The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam by Jerry Brotton Page B

327.4205609/031—dc23
    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029495
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To my wife, Charlotte

7
    London Turns Turk
    In the summer of 1588 London was braced for a Spanish invasion that, if successful, would open up the possibility of a victorious Philip II returning in public triumph to the city he had ridden through thirty-four years earlier as consort to the queen. Six months later, with Philip’s armada in ruins, instead of a Catholic conqueror, Londoners watched a Muslim ambassador riding in state through the capital. The sight of Ahmad Bilqasim—or Marshok Reiz, as his English hosts Anglicized his name—entering London at the head of an entourage that included the Barbary Company’s most senior merchants signaled an important shift in Elizabethan foreign policy toward the Islamic world. Both the Moroccan and Ottoman rulers had watched tiny, insignificant England overcome the mighty war machine of “the great tyrant of Castile” and now regarded her queen as an important political player on the international stage. Elizabeth and her advisers understood that a strategic alliance with these Muslim rulers was more important than ever to combat the inevitable attempt by King Philip to recover from his recent humiliation.
    Little documentary evidence remains of where the Moroccan ambassador stayed and whom he met during his time in London, but the official diplomatic correspondence suggests what both sides hoped to achieve from his mission. A remarkable memorandum written by Bilqasim in late January 1589 outlined the scale of al-Mansur’s projected alliance. It proposed:
To offer unto your majesty not only to employ in her assistance men, money, victuals and the use of his ports, but also his own person, if your majesty should be pleased to require it; and to desire, for the better withstanding of the common enemy the King of Spain, there might [be] a sound and perfect league between them.
To let her understand that for the better furtherance of her princely purpose to restore Don António to the kingdom of Portugal, he thought it a good course that the army by sea that she should send with him, should enter into the Straits [of Gibraltar], and there to ship such assistance as he should send; whereby the King of Spain, for the defense of those parts of Spain within the Straits, that coast upon Barbary, should be constrained to withdraw his forces out of Portugal; whereby Don António, finding the country unfurnished of foreign forces, may be better able to recover his country.
Lastly, to offer, when the 100 ships should come upon the coast of Barbary, whereby he might in his own person go into Spain, he would deliver unto her majesty 150,000 ducats. 1
    Acting through Bilqasim, al-Mansur was proposing an audacious joint military campaign against the Spanish that would put Don António on the Portuguese throne and enable him to reconquer the lost Muslim lands of Al-Andalus, in return for which he would pay Elizabeth 150,000 ducats. With his subtle but emotive emphasis on “recover” and “restore,” the sultan offered a “perfect league” between the English and the Moroccan rulers that was as much an ideological as a geographical union of the two countries. In the uncertain aftermath of the Spanish Armada’s defeat, al-Mansur was proposing an extraordinary identification of Muslim aims with Protestant ones.
    This plan was not solely of al-Mansur’s making. It was in fact part of a much larger anti-Spanish axis, developed by Elizabeth and her advisers in the immediate aftermath of their victory, that became known as the Portugal Expedition. In September 1588 plans were being drawn up to launch a bold counterstrike against Spain, with Sir Francis Drake appointed admiral and Sir John Norris as general. Elizabeth approved a military campaign to capture Lisbon, which it was hoped would trigger a popular uprising to put Don António on the throne, and to strike at Seville and establish a naval base in