In early modern England, diplomacy and commerce often went hand in hand. During the Tudor era, many trade companies were created and given a royal charter to fund travels towards the East, such as the Muscovy Company in 1555, the Levant Company in 1592 or the East India Company in 1600. With approval from the Crown, these companies sent out messengers, merchants, and representatives, often acting as official diplomatic agents, to promote commerce with Eastern courts. Early modern people travelled because of goods, in the hope of securing lucrative business opportunities, but goods also travelled because of people, such as when company agents brought back items from the East back with them to England. These objects were bought for their material value, such as silk and other expensive fabrics, but sometimes these souvenirs were also living curiosities: exotic human pets forcefully brought to England as spectacle. These people were traded and transported alongside other commodities through increasingly globalised networks between Europe and the empires of the East. One of these living curiosities was a slave girl from Central Asia, acquired by Anthony Jenkinson, captain for the Muscovy Company, during his travels, and later gifted to Queen Elizabeth I.

This mysterious figure was first brought to my attention in Bernadette Andrea’s The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). In 1557, Jenkinson was dispatched to accompany Osep Napea, the departing Russian ambassador, from London to Moscow.^[1] After departing the Russian court, Jenkinson’s mission was to go east to Persia in order to establish commercial ties with the Shah’s empire and the valuable silk trade it produced. However, due to the devastation brought by conflicts between Russians, Persians, and Central Asians tribes, Jenkinson was only able to go as far east as the city of Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan, before having to turn back in 1559.^[2] In a letter to his superior Henry Lane, Muscovy Company resident in Vologda, Jenkinson mentions a woman, apparently purchased with Lane’s permission: “Thus giving you most heartie thanks for my wench Aura Soltana, I commend you to the tuition of God, who send you health with hearts desire.”^[3]

In my own doctoral research, which focuses on the role played by women in diplomatic relations between early modern England and the Muslim East, I look at Aura Soltana’s presence as a living diplomatic gift at the Elizabethan court. Indeed, Jenkinson’s letter was first published in the 1589 edition of the Principal Navigations, where Richard Hakluyt added a footnote explaining that “[t]his was a yong Tartar girle which he gave to the Queene afterward.” “Tatars” or “Tartars,” were a Muslim people from Central Asia, known as fierce warriors living east of the Volga River and around the Caspian Sea. At the time of Jenkinson’s travels in the region, between 1558 and 1559, many Tatars had been enslaved by the forces of the Russian Emperor Ivan the Terrible. During the Russian conquests, Tatars were found in slave markets around Astrakhan, where Jenkinson himself remarked that you could buy a Tatar child “for a loafe of bread woorth sixe pence in England.”^[4] It is likely there that he purchased the “wench Aura Soltana,” before gifting her to Elizabeth I upon his return to England.

In archival documents related to the department of the Queen’s Royal Wardrobe, there are mentions of “oure deare and welbeloved woman Ipolita the Tartarian,” who was part of Elizabeth’s court between 1561 and 1569.^[5] Bernadette Andrea identifies Ipolita and Aura Soltana as the same Tatar girl. The names Ipolita and Aura Soltana would have been given to the girl by her different owners, first Jenkinson (or the people who sold her to him) and then Elizabeth I. Slaves were often given “imperial names” in order to both erase their past and to elevate the status of those who owned them.[6] The different names of the Tatar girl certainly follow this pattern, with “Soltana” meaning “Sultana” or queen, while Ipolita, or Hippolyta, was the renowned Queen of the Amazons, tamed by the mythical King of Athens, Theseus. These successive changes in the naming of the Tatar girl illustrate her role as a diplomatic gift and as a receptacle for other people’s agendas.

Indeed, Jenkinson’s 1557 mission to reach Persia and its lucrative silk trade was a failure. But to advertise this would endanger the future of the Muscovy Company and its subsequent ventures. By bringing the English Queen an exotic-looking girl with a name synonymous with Eastern riches, Jenkinson was able to spin his failure into an apparent success, which in turn secured the Crown’s support for further travels to Central Asia. This gift of a living pet appears thus as part of Jenkinson’s – and more largely, the company’s – corporate agenda. But when Aura Soltana entered the Queen’s court, she received a new name, Ipolita the Tartarian. This denomination did not evoke Eastern riches, but rather, to Elizabethan audiences, it stood for a wild and foreign element now tamed and conquered, integrated into a more refined civilization. By integrating an exotic girl with such a symbolic name into her retinue, Elizabeth I could display her own power as a sovereign ruling over a nation of merchants and explorers. Different agendas were thus projected onto this anonymous Tatar girl.

While the girl known successively as “Aura Soltana” and “Ipolita the Tartarian” left no written trace of her own, she came to play a role in the performance of England, through its fledgling trade companies and its Queen, as a powerful realm built on exploration and commerce overseas.

Mathilde Alazraki is a fourth year PhD student at Université Paris Cité (Paris, France) and a member of the LARCA research unit (UMR8225, CNRS). Her PhD thesis, supervised by Professor Ladan Niayesh, focuses on the role of women in the diplomatic relations between Britain and the Muslim East in the early modern period (1558-1676).

[1] John H. Appleby, ‘Jenkinson, Anthony (1529–1610/11), traveller and writer,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,  https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14736 (Accessed 12 May 2023).

[2] Stephan Schmuck, ‘Jenkinson, Anthony,’ Iranica Online, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jenkinson-anthony (Accessed 13 May 2023). For a map of Jenkinson’s first journey, see appendix XV.

[3] Jenkinson, ‘A Letter of Master Anthonie Jenkinson upon his returne from Boghar to the worshipful Master Henrie Lane Agent for the Moscovie companie resident in Vologda, written in the Mosco the 18. of September, 1559,’ in The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques And Discoveries Of The English Nation, ed. Richard Hakluyt (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons: 1903), vol. 2, p. 401.

[4] Anthony Jenkinson, ‘The voyage of Master Anthony Jenkinson, made from the citie of Mosco in Russia, to the citie of Boghar in Bactria, in the yeere 1558: written by himself to the Merchants of London of the Moscovie companie,’ in Principal Navigations, vol. 2, p. 455.

[5] Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d: The Inventories of the Wardrobe of Robes Prepared in July 1600 (Leeds: Maney, 1988), p. 107.

[6] Andrea, ‘The Tartar Girl, the Persian Princess, and Early Modern English Women's Authorship from Elizabeth I to Mary Wroth,’ in Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era, eds. Anke Gilleir et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 265.

Title Image: Map of Tartaria by Anthony Jenkinson, accessed here