The British in the Middle East – Sarah Searight – 1979 – East West publications, London and the Hague
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The British who visited the Ottoman or Safavid Empires in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries were justifiably afraid of the dreaded Turk, whose military exploits had sounded grimly in their ears for at least a hundred years before this book opens, and they were similarly wary of the Persians. Their fear was to some extent tempered by comparing the oriental despotism of Middle Eastern rulers with the politics of Renaissance Europe; to British travellers of the early seventeenth century, fear of the Spanish Inquisition was as great as capture by Barbary pirates and almost certain slavery. The organisation of the Ottoman or Safavid state was little more intolerant than that of Britain. Travellers by land in Britain ran the same risk as in the Middle East: plague and robbery were commonplace in both areas, roads were uncomfortable everywhere and eastern khans were hardly less comfortable than the average roadside inn in remote parts of Britain. In the towns where British merchants set up their factories European quarters were protected from the populace by gates and guards and their occupants managed to live isolated from much of the turbulence of the period as well as from its culture and achievements.
By the eighteenth century the luxury, ritual and grandiloquence of the Ottoman and Persian courts which had evoked such widespread admiration among the first British merchants to visit them were coming to be regarded with contempt by their successors. The anarchy into which so many Ottoman and Persian provinces now relapsed discouraged contact at a time when the gulf between the conservative despotism of the Middle East and the rational enquiring mind of Europe could still have been bridged.
The Lord of the Golden Horn
English relations with the Middle East until the mid-eighteenth century were mostly commercial. Trade with the Levant was by no means new to English merchants when the Levant Company was founded in 1581. The first recorded English voyage to the Levant was in 1458, and the great historian of sixteenth-century travel, Richard Hakluyt, tells of ‘divers tall ships’ which ‘had an ordinary and usuall trade to Sicilia, Cyprus, Chio and somewhiles to Crete, as also to Tripoli and Barutti in Syria’ in 1511 and 1512, carrying cotton and woollen manufactures. They returned with an assortment of ‘silks, chamlets, rubabe, malmesies, muskadels and other wines, sweet oyles, cotton woole, Turkie carpets, galles, pepper, cinnamon and some other spices’. Direct trade between England and the Levant lapsed in the 1560s and 1570s mainly because the war in the eastern Mediterranean between the Turks and Venice made most of the area unsafe to European shipping, but English goods still reached the Levant via Italy. In 1553 Anthony Jenkinson was given permission by the Sultan to trade throughout his dominions, but there is no evidence that he actually made use of the permission. The dangers of the trade demanded more capital and more protection than a single merchant could provide.
In the latter half of the century English access to the spices which were so much a necessity of life was threatened by Spanish annexation of Portugal and commercial quarrels with the Netherlands. By 1575, when an Englishman was first sent to Constantinople to investigate trading directly with the Ottomans, the fact that the French and Venetians were already established in the Levant proved to the hard-headed businessmen of London that trade with the dreaded Turk was not such a risk after all. The military success and legendary wealth of the Turks was bound sooner or later to attract the attention of merchants anxious to market their growing supplies of cloth.
In 1575 Joseph Clements was sent by two English merchants, Edward Osborne and Richard Staper, to Sultan Murad III. Queen Elizabeth is thought to have given her support to the venture in the hopes of obtaining Sultan’s alliance against Spain. Eighteen months after his arrival in Constantinople, Clements obtained a safe conduct for William Harborne to go to the Ottoman dominions. In 1580, after two years in Constantinople, Harborne won from the Sultan – in the face of strong French opposition – a grant of Capitulations governing relations between Turks and English trading in the Ottoman Empire, based on those granted to the French in 1535. These grants protected the foreigner from molestation of his person and goods and from imprisonment by the Turks; they exempted him from payment of taxes except ‘our lawful toll and custom’ on goods imported; and they allowed the appointment of consuls and other officials to govern the merchants, their trade and their relations with the Ottoman authorities. They were free to practice their own religion, to leave the country as and when they liked and to adjudicate in quarrels between their own nations (this, in the nineteenth century, became one of the major abuses of the Capitulations system, particularly in Egypt).
To begin with, Capitulations were renewed by each sultan on his accession, but this practice ceased after 1675, much to the relief of the ambassadors and companies concerned, who could ill afford the lavish presents and presentation ceremonies which became part of the ritual of renewal. The terms remained substantially the same throughout the life of the Levant Company. Although in theory they gave foreign merchants the maximum protection, in practice the authority of the Sultan, on which effective execution depended, was already declining and merchants found themselves dependent instead on the more temperamental authority of local governors and their officials.
In 1581 Queen Elizabeth granted Osborne, Staper and ten colleagues a seven-year monopoly in the Levant trade, thus establishing the Levant Company, otherwise known as the Turkey merchants. William Harborne was appointed the Company’s agent in Constantinople and was given extra status by appointment as the Queen’s ‘messanger, deputie and agent’ to the Ottoman court. In 1592 Elizabeth renewed the monopoly for twelve years in the form of a charter to the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of the Levant’ with fifty-three members. The Levant monopoly now covered not only the lands of the Grand Signor, as the Sultan was called, but also those of ‘Venice, including Zante, Cephalonia and Candia’.
Most of England’s overseas trade at this period was conducted corporately: merchants trading overseas were obliged by political factors and hardships to be responsible for functions usually belonging to the state – appointing ambassadors to placate foreign potentates with presents, maintaining embassies, protecting themselves against local and European piracy. At home, by operating as one unit, they were often able to stand up to state interference in their affairs. There were six new trading companies by the end of the sixteenth century, compared with two in the earlier half of the century. Each company dealt with a single area and merchants could only trade with more than one area by belonging to more than one company. The regulated company, of which the Levant Company was an example, was a looser association than joint-stock companies such as the East India Company, and each member transacted his business through his own factors and agents.
Elizabethan merchants were governed mainly by self-interest, but they firmly believed – and persuaded most of their contemporaries to believe – that commerce was the best means to promote the welfare of the community. ‘Wherever the traders thrive the public of which they are a part thrives also’, wrote Dudley North, a Levant merchant. The vital importance attached by the Elizabethans and their successors to overseas trade as the life-blood of the nation gave prestige and power to the merchant adventurers. Many were knighted or became governors of one or more of the chartered trading companies, financial advisers to the Crown, large property owners or lord mayors. Merchants such as Edward Osborne (one of the founders of the Levant Company), Thomas Glover and Thomas Roe passed through the gamut of civil life. ‘Trade is now become the Lady, which in its present Age is more courted and celebrated than in any former’, commented Roger Coke, a remark as true today as in the seventeenth century.
International trade in the seventeenth century and even in the eighteenth was mainly in luxuries. Major exports to the Levant were woollen and cotton cloths and by the end of the seventeenth century the Turkey merchants were exporting to the Levant an average of twenty thousand broadcloths a year. The Lancashire cotton industry is said to have been founded on the Levant trade; the Manchester cotton manufacturers ‘buy cotton wool from London, that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home work such stuffes, and then return it to London, where the same is vented and sold into foreign parts, who have means at far easier terms, to provide themselves with the said first materials,’ wrote Lewis Roberts, a member of the Levant Company, in 1641. Fynes Moryson in Tripoli in 1596 was offered a bed for the first time for months and could hardly wait for supper he was so anxious to make full use of this luxury: ‘but after supper all this joy vanished by an event least expected,’ he recalled in his Itinery, ‘for in this part of Asia great store of cotton growes upon stalks like Cabbages…and these sheetes being made thereof did so increase the perpetuall heat of the Countrey, now most unsupportable…as I was forced to leape out of bed and sleepe as I had formerly done’ – on the floor.
Other exports were tin, spices and lead. George Sandys, a gentleman traveller who visited the Middle East in 1609, wrote of tin exports as being ‘the most profitable, here exceedingly used and exceedingly wasted for they tinne the insides of their vessels and monethly renew it’, a practice still common today. The spice trade became the salvation of the Levant Company in spite of gloomy forebodings to the contrary. William Aldrych, a real Job’s comforter, wrote to the Company in 1599 on hearing of the arrival in Europe of Dutch ships laden with oriental spices coming by way of the Cape, that ‘this tradynge to that Endyes have clean overthroughen our dealings to Aleppo as by experience ere longe we shall see’. In fact Aleppo maintained its position as ‘the chief mart of all the East’ partly because the Levant Company found it could buy spices from East India merchants in London, re-export them to the Middle East and sell them on the Aleppo market for less than produce coming overland.
In return the Turkey merchants brought back to England raw cotton and silk currants, dyes, wines, brass and silverware – similar commodities to those mentioned earlier by Hakluyt. Most of these were paid for by exports, except for the currants from Zante where the market for English goods was limited; purchases there, and elsewhere when necessary, were usually paid for with Spanish dollars or pieces of eight, picked up from Lisbon or Cadiz in exchange for English goods. The Levant trade was always more popular with contemporary English economists than the East India trade because it seldom involved large-scale exports of bullion.
The main Levant Company factory was at Constantinople, home of the ambassador, who was responsible for relations with the Sultan and his officials. The significance of the Ottoman Empire in European politics inevitably involved the ambassador in diplomacy to some degree and it was only a matter of time before the Crown, under Charles I, took over the appointed. The Company still paid the ambassador, but they were loth to meet expenses incurred solely in state affairs; and if this included calling on the Sultan the sum could be astronomical. As a royal emissary the ambassador was obliged to live in more state than he would as the Company’s representative. The first ambassador, William Harborne, lived down by the docks in Galata, but his successor, Edward Barton, moved up the hill to Pera, to a ‘faire house within a large field and pleasant gardens compassed with a wall’ – cooler and healthier and also more expensive. Much to its dislike the Company was responsible for maintaining the house and several ambassadors complained of its preference to frugal repairs to the thought of buying another. One inhabitant of the embassy, however, was quite satisfied with her accommodation: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1717 went into rhapsodies about the embassy, in particular the view from her window which she described as the ‘most beautiful in the world’. ‘The unequal heights make it seem as large again as it is (though one of the largest cities in the world), showing an agreeable mixture of gardens, pines and cypress trees, palaces, mosques and public buildings, raised one above another, with as much beauty and appearance of symmetry as your Ladyship [the Countess of Bristol] ever saw in a cabinet adorned by the most skilful hands.’
Barton shared his hill-top residence with John Sanderson, one of the few factors who has, through his letters and autobiography, left a picture of the early days of the Levant Company. Sanderson was typical of those truculent factors the ambassador so often had to deal with: Barton later accused him of having a ‘cancar’d mind’ and certainly Sanderson’s abusive remarks justify this conclusion. He accused Barton of loose living and drunkenness, but this was complimentary compared to his remarks about poor Sir Henry Lello, ambassador when Sanderson was the factory’s treasurer and the chief target of his scorn. In a letter home the factor described Lello calling on the sultan: he ‘sat upon his horse with a ruddie downe looke as though he had been streyninge at a close-stoole; and when he came before the Grand Signor he stood with hands handsomalie before him like a modest midwife and began a trembling speech in Inglishe, as you know, sounding like the squeking of a goose divided into semiquavers.’ Lello was not the only foreign representative to be reduced to quaking before the Ottoman ruler.
Lello’s successor, Sir Thomas Glover, made full use of the embassy grounds as a haven for escaped Christian prisoners and slaves, whom he spent much of his time trying to persuade the Sultan to release. ‘That red boar of an English ambassador’, as a Turkish official described him, was one of the first ambassadors to learn the Turkish language, laws and customs.
After the middle of the seventeenth century the ambassadors nominated by the Crown were seldom merchants by profession, though none were adverse to making often substantial fortunes out of the Levant trade during their period of office. This indeed was recognised as part, or most, of the ambassador’s salary, much to the annoyance of those ambassadors whose share of the trade was diminished by war or foreign competition. During the eighteenth century diplomatic duties came more and more to take precedence over commercial duties; Edward Wortley Montagu, for instance, was wholly preoccupied with diplomatic negotiations during his embassy from 1717 to 1718. In the last years of the Company’s existence the Crown took over the payment as well as the appointment of the ambassador.
‘When the Sultan entertaineth Embassadours, he sitteth in a roome of white Marble, glittring with gold and stones, upon a low throne, spred with curious carpets…’, wrote Sanderson, ‘It is now a custome that none doe come to his presence without presents.’ Normally Europeans were not allowed to satisfy their curiosity about the Serail beyond the second court, and travellers to Constantinople would try to attach themselves to the ambassador’s retinue on one of his expensive visits. After the interview, ‘they go backwards from him and never put off their hats; the showing of the head being held by the Turk to be an opprobrius indecency’. The time was yet to come when Europeans would deliberately sweep off their hats before a sultan.
When Henry Lello was to be confirmed as ambassador in 1599, the Company made a particular effort to present gifts worthy of the special pleas they had to make to the Sultan. The Sultana received a coach worth six hundred pounds, complete with coach-man. But the most resplendent presents – quite surpassing the French and Venetian efforts – was a unique clockwork organ, presented to the Sultan on behalf of the Company by its maker, Thomas Dallam, who later described his stay in Constantinople. He was sternly lectured by the ambassador on the seriousness of his task, in particular that the organ should perform perfectly lest the Company should lose all its privileges. At the presentation ceremony Dallam was kept in an ante-room; miraculously, as soon as the Sultan arrived in front of the organ its performance began: ‘firste the clocke 22, then the chime of 16 bels went off, and played a songe of four partes. That beinge done, two personages which stood upon two corners of the second storie, holdinge silver trumpetes in their handes, did lift them to their heades, and sounded a tantarra. Then the musicke went offe and the organ played a songe of five partes twice over. In the top of the organ, being 16 foote hie, did stand a holly bushe full of blacke birds and thrushis, which at the end of the musicke did singe and shake their wynges.’
The Sultan was very excited by the instrument and asked if there was anyone in Constantinople who could play it. Immediately the grand vezir opened the door of the ante-room and produced poor Dallam before the Sultan and his assembled court – ‘the sight whereof did make me almoste to thinke I was in another worlde’, for there were more than four hundred of them, so splendidly dressed in gold and jewels that he would have fled if he could. At first he refused to play, even for the Sultan: it would mean turning his back on the Grand Signor, which he had been warned could result in instant decapitation, if not worse. He yielded, however, at the Sultan’s insistence, but remembered as he did so at least not to remove his cap. The Sultan was sitting so close to Dallam while he played that every time he moved the terrified organist ‘thoughte he had been drawinge his sorde to cut of my heade’. Delighted with the organ and its maker the Sultan tried to persuade Dallam to stay, offering him two concubines, even two virgins, as an inducement. But Dallam refused and returned to England to design more organs, including that of King’s College, Cambridge.
Dr Covell, a learned and verbose authority on the Greek Church, a collector of Turkish songs and music, amateur botanist and chaplain to the embassy from 1670 to 1677, gave an idea of the expense involved in the renewal of Capitulations in his description of the ambassador, Sir John Finch’s visit to the Sultan at Adrianople for this purpose. An immense train of attendants1 on bejewelled horses escorted Finch from Constantinople to Adrianople where the Sultan had gone for the summer. In Adrianople there was a round of visits at each of which, writes Covell, ‘from the Grand Signior himself to the Kaimacham [mayor] of Stamboul, we give presents, viz. vests of cloth, silk, cloth of gold, silver, velvet, etc., and in most places we receive vests from them’ – Covell later sold his for six and a half dollars. After a lavish meal with the vezir and his officials the ambassador was taken to his audience with the Sultan – the jewels inlaid in the furniture of the audience chamber and stitched to the Sultan’s clothes convinced Finch that ‘it was the richest room for certain in the whole world’. After four months in Adrianople the Sultan renewed the Capitulations and Sir John could return, considerably poorer, to the capital.
Even in the eighteenth century when Europeans were less in awe of the Sultan, a new ambassador, Abraham Stanyan, calling on the grand vezir for the first time, wrote that ‘the retinue and pomp with which I am bound to appear in Turkish camps are greater and more expensive than I have ever known used by ambassadors in other courts’. Ambassadors, whatever their nationality, were expected to parade with as much pomp as if they were in fact the monarchs whom they were merely representing.
Constantinople was indeed a resplendent city for the Turkey merchants to find themselves in, especially in comparison with most European cities of the period. Sandys was overjoyed at the sight as he arrived by boat, sailing up the Bosphorus from the Sea of Marmora early in the morning. ‘Than this there is hardly in nature a more delicate object,’ he recalled, ‘if beheld from the sea or adjoining mountains; the loftie and beautiful cypresse trees so inter-mixed with the buildings that is seems to present a citie in a wood to the pleased beholder’. He went on to describe this city, ‘whose seven aspiring heads (for on so many hills and no more they say it is seated) are most of them crowned with magnificent Mosques, all of white Marble, being finished on the top with gilded spires that reflect the beames they receive with marvellous splendour’, among them Santa Sophia, surrounded by the tombs of sultans and their families and haunted by beggars, and that of Sultan Ahmad, the so-called Blue Mosque, ‘most magnificent of any in Constantinople’.
The Serail was the magnet that attracted all strangers, with its ‘very fine gardens of all sorts of flowers’ (spemicems of which were brought home by amateur botanists such as George Wheler and Dr Covell) which partially hid the kiosks described as ‘rooms of fair prospect, or (as we term them) banqueting houses into which the king sometimes goes alone, but most commonly with his concubines for his recreation’. Here ‘luxury was the steward and treasure inexhaustible’. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described the Serail to the Countess of Bristol soon after her arrival – its buildings ‘all of which stone, leaded on top, with gilded turrets and spires, which look very magnificent, and indeed I believe there is no Christian king’s palace half so large’.
The great aqueduct of Constantinople also attracted the marvelling attention of English visitors. Suleyman the Magnificient had lengthened it and thereby, Sanderson wrote, ‘increased the current of water in so great abundance, as they doe serve seven hundred and forty fountaines for the publique, not reckoning those which are drawne into diverse parts to furnish the great number of Baths which serve delights’.
Most of the merchants in Constantinople commented on the famous Turkish baths, even more of a novelty in those days when bathing in England was still considered unhygienic. Turks were found to believe exactly the opposite. They built their baths near mosques because of the Islamic dictate of outer as well as inner cleanliness. According to George Wheler, ‘they have a Roome without, with a sopha round it to undress themselves; and a large square Roome beyond that, covered with a Cuppola, though which the light is let by Belglasses; and about it are many little apartments covered with small Cuppolas, much resembling that built in London; only they usually have a great Bason in the middle, filled with hot water into which they go to bathe themselves’. Some baths were segregated but in general special times or days were set aside for women. Lady Mary visited one in Sofia in 1717 on her way to Constantinople. ‘It is the women’s coffee house,’ she wrote to Lady Rich, ‘they take this diversion once a week, and stay there at least four or five hours without getting cold by immediately coming out of the hot bath into the cold room.’
One of the first Turkish baths (known as bagnios after the Venetian name) in London opened in 1679, probably the one to which Wheler referred. It was in Roman Bath Street, off Newgate Street, conveniently placed for the Turkey merchants in their various city premises. Scandal, in Congreve’s Love for Love, was probably thinking of the new bagnio when he described ‘a Beau, in a Bagnio, Cupping for a complexion, and Sweating for a shape’. It was described in 1720 as a ‘neat contrived building after the Turkish mode for that purpose; seated in a handsome yard…Much restored into for Sweating, being found very good for aches, etc., and approved of by our Physicians.’ Known as the Royal Bagnio, it consisted of one large room with a cupola and several smaller ones lined with the fashionable Dutch oriental tiles. The water was heated, it cost four shillings per person and women were allowed in on special days. There was another bath in Chancery Lane and a third, Duke’s Bagnio, in Long Acre. Turks were imported for ‘champooing’ or massage: ladies were allowed to wear masks for the ordeal if they were at all inclined to be embarrassed.
According to Peter Mundy, he and the other English merchants in Constantinople ‘passe very commodiously with pleasure, love and Amitye among themselves, wearing our own Countrie habitt, Provision, fruit and wine very good varietye and plentye’. Ambassadors were sometimes accompanied by their wives, but few of the factors were married or had their wives in Constantinople. Still, as Sandys remarked, ‘many of them will not be alone where women are so easily come by’. According to the eighteenth-century traveller, James Haynes, European merchants sometimes married local Christians in order to be able to infiltrate harems with their merchandise. During the seventeenth century, however, no official in the Levant was allowed to marry without the consent of the Company directors. In spite of Mundy’s remark about dress, many factors wore Turkish costume whenever they went about the city; in Constantinople, a more cosmopolitan city than some, few incidents were reported involving Franks (as all Europeans were known), but elsewhere – in Cairo, Aleppo or Jerusalem for instance – Europeans dressed as such were often insulted and beaten. Lady Mary certainly wore Turkish dress during her stay in the east.2
Lady Mary Worthley Montagu was one of the wives who did accompany her husband on his embassy. This paragon of English elegance and learning described in one of her letters to Alexander Pope how she spent her week in Constantinople: ‘Monday, setting of partridges – Tuesday, reading English – Wednesday, studying in the Turkish language (in which, by the way, I am already very learned), Thursday, classical authors – Friday, spent in writing – Saturday, at my needle – and Sunday, admitting of visits and hearing of music’. How busy she must have seemed to her contemporaries, particularly to the poor little French ambassadress in Constantinople, who, according to Lady Mary, had never even ventured across the Golden Horn to Stamboul and spent much of her time exclaiming with joy at the vast number of servants she had been allotted. In the summer the ambassador and his wife, in common with many other Europeans, left the heat and smells of the capital for the cool green forests called Belgrade on the slopes of the northern Bosphorus. Again to Pope she wrote, ‘ I am in the middle of a wood consisting chiefly of fruit trees, watered by a vast number of fountains…and divided into many shady walks, upon short grass…and within view of the Black Sea, from whence we perpetually enjoy the refreshment of cool breezes, that make us insensible of the heat of summer.’ ‘The Elysian fields’, she called the forests of Belgrade.
Characteristically, Lady Mary was more receptive to the customs of Muslim Turks than many of her contemporaries. She went to great pains to demonstrate the freedom Turkish women enjoyed through the protection of the harem and decided slaves were no worse treated than free servants. True to her time, she considered Islam little different from the rational deism admitted by many of her contemporaries.
It was during her years in Constantinople that she came across the practice of inoculation against smallpox, a disease she herself had contracted in 1715, and was considered to have been very disfigured by it. She had only been in Turkey a few months before she was writing to her friend Sarah Chiswell: ‘A propos of distempers I am going to tell you a thing I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it.’ Old women scratched a patient’s vein, inserting a needle with smallpox venom on the head. The patient later developed two or three days’ fever which soon disappeared leaving him immune. The practice was already known in England but only through learned reports of the Royal Society. ‘Every year thousands undergo this operation’, Lady Mary went on, ‘and the French ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the smallpox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries.’ She had her six-year-old son inoculated in Constantinople and her daughter treated during an epidemic in England in 1721. A year later the Princess of Wales followed her example. Voltaire, in England between 1726 and 1729, described the operation in one of his Lettres Philosophiques, attributing its origin to the Circassians, famous for their beauty and highly prized for Turkish harems, so that a smallpox epidemic ‘causait une notable diminution dans les serials de Perse et de Turquie’.
The Turkey merchants
The ambassador was responsible for the supervision of the Levant Company’s activities throughout the Ottoman Empire which were as important to the Company outside Constantinople as inside. Aleppo and Smyrna were the main centres of trading activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – apart from Constantinople – and the ambassador was responsible for the appointment of consuls and other officials to the factories there and elsewhere, subject to the approval of the Company in London.
Ambassadors journeying to take up their posts in the capital were allowed the extra expense of going overland, through France and Vienna to Adrianople and Constantinople. Other Company officials and factors went by sea through the hostile Mediterranean. There were three enemies: navies of European countries, depending on the state of war or peace (though at least if they were captured the unhappy merchants became honourable prisoners of war with the prospect of repatriation); Barbary pirates operating from North Africa; and English pirates using the Barbary coast as a base and when possible (but mistakes were frequent) avoiding their compatriots’ ships. William Lithgow met Turkish pirates in the course of his Peregrination and describes the fight with characteristic vigour: ‘in a furious spleene the first Hola of their courtesies was the prograce of a martiall conflict, thundring forth a terrible noise of Galley-roaring pieces. And we in a sad reply sent out a back-sounding echo of fiery-flying shots; which made an aequinox to the clouds, rebounding backward in our perturbed breasts the ambiguous sounds of feare and hope.’ Few travellers were as lucky as Veryard whose vessel was captured by Algerian pirates in 1686; after a three-day storm their Arab captors were so exhausted that the prisoners were able to escape from the hold (‘in which Region of Darkness we lay smother’d for want of Air’) and regain control.
Various attempts were made to deal with the pirates: the ambassador could ask the Sultan to intervene but he was powerless to do much as Sir Thomas Roe wrote to the Company from Constantinople in 1624; ‘the pirates of Algiers and Tunis have cast off all obedience to this empire not only upon the sea where they are masters but presuming to do many insolences even upon the land and in the best ports of the grand signior’. With the gift of Tangier to Charles II by his Portuguese bride in 1661 the suppression of the Barbary pirates became the concern of the Restoration government though of the several expeditions fitted out for this purpose none had any lasting success. In the long run the only effective way of dealing with the pirates was to ensure that every vessel venturing into the Mediterranean was fully armed and to send merchant vessels as often as possible in convoy.
Henry Teonge, a chaplain with literary fancies, was with a convoy escorting merchant vessels in 1675. The convoy was expected to attack any sail sighted, whether hostile or not; if it was friendly, as happened on one occasion, ‘our fight soone turned to a great deale of myrth’. Arriving at Tripoli (Libya) Teonge found that the English had successfully attacked the town for harbouring pirates; while his ship was blockading the port he composed the Relation of this Combatte (‘for want of a better employment before Trypolye’)…
Anchoring later in Iskenderun Teonge heard of the capture of the Bristol Merchant, with all her cargo and fourteen merchants, and of the Dartmouth pinnace which managed to get away with only two of her crew captured, who ‘are now in a gally in Famagosta…which we intend to redeeme at our returne’. Slavery was the fate faced by most prisoners of the pirates. Some, such as Edward Webbe, were rescued from the galleys by the ambassador in Constantinople. Others were less fortunate. The Camdem Wonder is a curious tale by Sir Thomas Overbury showing how the pirates at the height of their power spread out from the Mediterranean. It is the history of one John Harrison who was kidnapped by Barbary pirates from England and turned up two years later after his servant had been hanged for his murder, having spent the intervening period as a slave in Algiers and Smyrna. Joseph Pitts was another Barbary slave who contributed the most successful contemporary account of piracy in his Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahometans, with an account of the author’s having been taken by his master on the pilgrimage to Mecca; Pitts thus became the first Englishman, as far as is known, to visit Mecca and describe the hajj. In the early years of the seventeenth century there were reckoned to be some twelve thousand Christian prisoners in the hands of the pirates. A fund was set up in London after the Restoration by the Duchess of Dudley for the redemption of slaves, and the Levant Company on several occasions raised ransoms for its enslaved members or their employees.
1- Except for factors and Company officials these would have been Christians of Constantinople, such as Greeks and Armenians, as the embassy was not at this stage allowed to employ Muslims.
2- One of her costumes is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The British who visited the Ottoman or Safavid Empires in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries were justifiably afraid of the dreaded Turk, whose military exploits had sounded grimly in their ears for at least a hundred years before this book opens, and they were similarly wary of the Persians. Their fear was to some extent tempered by comparing the oriental despotism of Middle Eastern rulers with the politics of Renaissance Europe; to British travellers of the early seventeenth century, fear of the Spanish Inquisition was as great as capture by Barbary pirates and almost certain slavery. The organisation of the Ottoman or Safavid state was little more intolerant than that of Britain. Travellers by land in Britain ran the same risk as in the Middle East: plague and robbery were commonplace in both areas, roads were uncomfortable everywhere and eastern khans were hardly less comfortable than the average roadside inn in remote parts of Britain. In the towns where British merchants set up their factories European quarters were protected from the populace by gates and guards and their occupants managed to live isolated from much of the turbulence of the period as well as from its culture and achievements.
By the eighteenth century the luxury, ritual and grandiloquence of the Ottoman and Persian courts which had evoked such widespread admiration among the first British merchants to visit them were coming to be regarded with contempt by their successors. The anarchy into which so many Ottoman and Persian provinces now relapsed discouraged contact at a time when the gulf between the conservative despotism of the Middle East and the rational enquiring mind of Europe could still have been bridged.
The Lord of the Golden Horn
English relations with the Middle East until the mid-eighteenth century were mostly commercial. Trade with the Levant was by no means new to English merchants when the Levant Company was founded in 1581. The first recorded English voyage to the Levant was in 1458, and the great historian of sixteenth-century travel, Richard Hakluyt, tells of ‘divers tall ships’ which ‘had an ordinary and usuall trade to Sicilia, Cyprus, Chio and somewhiles to Crete, as also to Tripoli and Barutti in Syria’ in 1511 and 1512, carrying cotton and woollen manufactures. They returned with an assortment of ‘silks, chamlets, rubabe, malmesies, muskadels and other wines, sweet oyles, cotton woole, Turkie carpets, galles, pepper, cinnamon and some other spices’. Direct trade between England and the Levant lapsed in the 1560s and 1570s mainly because the war in the eastern Mediterranean between the Turks and Venice made most of the area unsafe to European shipping, but English goods still reached the Levant via Italy. In 1553 Anthony Jenkinson was given permission by the Sultan to trade throughout his dominions, but there is no evidence that he actually made use of the permission. The dangers of the trade demanded more capital and more protection than a single merchant could provide.
In the latter half of the century English access to the spices which were so much a necessity of life was threatened by Spanish annexation of Portugal and commercial quarrels with the Netherlands. By 1575, when an Englishman was first sent to Constantinople to investigate trading directly with the Ottomans, the fact that the French and Venetians were already established in the Levant proved to the hard-headed businessmen of London that trade with the dreaded Turk was not such a risk after all. The military success and legendary wealth of the Turks was bound sooner or later to attract the attention of merchants anxious to market their growing supplies of cloth.
In 1575 Joseph Clements was sent by two English merchants, Edward Osborne and Richard Staper, to Sultan Murad III. Queen Elizabeth is thought to have given her support to the venture in the hopes of obtaining Sultan’s alliance against Spain. Eighteen months after his arrival in Constantinople, Clements obtained a safe conduct for William Harborne to go to the Ottoman dominions. In 1580, after two years in Constantinople, Harborne won from the Sultan – in the face of strong French opposition – a grant of Capitulations governing relations between Turks and English trading in the Ottoman Empire, based on those granted to the French in 1535. These grants protected the foreigner from molestation of his person and goods and from imprisonment by the Turks; they exempted him from payment of taxes except ‘our lawful toll and custom’ on goods imported; and they allowed the appointment of consuls and other officials to govern the merchants, their trade and their relations with the Ottoman authorities. They were free to practice their own religion, to leave the country as and when they liked and to adjudicate in quarrels between their own nations (this, in the nineteenth century, became one of the major abuses of the Capitulations system, particularly in Egypt).
To begin with, Capitulations were renewed by each sultan on his accession, but this practice ceased after 1675, much to the relief of the ambassadors and companies concerned, who could ill afford the lavish presents and presentation ceremonies which became part of the ritual of renewal. The terms remained substantially the same throughout the life of the Levant Company. Although in theory they gave foreign merchants the maximum protection, in practice the authority of the Sultan, on which effective execution depended, was already declining and merchants found themselves dependent instead on the more temperamental authority of local governors and their officials.
In 1581 Queen Elizabeth granted Osborne, Staper and ten colleagues a seven-year monopoly in the Levant trade, thus establishing the Levant Company, otherwise known as the Turkey merchants. William Harborne was appointed the Company’s agent in Constantinople and was given extra status by appointment as the Queen’s ‘messanger, deputie and agent’ to the Ottoman court. In 1592 Elizabeth renewed the monopoly for twelve years in the form of a charter to the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of the Levant’ with fifty-three members. The Levant monopoly now covered not only the lands of the Grand Signor, as the Sultan was called, but also those of ‘Venice, including Zante, Cephalonia and Candia’.
Most of England’s overseas trade at this period was conducted corporately: merchants trading overseas were obliged by political factors and hardships to be responsible for functions usually belonging to the state – appointing ambassadors to placate foreign potentates with presents, maintaining embassies, protecting themselves against local and European piracy. At home, by operating as one unit, they were often able to stand up to state interference in their affairs. There were six new trading companies by the end of the sixteenth century, compared with two in the earlier half of the century. Each company dealt with a single area and merchants could only trade with more than one area by belonging to more than one company. The regulated company, of which the Levant Company was an example, was a looser association than joint-stock companies such as the East India Company, and each member transacted his business through his own factors and agents.
Elizabethan merchants were governed mainly by self-interest, but they firmly believed – and persuaded most of their contemporaries to believe – that commerce was the best means to promote the welfare of the community. ‘Wherever the traders thrive the public of which they are a part thrives also’, wrote Dudley North, a Levant merchant. The vital importance attached by the Elizabethans and their successors to overseas trade as the life-blood of the nation gave prestige and power to the merchant adventurers. Many were knighted or became governors of one or more of the chartered trading companies, financial advisers to the Crown, large property owners or lord mayors. Merchants such as Edward Osborne (one of the founders of the Levant Company), Thomas Glover and Thomas Roe passed through the gamut of civil life. ‘Trade is now become the Lady, which in its present Age is more courted and celebrated than in any former’, commented Roger Coke, a remark as true today as in the seventeenth century.
International trade in the seventeenth century and even in the eighteenth was mainly in luxuries. Major exports to the Levant were woollen and cotton cloths and by the end of the seventeenth century the Turkey merchants were exporting to the Levant an average of twenty thousand broadcloths a year. The Lancashire cotton industry is said to have been founded on the Levant trade; the Manchester cotton manufacturers ‘buy cotton wool from London, that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home work such stuffes, and then return it to London, where the same is vented and sold into foreign parts, who have means at far easier terms, to provide themselves with the said first materials,’ wrote Lewis Roberts, a member of the Levant Company, in 1641. Fynes Moryson in Tripoli in 1596 was offered a bed for the first time for months and could hardly wait for supper he was so anxious to make full use of this luxury: ‘but after supper all this joy vanished by an event least expected,’ he recalled in his Itinery, ‘for in this part of Asia great store of cotton growes upon stalks like Cabbages…and these sheetes being made thereof did so increase the perpetuall heat of the Countrey, now most unsupportable…as I was forced to leape out of bed and sleepe as I had formerly done’ – on the floor.
Other exports were tin, spices and lead. George Sandys, a gentleman traveller who visited the Middle East in 1609, wrote of tin exports as being ‘the most profitable, here exceedingly used and exceedingly wasted for they tinne the insides of their vessels and monethly renew it’, a practice still common today. The spice trade became the salvation of the Levant Company in spite of gloomy forebodings to the contrary. William Aldrych, a real Job’s comforter, wrote to the Company in 1599 on hearing of the arrival in Europe of Dutch ships laden with oriental spices coming by way of the Cape, that ‘this tradynge to that Endyes have clean overthroughen our dealings to Aleppo as by experience ere longe we shall see’. In fact Aleppo maintained its position as ‘the chief mart of all the East’ partly because the Levant Company found it could buy spices from East India merchants in London, re-export them to the Middle East and sell them on the Aleppo market for less than produce coming overland.
In return the Turkey merchants brought back to England raw cotton and silk currants, dyes, wines, brass and silverware – similar commodities to those mentioned earlier by Hakluyt. Most of these were paid for by exports, except for the currants from Zante where the market for English goods was limited; purchases there, and elsewhere when necessary, were usually paid for with Spanish dollars or pieces of eight, picked up from Lisbon or Cadiz in exchange for English goods. The Levant trade was always more popular with contemporary English economists than the East India trade because it seldom involved large-scale exports of bullion.
The main Levant Company factory was at Constantinople, home of the ambassador, who was responsible for relations with the Sultan and his officials. The significance of the Ottoman Empire in European politics inevitably involved the ambassador in diplomacy to some degree and it was only a matter of time before the Crown, under Charles I, took over the appointed. The Company still paid the ambassador, but they were loth to meet expenses incurred solely in state affairs; and if this included calling on the Sultan the sum could be astronomical. As a royal emissary the ambassador was obliged to live in more state than he would as the Company’s representative. The first ambassador, William Harborne, lived down by the docks in Galata, but his successor, Edward Barton, moved up the hill to Pera, to a ‘faire house within a large field and pleasant gardens compassed with a wall’ – cooler and healthier and also more expensive. Much to its dislike the Company was responsible for maintaining the house and several ambassadors complained of its preference to frugal repairs to the thought of buying another. One inhabitant of the embassy, however, was quite satisfied with her accommodation: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1717 went into rhapsodies about the embassy, in particular the view from her window which she described as the ‘most beautiful in the world’. ‘The unequal heights make it seem as large again as it is (though one of the largest cities in the world), showing an agreeable mixture of gardens, pines and cypress trees, palaces, mosques and public buildings, raised one above another, with as much beauty and appearance of symmetry as your Ladyship [the Countess of Bristol] ever saw in a cabinet adorned by the most skilful hands.’
Barton shared his hill-top residence with John Sanderson, one of the few factors who has, through his letters and autobiography, left a picture of the early days of the Levant Company. Sanderson was typical of those truculent factors the ambassador so often had to deal with: Barton later accused him of having a ‘cancar’d mind’ and certainly Sanderson’s abusive remarks justify this conclusion. He accused Barton of loose living and drunkenness, but this was complimentary compared to his remarks about poor Sir Henry Lello, ambassador when Sanderson was the factory’s treasurer and the chief target of his scorn. In a letter home the factor described Lello calling on the sultan: he ‘sat upon his horse with a ruddie downe looke as though he had been streyninge at a close-stoole; and when he came before the Grand Signor he stood with hands handsomalie before him like a modest midwife and began a trembling speech in Inglishe, as you know, sounding like the squeking of a goose divided into semiquavers.’ Lello was not the only foreign representative to be reduced to quaking before the Ottoman ruler.
Lello’s successor, Sir Thomas Glover, made full use of the embassy grounds as a haven for escaped Christian prisoners and slaves, whom he spent much of his time trying to persuade the Sultan to release. ‘That red boar of an English ambassador’, as a Turkish official described him, was one of the first ambassadors to learn the Turkish language, laws and customs.
After the middle of the seventeenth century the ambassadors nominated by the Crown were seldom merchants by profession, though none were adverse to making often substantial fortunes out of the Levant trade during their period of office. This indeed was recognised as part, or most, of the ambassador’s salary, much to the annoyance of those ambassadors whose share of the trade was diminished by war or foreign competition. During the eighteenth century diplomatic duties came more and more to take precedence over commercial duties; Edward Wortley Montagu, for instance, was wholly preoccupied with diplomatic negotiations during his embassy from 1717 to 1718. In the last years of the Company’s existence the Crown took over the payment as well as the appointment of the ambassador.
‘When the Sultan entertaineth Embassadours, he sitteth in a roome of white Marble, glittring with gold and stones, upon a low throne, spred with curious carpets…’, wrote Sanderson, ‘It is now a custome that none doe come to his presence without presents.’ Normally Europeans were not allowed to satisfy their curiosity about the Serail beyond the second court, and travellers to Constantinople would try to attach themselves to the ambassador’s retinue on one of his expensive visits. After the interview, ‘they go backwards from him and never put off their hats; the showing of the head being held by the Turk to be an opprobrius indecency’. The time was yet to come when Europeans would deliberately sweep off their hats before a sultan.
When Henry Lello was to be confirmed as ambassador in 1599, the Company made a particular effort to present gifts worthy of the special pleas they had to make to the Sultan. The Sultana received a coach worth six hundred pounds, complete with coach-man. But the most resplendent presents – quite surpassing the French and Venetian efforts – was a unique clockwork organ, presented to the Sultan on behalf of the Company by its maker, Thomas Dallam, who later described his stay in Constantinople. He was sternly lectured by the ambassador on the seriousness of his task, in particular that the organ should perform perfectly lest the Company should lose all its privileges. At the presentation ceremony Dallam was kept in an ante-room; miraculously, as soon as the Sultan arrived in front of the organ its performance began: ‘firste the clocke 22, then the chime of 16 bels went off, and played a songe of four partes. That beinge done, two personages which stood upon two corners of the second storie, holdinge silver trumpetes in their handes, did lift them to their heades, and sounded a tantarra. Then the musicke went offe and the organ played a songe of five partes twice over. In the top of the organ, being 16 foote hie, did stand a holly bushe full of blacke birds and thrushis, which at the end of the musicke did singe and shake their wynges.’
The Sultan was very excited by the instrument and asked if there was anyone in Constantinople who could play it. Immediately the grand vezir opened the door of the ante-room and produced poor Dallam before the Sultan and his assembled court – ‘the sight whereof did make me almoste to thinke I was in another worlde’, for there were more than four hundred of them, so splendidly dressed in gold and jewels that he would have fled if he could. At first he refused to play, even for the Sultan: it would mean turning his back on the Grand Signor, which he had been warned could result in instant decapitation, if not worse. He yielded, however, at the Sultan’s insistence, but remembered as he did so at least not to remove his cap. The Sultan was sitting so close to Dallam while he played that every time he moved the terrified organist ‘thoughte he had been drawinge his sorde to cut of my heade’. Delighted with the organ and its maker the Sultan tried to persuade Dallam to stay, offering him two concubines, even two virgins, as an inducement. But Dallam refused and returned to England to design more organs, including that of King’s College, Cambridge.
Dr Covell, a learned and verbose authority on the Greek Church, a collector of Turkish songs and music, amateur botanist and chaplain to the embassy from 1670 to 1677, gave an idea of the expense involved in the renewal of Capitulations in his description of the ambassador, Sir John Finch’s visit to the Sultan at Adrianople for this purpose. An immense train of attendants1 on bejewelled horses escorted Finch from Constantinople to Adrianople where the Sultan had gone for the summer. In Adrianople there was a round of visits at each of which, writes Covell, ‘from the Grand Signior himself to the Kaimacham [mayor] of Stamboul, we give presents, viz. vests of cloth, silk, cloth of gold, silver, velvet, etc., and in most places we receive vests from them’ – Covell later sold his for six and a half dollars. After a lavish meal with the vezir and his officials the ambassador was taken to his audience with the Sultan – the jewels inlaid in the furniture of the audience chamber and stitched to the Sultan’s clothes convinced Finch that ‘it was the richest room for certain in the whole world’. After four months in Adrianople the Sultan renewed the Capitulations and Sir John could return, considerably poorer, to the capital.
Even in the eighteenth century when Europeans were less in awe of the Sultan, a new ambassador, Abraham Stanyan, calling on the grand vezir for the first time, wrote that ‘the retinue and pomp with which I am bound to appear in Turkish camps are greater and more expensive than I have ever known used by ambassadors in other courts’. Ambassadors, whatever their nationality, were expected to parade with as much pomp as if they were in fact the monarchs whom they were merely representing.
Constantinople was indeed a resplendent city for the Turkey merchants to find themselves in, especially in comparison with most European cities of the period. Sandys was overjoyed at the sight as he arrived by boat, sailing up the Bosphorus from the Sea of Marmora early in the morning. ‘Than this there is hardly in nature a more delicate object,’ he recalled, ‘if beheld from the sea or adjoining mountains; the loftie and beautiful cypresse trees so inter-mixed with the buildings that is seems to present a citie in a wood to the pleased beholder’. He went on to describe this city, ‘whose seven aspiring heads (for on so many hills and no more they say it is seated) are most of them crowned with magnificent Mosques, all of white Marble, being finished on the top with gilded spires that reflect the beames they receive with marvellous splendour’, among them Santa Sophia, surrounded by the tombs of sultans and their families and haunted by beggars, and that of Sultan Ahmad, the so-called Blue Mosque, ‘most magnificent of any in Constantinople’.
The Serail was the magnet that attracted all strangers, with its ‘very fine gardens of all sorts of flowers’ (spemicems of which were brought home by amateur botanists such as George Wheler and Dr Covell) which partially hid the kiosks described as ‘rooms of fair prospect, or (as we term them) banqueting houses into which the king sometimes goes alone, but most commonly with his concubines for his recreation’. Here ‘luxury was the steward and treasure inexhaustible’. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described the Serail to the Countess of Bristol soon after her arrival – its buildings ‘all of which stone, leaded on top, with gilded turrets and spires, which look very magnificent, and indeed I believe there is no Christian king’s palace half so large’.
The great aqueduct of Constantinople also attracted the marvelling attention of English visitors. Suleyman the Magnificient had lengthened it and thereby, Sanderson wrote, ‘increased the current of water in so great abundance, as they doe serve seven hundred and forty fountaines for the publique, not reckoning those which are drawne into diverse parts to furnish the great number of Baths which serve delights’.
Most of the merchants in Constantinople commented on the famous Turkish baths, even more of a novelty in those days when bathing in England was still considered unhygienic. Turks were found to believe exactly the opposite. They built their baths near mosques because of the Islamic dictate of outer as well as inner cleanliness. According to George Wheler, ‘they have a Roome without, with a sopha round it to undress themselves; and a large square Roome beyond that, covered with a Cuppola, though which the light is let by Belglasses; and about it are many little apartments covered with small Cuppolas, much resembling that built in London; only they usually have a great Bason in the middle, filled with hot water into which they go to bathe themselves’. Some baths were segregated but in general special times or days were set aside for women. Lady Mary visited one in Sofia in 1717 on her way to Constantinople. ‘It is the women’s coffee house,’ she wrote to Lady Rich, ‘they take this diversion once a week, and stay there at least four or five hours without getting cold by immediately coming out of the hot bath into the cold room.’
One of the first Turkish baths (known as bagnios after the Venetian name) in London opened in 1679, probably the one to which Wheler referred. It was in Roman Bath Street, off Newgate Street, conveniently placed for the Turkey merchants in their various city premises. Scandal, in Congreve’s Love for Love, was probably thinking of the new bagnio when he described ‘a Beau, in a Bagnio, Cupping for a complexion, and Sweating for a shape’. It was described in 1720 as a ‘neat contrived building after the Turkish mode for that purpose; seated in a handsome yard…Much restored into for Sweating, being found very good for aches, etc., and approved of by our Physicians.’ Known as the Royal Bagnio, it consisted of one large room with a cupola and several smaller ones lined with the fashionable Dutch oriental tiles. The water was heated, it cost four shillings per person and women were allowed in on special days. There was another bath in Chancery Lane and a third, Duke’s Bagnio, in Long Acre. Turks were imported for ‘champooing’ or massage: ladies were allowed to wear masks for the ordeal if they were at all inclined to be embarrassed.
According to Peter Mundy, he and the other English merchants in Constantinople ‘passe very commodiously with pleasure, love and Amitye among themselves, wearing our own Countrie habitt, Provision, fruit and wine very good varietye and plentye’. Ambassadors were sometimes accompanied by their wives, but few of the factors were married or had their wives in Constantinople. Still, as Sandys remarked, ‘many of them will not be alone where women are so easily come by’. According to the eighteenth-century traveller, James Haynes, European merchants sometimes married local Christians in order to be able to infiltrate harems with their merchandise. During the seventeenth century, however, no official in the Levant was allowed to marry without the consent of the Company directors. In spite of Mundy’s remark about dress, many factors wore Turkish costume whenever they went about the city; in Constantinople, a more cosmopolitan city than some, few incidents were reported involving Franks (as all Europeans were known), but elsewhere – in Cairo, Aleppo or Jerusalem for instance – Europeans dressed as such were often insulted and beaten. Lady Mary certainly wore Turkish dress during her stay in the east.2
Lady Mary Worthley Montagu was one of the wives who did accompany her husband on his embassy. This paragon of English elegance and learning described in one of her letters to Alexander Pope how she spent her week in Constantinople: ‘Monday, setting of partridges – Tuesday, reading English – Wednesday, studying in the Turkish language (in which, by the way, I am already very learned), Thursday, classical authors – Friday, spent in writing – Saturday, at my needle – and Sunday, admitting of visits and hearing of music’. How busy she must have seemed to her contemporaries, particularly to the poor little French ambassadress in Constantinople, who, according to Lady Mary, had never even ventured across the Golden Horn to Stamboul and spent much of her time exclaiming with joy at the vast number of servants she had been allotted. In the summer the ambassador and his wife, in common with many other Europeans, left the heat and smells of the capital for the cool green forests called Belgrade on the slopes of the northern Bosphorus. Again to Pope she wrote, ‘ I am in the middle of a wood consisting chiefly of fruit trees, watered by a vast number of fountains…and divided into many shady walks, upon short grass…and within view of the Black Sea, from whence we perpetually enjoy the refreshment of cool breezes, that make us insensible of the heat of summer.’ ‘The Elysian fields’, she called the forests of Belgrade.
Characteristically, Lady Mary was more receptive to the customs of Muslim Turks than many of her contemporaries. She went to great pains to demonstrate the freedom Turkish women enjoyed through the protection of the harem and decided slaves were no worse treated than free servants. True to her time, she considered Islam little different from the rational deism admitted by many of her contemporaries.
It was during her years in Constantinople that she came across the practice of inoculation against smallpox, a disease she herself had contracted in 1715, and was considered to have been very disfigured by it. She had only been in Turkey a few months before she was writing to her friend Sarah Chiswell: ‘A propos of distempers I am going to tell you a thing I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it.’ Old women scratched a patient’s vein, inserting a needle with smallpox venom on the head. The patient later developed two or three days’ fever which soon disappeared leaving him immune. The practice was already known in England but only through learned reports of the Royal Society. ‘Every year thousands undergo this operation’, Lady Mary went on, ‘and the French ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the smallpox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries.’ She had her six-year-old son inoculated in Constantinople and her daughter treated during an epidemic in England in 1721. A year later the Princess of Wales followed her example. Voltaire, in England between 1726 and 1729, described the operation in one of his Lettres Philosophiques, attributing its origin to the Circassians, famous for their beauty and highly prized for Turkish harems, so that a smallpox epidemic ‘causait une notable diminution dans les serials de Perse et de Turquie’.
The Turkey merchants
The ambassador was responsible for the supervision of the Levant Company’s activities throughout the Ottoman Empire which were as important to the Company outside Constantinople as inside. Aleppo and Smyrna were the main centres of trading activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – apart from Constantinople – and the ambassador was responsible for the appointment of consuls and other officials to the factories there and elsewhere, subject to the approval of the Company in London.
Ambassadors journeying to take up their posts in the capital were allowed the extra expense of going overland, through France and Vienna to Adrianople and Constantinople. Other Company officials and factors went by sea through the hostile Mediterranean. There were three enemies: navies of European countries, depending on the state of war or peace (though at least if they were captured the unhappy merchants became honourable prisoners of war with the prospect of repatriation); Barbary pirates operating from North Africa; and English pirates using the Barbary coast as a base and when possible (but mistakes were frequent) avoiding their compatriots’ ships. William Lithgow met Turkish pirates in the course of his Peregrination and describes the fight with characteristic vigour: ‘in a furious spleene the first Hola of their courtesies was the prograce of a martiall conflict, thundring forth a terrible noise of Galley-roaring pieces. And we in a sad reply sent out a back-sounding echo of fiery-flying shots; which made an aequinox to the clouds, rebounding backward in our perturbed breasts the ambiguous sounds of feare and hope.’ Few travellers were as lucky as Veryard whose vessel was captured by Algerian pirates in 1686; after a three-day storm their Arab captors were so exhausted that the prisoners were able to escape from the hold (‘in which Region of Darkness we lay smother’d for want of Air’) and regain control.
Various attempts were made to deal with the pirates: the ambassador could ask the Sultan to intervene but he was powerless to do much as Sir Thomas Roe wrote to the Company from Constantinople in 1624; ‘the pirates of Algiers and Tunis have cast off all obedience to this empire not only upon the sea where they are masters but presuming to do many insolences even upon the land and in the best ports of the grand signior’. With the gift of Tangier to Charles II by his Portuguese bride in 1661 the suppression of the Barbary pirates became the concern of the Restoration government though of the several expeditions fitted out for this purpose none had any lasting success. In the long run the only effective way of dealing with the pirates was to ensure that every vessel venturing into the Mediterranean was fully armed and to send merchant vessels as often as possible in convoy.
Henry Teonge, a chaplain with literary fancies, was with a convoy escorting merchant vessels in 1675. The convoy was expected to attack any sail sighted, whether hostile or not; if it was friendly, as happened on one occasion, ‘our fight soone turned to a great deale of myrth’. Arriving at Tripoli (Libya) Teonge found that the English had successfully attacked the town for harbouring pirates; while his ship was blockading the port he composed the Relation of this Combatte (‘for want of a better employment before Trypolye’)…
Anchoring later in Iskenderun Teonge heard of the capture of the Bristol Merchant, with all her cargo and fourteen merchants, and of the Dartmouth pinnace which managed to get away with only two of her crew captured, who ‘are now in a gally in Famagosta…which we intend to redeeme at our returne’. Slavery was the fate faced by most prisoners of the pirates. Some, such as Edward Webbe, were rescued from the galleys by the ambassador in Constantinople. Others were less fortunate. The Camdem Wonder is a curious tale by Sir Thomas Overbury showing how the pirates at the height of their power spread out from the Mediterranean. It is the history of one John Harrison who was kidnapped by Barbary pirates from England and turned up two years later after his servant had been hanged for his murder, having spent the intervening period as a slave in Algiers and Smyrna. Joseph Pitts was another Barbary slave who contributed the most successful contemporary account of piracy in his Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahometans, with an account of the author’s having been taken by his master on the pilgrimage to Mecca; Pitts thus became the first Englishman, as far as is known, to visit Mecca and describe the hajj. In the early years of the seventeenth century there were reckoned to be some twelve thousand Christian prisoners in the hands of the pirates. A fund was set up in London after the Restoration by the Duchess of Dudley for the redemption of slaves, and the Levant Company on several occasions raised ransoms for its enslaved members or their employees.
1- Except for factors and Company officials these would have been Christians of Constantinople, such as Greeks and Armenians, as the embassy was not at this stage allowed to employ Muslims.
2- One of her costumes is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.