In 1604-05, the English diplomat Thomas Smythe (c. 1558-1625) undertook an embassy to the Russian tsar Boris Godunov to acquire trading privileges for the English.^[1] The embassy didn’t go anywhere near as smoothly as Smythe had hoped, however. It coincided with a tumultuous period of Russian history now known as the Time of Troubles (1598-1613) which featured a series of political assassinations, including the assassination of the tsar himself.^[2] The events of Smythe’s embassy, and the political contexts in which it took place, are described in Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in Rushia (London, 1605).^[3] This account is anonymous but may have been composed by (or for) the lawyer and poetic theorist William Scott.^[4] As I have argued elsewhere, Smithes voiage offers an especially vivid illustration of the relationship of travel writing and humanist learning, and reflects on questions of accident and the accidental in ways that have implications for our understanding not only of early modern diplomacy but also of aspects of rhetoric and poetics (and, for that matter, of logic and metaphysics).^[5] In claiming that Russian politics were characterised by tyranny, Smithes voiage reinforces the images and ideas of Russia which circulated in early modern England more broadly, in travel writing and diplomatic correspondence as well as in works of poetry and drama.^[6]

Given its focus on an English embassy to Russia, Smithes voiage might seem somewhat tangential to this project’s concern with England’s early encounters with the Islamic worlds. But the Islamic worlds, particularly the Ottoman Empire, were central to Smythe’s embassy. As Tracy A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings explain, aspects of the embassy, including the gifts Smythe delivered to the tsar on behalf of James VI and I, were designed to intervene in ‘an ongoing Anglo-Russian dialogue about the nature and extent of the English amity with the Ottoman Turks’; specifically, Smythe, like English ambassadors before him, needed to appeal to Russia’s anti-Ottoman sentiment for the trade negotiations to succeed.^[7] Smythe was so persuasive that the tsar was led to believe that England was willing to join Russia in military action against the Ottomans, which was not the case: England wanted to be able to trade with Russia and the Ottomans, and thus needed to maintain good relations with both.^[8] Knowing this context of Smythe’s embassy means that we can think about Smithes voiage not only in terms of Anglo-Russian relations, but in terms of Anglo-Ottoman and Ottoman-Russian relations, too. It means that we can view Smythe’s approach to the embassy as a negotiation of this geopolitical situation, giving a new significance to passages like this:

The Ambassador having taken the Kings Letter of his Gentleman Usher, went up after his obeysance to deliver it, which the Lord Chansellor would have intercepted. But the Ambass. gave it to the Emperors owne hands, and his Majesty afterwards delivered it to the Lord Chansellor: who tooke it, and shewing the superscription to the Emperor and Prince, held it in his hande openly with the seale towardes them. Then the Emperor called the Ambassador to kisse his hand, which he did, as likewise the Princes, and with his face towards them returned.^[9]  

What would it mean to understand Smythe’s carefully calibrated words and gestures, from his delivery of ‘the Kings Letter’ to his kiss of the tsar’s hand, as an example of England’s engagement with the Ottoman Empire, albeit an engagement that is indirect and mediated by other diplomatic and political relations and geographies? What would happen if we looked for evidence of England’s encounters with the Islamic worlds in unexpected places?

Admittedly, this is much easier said than done in the case of Smithes voiage. The account does not address the Ottoman context of Smythe’s embassy explicitly. It refers to the instructions Smythe received from Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury and secretary of state to James VI and I, in passing; but it does not discuss the content of these instructions, which included details about how to navigate the Ottoman question.^[10] Indeed, Smithes voiage mentions the Ottomans only once. It is a passage towards the beginning of the account, in which the author describes the first few days of Smythe’s embassy. As Smythe rests at his first lodging in Russia, he receives a request:

Here the Ambassador laie some fourteen dayes, or lesse, where in the meane time, there was demanded a particular note of the names of all the Ambassadors traine, fyrst of the Kings Gentlemen, (which name not only the Emperor, but the Great Turke, Persian & Moroco Princes do highly account of) as indeed soothing their own greatness therwith.^[11]

Although ‘the Great Turke, Persian & Moroco Princes’ are mentioned only in passing, this mention nonetheless has the effect of situating Smythe’s embassy within a global and specifically Islamic context. It implies that the author possesses some knowledge of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, and of Morocco, and uses this knowledge as a lens through which to understand the Russian tsar. Safavid Persia also features in the account’s descriptions of the material culture of the tsar’s court, in which nobles are dressed in ‘faire coates of Persian stuffe’ or ‘Golden and Persyan coates’, and the tsar himself sits in ‘a chaire of golde, richly embroidered with Persyan stuffe’.^[12] This means that there are traces of England’s encounters with the Islamic worlds in Smithes voiage, but these encounters never take centre stage. Unlike the official correspondence Smythe exchanged with Cecil, this account was written for a general readership which would have had less of an appetite for the minutiae of diplomatic relations. The Ottoman context also might have been omitted for reasons of political expedience which are now difficult to reconstruct.

For scholars interested in such encounters, however, Smythe’s embassy and Smithes voiage are suggestive. They might prompt us to think more expansively and creatively about where we look for evidence of England’s encounters with the Islamic worlds: instead of restricting ourselves to texts which are explicitly ‘on’ or ‘about’ the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, say, we might look to texts which focus on different cultures and geographies but are nonetheless inflected by Anglo-Ottoman and Anglo-Safavid interactions. Attending to the impact of the Ottoman Empire on Anglo-Russian relations might also enable us to retheorise ‘encounter’, building on the work of Nabil Matar, who describes the relationships between England, North Africa, and the Americas as ‘The Renaissance Triangle’, and of Nandini Das, who uses the ‘in passing’ presence of Japan in early modern English texts to make the case for an understanding of encounter which is ‘not as a moment or occurrence, but as a process’.^[13] Looking at the longer history of England’s negotiations with both Russia and the Ottoman Empire will not only expand our understanding of the lives of individual agents and ambassadors like Smythe, and of the significance of particular embassies, but could transform our conception of encounter itself.

[1] See Basil Morgan, “Smythe [Smith], Sir Thomas (c. 1558-1625)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.).

[2] See Chester S.L. Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001), esp. 60-238.

[3] Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in Rushia (London, 1605). Hereafter ‘Smithes voiage’.  

[4] On the possibility that Smithes voiage was written by or for Scott, see William Scott, The Model of Poesy ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xxii-xxv, xxiv.

[5] Natalya Din-Kariuki, ‘“Strange accidents”: Navigating conflict in Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in Rushia (1605)’ in Gábor Gelléri and Rachel Willie eds. Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2020), 58-78.

[6] See Felicity Stout, ‘“The countrey is too colde, the people beastly be”: Elizabethan Representations of Russia, Literature Compass 10.6 (2013), 483-495, and Stout, Exploring Russia in the Elizabethan Commonwealth: The Muscovy Company and Giles Fletcher, the elder (1546-1611) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

[7] Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings eds. Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410-1800 (London: Routledge, 2017), 1.

[8] ibid.

[9] Smithes voiage, E4r.  

[10] ibid., Bv. For Smythe’s instructions from Cecil, see TNA SP 91/1/196.

[11] Smithes voiage, C4r.

[12] ibid., E3v, E4r-v.

[13] Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Nandini Das, ‘Encounter as Process: England and Japan in the Late Sixteenth Century’, Renaissance Quarterly 69.4 (2016), 1343-1368, 1346.