultans acted as a powerful if capricious bulwark against Spain, trade with the Ottoman Empire had a marked impact on England’s domestic economy. In contrast to the uneven profitability of the Barbary Company, the Turkey Company was successful—so much so as to prompt a merger with the Venice Company in 1592. Many of London’s merchants felt that separating the Venetian and Turkish trade made little sense, so when a new charter was proposed most of the Turkey Company’s members petitioned the government for an extension of its jurisdiction to include Venice, as well as expanding membership to fifty-three merchants, with space for more. To acknowledge the geographical expansion of its operation, the organization renamed itself the Levant Company, and in acknowledgment of his achievements in establishing the Ottoman trade, Edward Osborne was appointed its governor. It was an immediate success and by the end of the decade had twenty ships exporting cloth worth £150,000 annually to the Mediterranean.
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The impact of all this trade could be seen at various levels back home. If printed books are anything to go by, there was a notable surge of interest in the Muslim world toward the end of the sixteenth century. The registers of the Company of Stationers of London reveal that an estimated sixty books were published in Elizabeth’s reign on subjects relating to the Ottomans, over half of them in the 1590s, though the true figures are likely to be much higher.
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