During the week following Charles III’s ascension to the throne of the United Kingdom I came across a video issued by one of the well-known Muslim cultural news outlets about how sympathetic the new monarch was toward Islam. The video stirred a distant memory from many years ago. I recall that a religious teacher once told me and a bunch of teenage students that the then Prince of Wales wrote an introduction to an Islamic book and there were signs in there which revealed that he could have secretly converted to Islam. The rumour that the Prince of Wales could be a crypto-Muslim did not mean anything to my teenage self, who at the back was rolling her eyes at this ‘revelation’. Being an early modernist now, I see an uncanny similarity between the contemporary suggestions about the current British monarch’s faith and early modern English speculations of the same kind about Ottoman sultans. English material dating to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries indicate that there were speculations about a possible conversion of multiple Ottoman sultans to Christianity. These came in the form of religious pamphlets, epistolary literature, and a stage play.

In the 1590s there were English clergymen writing about the possibility of converting Murad III through his various wives. One of them, Hugh Broughton, a renowned Hebraist from London, wrote to Edward Barton, English ambassador in Istanbul, to discuss his elaborate scheme of converting first Jewish and then Orthodox Christian and Muslim Ottoman subjects in succession to Protestantism by influencing Rabbi Reuben, a respectable rabbi in Istanbul, who happened to be an acquaintance of Barton. Broughton’s grand conversion scheme also encompassed the sultan himself. In his pamphlet ‘To the Christian Reader about the Turkie cause’ he argues that the sultan can be persuaded through a coalition of the English agent, the rabbi and the queen mother (Safiye Sultan), whom he believed was a Jewess. His argument was that considering, ‘how unnatural a thing it was for a father to have his Funeral celebrated with the death of an exceeding great Troop of sons’, the sultan would choose Christianity, which is ‘better and how by peace with the Emperour, and change of Countries, his sons might be among Christians, and their Princes sons would gladly dwell in his territories’.  Therefore, the sultan’s conversion would put an end to this horror. The passage illustrates that fratricide came to be the most prominent characteristic of Ottoman sultans in English perception, for the text relies on the presumption that the reader already is familiar with this dynastic practice. Broughton also implies that fratricide is something that Ottoman sultans and by extension their wives do not wilfully practice but are forced to do because of their religion. This view is echoed in the dramatization of fratricide in the last scene of Amurath, The Courageous Turk where the succeeding sultan’s hand is forced by his chancellors to execute his brother Jacup.

In Robert Greene’s play Selimus, Emperour of the Turks which is rather unfortunately labelled as a Tamburlaine impostor, there is a scene in which one of Bayezid II’s sons, Prince Korkut (Corcut in the play) announces to his brother that he has converted to Christianity: ‘Selim, I have convers’d with Christians/ And learned of them to save my soul’ (1.22.50-51). Unfortunately, his announcement comes moments before he loses his neck in the fight for the Ottoman throne. The play makes it clear from the beginning that Corcut, as one of the heirs to the throne is a ‘non-starter’ (borrowing from Princess Diana’s infamous Panorama interview). He is portrayed as a learned prince, well-versed in Islamic law and sciences, however unfavoured by the courtiers as a strong candidate. A virtuous son, his mind is ‘free from ambitious thought’ and wishes his father would remain on the Ottoman throne as long as he lives. Greene gives this intellectual prince English company too by introducing the character of Bullithrumble in a short comic scene right before he is caught and executed by Selim. In Act 1.19 when Corcut is on the run, in disguise as he is trying to cross to Rhodes from Smyrna, he meets the ‘Christian shepherd’ Bullithrumble, an English clown of sorts. The plot takes a dark turn afterwards; Bajazet loses the crown to his son Selim and in the bloodbath afterwards all the contenders to the throne are eliminated. Hence Korkut, the Christian Ottoman prince’s body is left on stage as a relic of missed opportunity inspiring the question of what would have been if he survived and became the first Christian ruler of the Ottoman realm.

Greene’s insertion of an English clown into pastoral Türkiye in this strange conversion subplot has echoes of Broughton’s conversion scheme, where an English agent is expected to facilitate sultanic discussions of faith. It demonstrates that the cultural forces at work are then refracted in the drama and a playwright like Greene entertains and explores the idea, whether as a fantasy or possibility, on stage. Speculations about the faith of powerful figures always fascinate people and regardless of time periods and changing figures we see the same kind of rumours crop up online and offline.

REFERENCES

1. For Hugh Broughton’s life see Kirsten MacFarlane, Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy, pp.114-149

2. The quotes are from John Lighftoot ed. The Works of the Great Albionean Divine, Renown’d in Many Nations for Rare Skill in Salems & Athens Tongues, and Familiar Acquaintance with all Rabbinical Learning, Mr. Hugh Broughton: Collected into one Volume, and Digested into Four Tomes, London: Nath. Ekins (1662), p.717

3. The play lines are from Daniel Vitkus ed. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England.