Six Months in the City

On the 15th August 1600 a sixteen-man Embassy from an Arab country entered London for what would end up being a six-month stay. They had travelled from Morocco on a ship known as The Eagle and had managed to avoid capture by the Spanish fleet before landing in England at Dover on 8th August. Of the earlier embassies from Moroccan Sultan Ahmad Al-Mansur Al-Sa’di, which had been sent in 1577 and 1589, we know little more than the date: this was to be the first significant encounter between Arabs and English on northern soil rather than in the Mediterranean. It was led by Al-Mansur’s Secretary, ‘Abd-al-Wahid Bin Mas’ud Bin Muhammad ‘Anuri.

The Arab Embassy was lodged in the commercial heart of the City of London near the Royal Exchange, then as now located between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street, in the house of a rich City Merchant and politician, Anthony Ratclyffe, who had been elected as an Alderman of the City in 1586. His house had been chosen by the Lord Mayor of London as a suitable location, and would play host to the French Ambassador the following year. The involvement of ‘Sir Thomas Gerard, Knight Marshall, divers Gentlemen, and the chiefe Barbary merchants’ in conveying the Embassy to London, indicates that at least to some of its English sponsors, its objectives were commercial, aimed at improving English access to the rich markets of North Africa. None of those merchants, however, were willing to pay the costs of the Embassy, and these ended up being defrayed by the Crown.

In the beginning, the encounter appears to have gone well. From their vantage point in the heart of commercial London, the Embassy had travelled successively along the Thames for audience at those centres of royal power at Nonsuch Palace near Epsom (15 August), where a contemporary letter records ‘a royal preparation, in the Manner of his receiving; rich Hangings and Furnitures sent for from Hampton Court; the guard very strong, in their rich coates; the Pensioners with their Axes; the Lords of the Order with their Collars; a full Court of Lords and Ladies’. The Arabs were received again at Otelands Palace near Weybridge (10 September), and finally at Whitehall Palace on 17 November 1600. An audience on the latter day was a particular sign of royal favour as it was the date on which Elizabeth I celebrated her accession to the throne, and ‘a speciall place was builded onely for them neere to the Parke doore, to beholde that dayes triumph’. Thus it was that they were granted a privileged view of the festivities, held in what is now St. James’s Park. But an anonymous contemporary text describing the Embassy and using as its unnamed sources some ‘English merchants’, presumably those with close involvement in its proceedings, gives us a glimpse of the suspicions, misunderstandings and, at times, incomprehension of at least some Englishmen at their encounter with Arabs and Muslims. Parallels between the accusations made there, with those of an early 21st century fearful of extremist political Islam, are crude, but show the potential for tension when such cultural encounters are not accompanied by a generosity of spirit and an imaginative attempt to see beyond the boundaries of one’s own experience.

Many of the merchants were unaware of the true, secret purpose of the Embassy, which was to negotiate an alliance between England and Barbary against the Spanish, a purpose only recorded in state papers. But they appear to have seen through the official pretexts given for it, that the King of Barbary sought the assistance of Elizabeth I’s navy, ‘chiefly to secure his treasure from the parts of Guynea’, and having done so, turned to speculation about the true nature of ‘Abd-al-Wahid’s activity in London. This they interpreted, unfairly, in the terms best known to them, as unwelcome market research, verging on commercial espionage, which would only harm or ‘damnifie’ their own business. They saw attempts by the Arabs to understand better the local London market – its products, its prices, and its ‘wayghts and measures’ – as dishonourable, the behaviour of ‘spies’ not of ‘honorable Ambassadors’.

Espionage was not the only accusation made of the Arabs; their attempts to follow the precepts of Islam in a foreign country were met with suspicion and incomprehension. But does more lie behind the accusation that ‘such was their inveterate hate unto our Christian Religion… as they could not endure to give any manner of almes, charitie of reliefe, either in moneie or broken meate, unto any English poore’? At least two of the Arab members of the Embassy, Al Hajji Massa, and Al Hajji Bahamet, had previously taken their religious duties sufficiently seriously to perform the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca, thus earning themselves the honorific title ‘Al Hajji’. Whilst in London at least one of the party was responsible for killing ‘all their owne meat within the house’, certainly a reference to their desire to eat ritually-clean halal meat which would otherwise have been unavailable in Elizabethan London.

Long-standing prejudices on either side about the nature of the religious practice of the other might account for why frictions were felt in precisely those areas – of religious duties towards the poor, attitudes toward ritual purity, the use of prayer beads, and the direction of prayer towards ‘saints’ – where either Islam or Christianity intervened. But the exact shape of the accusation, that the Arabs were uncharitable, perhaps says more about the self-image of the English merchants than it does about what ‘Abd-al-Wahid and his men had either done or omitted to do. It is at the very least a peculiar complaint to make of those who seem to have been devout Muslims, given their duty to practise zakat (alms), although directing that charity at non-Muslims was optional, not obligatory. As just one example, Alderman Ratcliffe, in whose house the Embassy was lodged, had not only reached the pinnacle of a successful career which saw him elected for 1577-8 as Master of the Merchant Taylors, one of the richest commercial guilds in London, but had also attempted to display himself as the very pattern of a Christian businessman, with charitable benefactions of a religious nature to almshouses in 1587, 1589, and 1593. ‘Abd-al-Wahid had either failed to recognise that such benefactions were, in the eyes of English merchants, the appropriate way to behave, or, we might speculate, had he refused a suggestion from one of his hosts to follow his charitable lead? So, rather than following the ideal of Elizabethan charity espoused by these merchants, the Arabs had committed the supposed error of selling their surplus meat ‘unto such poore as would give most for them’.

We might interpret another of the observations made of the Arabs in a similar light: the accusation that in their religious practice the Arabs ‘use beades, and pray to saints’. This is less a misunderstanding of Islamic practice – since the use of misbaha beads is a regular feature of Muslim prayer, and even the reference to ‘saints’ might correctly reflect the existence of Sufi influences on practice in parts of Morocco – than it is an attempt to involve the Arabs in the religious controversies of the Elizabethan age, when beads, or rosaries, and the cult of the saints, were practices associated with the one group seen as most subversive of the peace of the Protestant state: the Catholics. Only twelve years after the Spanish Armada had sailed against England in an attempt to overthrow a Protestant monarch, even hints of Catholicism had a powerful charge to them. In attempting to blacken the image of the Arabs, it was a sly insinuation whose force was only exceeded by the implication – on which the narrator of this text is careful to hedge his bets with the phrase ‘it was supposed’ – that the Arabs had ‘poysoned their Interpretor, being borne in Granado, because he commended the estate and bountie of England’. Poisoning – a practice rife among villains in contemporary Renaissance tragedy – was a particularly unpleasant accusation to make, with all its associations in contemporary literature of surreptitious, sneaky and dishonourable killing. And in the supposed act of killing, it had been the very individual responsible for trying to mediate between Arab and Englishman, the interpreter, who had come off worse. His crime was in effect to have pursued comparisons between Morocco and England, and to have praised the latter.

Of the real personalities of the Embassy little emerges from texts written by Englishmen. One might ask whether there was any other way of trying to understand ‘Abd-al-Wahid and his men. It happens that an oil on oak painting of ‘Abd-al-Wahid himself exists, now at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford, and last displayed in London during the Tate’s East-West exhibition in 2006. Historian Lisa Jardine argued that he may have commissioned the painting himself and, if so, this suggests that he at least approved the image, depicting an individual with a powerful and piercing gaze, dressed in a white turban, and a rich dark cloak, in which our gaze is drawn to the Moroccan simcha sword, its golden hilt and beautifully-detailed sword belt with tassels of golden thread suggesting a ceremonial use. But the Sa’di dynasty of which ‘Abd-al-Wahid was a servant seems to have had little interest in figurative representations, in line with the long-standing Islamic tradition that preferred non-figurative art. The painting therefore seems to be more of a negotiation between subject and artist to produce an image conveying to an English audience the majesty of the dynasty he served than a representation of his self-image.

Another clue that the audience for the painting was to be found in London, and that it was not an image which ‘Abd-al-Wahid had commissioned for himself, comes in the painted inscription commemorating its subject as “1600, ‘Abd-al-Wahid, Ambassador of the King of Barbary sent to England. Aged 42”. Not only is it in Latin – a language unlikely to have much meaning or resonance to an Arabic-speaking diplomat – but also, by locating the Ambassador’s origin as ‘Barbary’ – a vague geographical term used by Europeans but not by the subjects of the Sa’di dynasty – it presupposes an English audience. The difference is not just one of name, but of political ideology. Far from seeing himself as the ruler of a particular territory, as implied in the phrase ‘King of Barbary’, ‘Abd-al-Wahid’s master Ahmad Al-Mansur adopted a series of dynastic titles, including that of Caliph, which made universalist claims to rule, and did not restrict himself to the state he actually ruled, roughly corresponding to modern Morocco, with its capital at Marrakesh.

So, was the cultural misunderstanding all in one direction, with Englishmen misunderstanding Arabs and, worse, making accusations of violence and espionage against them, or were the misunderstandings mutual? As Bernard Harris long ago observed in an essay comparing the figure of ‘Abd-al-Wahid to Shakespeare’s Othello, the account of the audience of the Arabs with the Queen produced by Rowland White, the letter writer present at the courts of Elizabeth and James I, is curious in making no mention of such customary gifts given as a diplomatic courtesy from one monarch to another. Certainly the Embassy was remembered after Elizabeth’s death – albeit once again by a prominent English merchant perhaps picking up on the unfavourable impressions of merchants directly involved in the Embassy – as one where the Ambassadors displayed rank ingratitude: ‘in the late Queen’s time there came an Ambassador from the King of Barbary, to whom she gave maintenance all the time he was here, and 100 l. at his departure, and yet he gave nothing here’. Perhaps ‘Abd-al-Wahid and his men were unaware of European diplomatic customs, or perhaps they were simply temperamentally objectionable. It is easy to allow our liberal inclinations to run riot in criticism of our forebears: we underestimate the historical impact of rebarbative personalities at our peril.