In studies of early modern Anglo-Islamic relations the role of diplomacy is often underrated. Scholars tend to highlight the commercial aspect of this relationship, while focusing on English trade with the Eastern Mediterranean and the Barbary coast, and their impact on English material culture and drama. The sheer volume of English royal correspondences with Muslim rulers during the Elizabethan period, however, signals the extensiveness of diplomacy, which was an efficient medium for transferring ideas of hegemonic legitimacy of power and imperial ambitions to readers both inside and outside the English court. In today’s post I will look into the circulation of Ottoman royal letters in the public sphere, and in my next post I will compare these letters and their impact with Anglo-Moroccan correspondence to see how each operated to convey these ideas.

Princely authority and sovereignty manifest on paper was not taken lightly in the Ottoman court. Until the eighteenth-century Ottomans did not favour the practice of sending resident ambassadors to foreign territories.^[1] “Whosoever wished would come to our threshold of felicity” was Murad III’s reply to the French ambassador protesting against the English presence in the Sublime Porte, the Ottoman court. Hence ambassadors would come to the sultan’s threshold but not vice versa. In the absence of an Ottoman ambassador the image of the sultan and the Ottoman state was to be created through the letters that conveyed his word.

Amongst the extant royal Ottoman letters dating from late-sixteenth to the turn of the nineteenth century that are kept in the National Archives the biggest portion are those that were received by Elizabeth I. Along with Ottoman royal letters kept in various locations in England and abroad, it is verified that the Queen received thirty-six letters from the Ottoman court, if not more.^[2] They include eman mektubu (safe conduct letters), ahidname (treaty letters), fetihname (letters of conquest), ferman-ı humayun (imperial commands), and hukm-u humayun (imperial orders) issued from the Topkapı Palace.

Ottoman royal letters were on most occasions more than three feet tall, in gilded letters, eighteen of which were from the Sultan Murad III himself while others were from his ministers and on one occasion from his wife. When the second English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Edward Barton withheld the Sultan’s original letter and sent a translation of this letter to cut on shipping costs, he had to send the original in the next dispatch, probably on the Queen’s request, as she appreciated the symbolic importance of receiving an original Turkish letter from the sultan. Rayne Allison notes “even for those who, like Elizabeth, were unable to read contents this letter proclaimed- both visually and rhetorically – the supreme magnificence of the sender and the sophistication of the bureaucratic culture in which it was produced.”^[3] As a matter of fact, Elizabeth’s lengthy and surprisingly regular correspondence with Murad was the first sustained communication between an English monarch and a non-Christian ruler.

Reproduction and circulation of royal epistola outside diplomatic circles for the general readership of the public was a common practice in early modern England. Scribal circulation of letters was a profession in some cases, and the letters that achieved the widest currency were those associated with monarchs (especially Elizabeth, James I and Charles I). James Daybell elaborates on how hundreds of manuscript copies of letters were scribally circulated from the late-Elizabethan period onwards in ways similar to other texts such as libels, verse, recipes and prose.^[4] He explains four stages of ‘scribal publication’: authorially controlled disseminations, private unrestricted copying, and professional scribal production and the final print publication. Accordingly, a restricted circulation of letters of political, historical or religious importance among closely defined groups was followed by their entrance to the ‘public’ world of informal scribal networks where they circulated between various scribal communities based around individuals within institutions like universities or the court.

Manuscripts and publications from the Elizabethan period indicate that Anglo-Ottoman diplomatic correspondence enjoyed a larger readership than within court circles. Passing through Daybell’s four stages of scribal publication, the letters appeared in personal correspondences of the Herrick family, which would qualify as private unrestricted copying. As for the final print publication, they appeared in Meredith Hanmer’s Baptizing of a Turke (1587) before being selectively printed in Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). These publications attest to the public curiosity and suspicion that attended these letters, which enjoyed a considerable fame outside the palace although technically they were meant to be confidential.

The Herrick Family Papers held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford provides evidence that these royal letters were circulated outside of London, as the mayor of Leicester John Eyrick had in 1585 sent a copy of the Grand Turk’s letter attached in his letter to his son William Heyricke (1562-1653), who was an ironmonger in London. He even complained to his son that he lent another copy to a friend, who never returned it.^[5] From the way letters from the Sultan pop up in casual correspondences between members of the general public, it can be deduced that it was common to have a copy of them to show it to friends or to send it to family for perusal.

Hanmer’s sermon includes chunks of Sultan Murad’s court translator Musdafa’s letter to Queen Elizabeth, while also carefully relaying the conversion of a liberated Turkish captive into the Protestant faith after being brought to England by Francis Drake. Hanmer reported to his crowd that “Musdafa Beg, secretary to the great Turke of Constantinople now is writing to the Queene of England as appeareth by his letters bearing date of the 15. of March, and in the yeare of great Iesu (so hee writeth) 1579 sheweth the great affection his maister the Turke togeather with himself beareth to this lande and of our religion.” ^[6] Murad’s first letter to Elizabeth was dated 15 March, 1579 and the court translator Musdafa wrote a cover letter for his translation of it. Hanmer, the vicar of St. Leonard’s^[7] delivered this sermon at the Hospital of St. Katherine on the northern bank of Thames. Sermons in the period drew big congregations and their audiences always far outnumbered those at the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries performed around the same time.^[8] St Leonard’s vicar evidently had the chance to read at least copies of two letters from the Ottoman court and exposed them to a greater public, including the congregation, and a year later to the readers of the printed sermon as well.

The royal Ottoman letters printed in The Navigations were bigger and their time frame more comprehensive as they went back to “Soliman the Great Turke” who was the grandfather of Murad III, the contemporary Sultan. Hakluyt provided four documents issued by the Ottoman sultans including Kanuni Sultan Suleyman’s safe conduct letter; Sultan Murad III’s letter to Elizabeth; Murad’s commandment to the magistrates with regards to English merchants; and his commandment to the beglerbeg of Tripolis. Hakluyt also edited the letters to omit references to Ottoman superiority and expectations for intelligence from England to give a good impression of the Anglo-Ottoman alliance.

Acknowledging the wider reach of Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy and the exposure of the various strata of Elizabethan England to this epistolary relationship would help us assign more significance to royal correspondence in Anglo-Islamic relations and consider the circulation and contamination of knowledge in early modern England in a different light.

Title image: SP102/4/29 translated to English in Cal. S.P. Ven. ix. 8 no.20, printed in Tenison E.M. Elizabethan England vol.9. Latin translation is in SP 102/61/45, Italian translation dated 30 Jan, is in Venice A. di S., Disp. Amb. Cost. Filza 34/380-1 enclosed in Zane’s dispatch of 7 Feb 1592.

[1] The first Ottoman ambassador Mehmet Çelebi Efendi was sent to France in 1720 by Mehmed III.

[2] Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 79, 72, British Library, Cotton MS, Nero B XI 126, 127, 178, Venetian Archives Mdina, BOA DVNSMH 36.120, 40.200, TNA SP 102, 104, 97.

[3] Rayne Allison, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I, Palgrave Macmillan (2012), p. 132.

[4] James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England, Palgrave (2012) pp. 190-203

[5]. Lynne Magnusson, ‘Mixed Messages and Cicero Effects in the Herrick Family Letters of the Sixteenth Century’, in Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, ed. James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, pp.131-155 (p.149)

[6] The baptizing of a Turke A sermon preached at the Hospitall of Saint Katherin, adioyning vnto her Maiesties Towre the 2. of October 1586. at the baptizing of one Chinano a Turke, borne at Nigropontus: by Meredith Hanmer, D. of Diuinitie.

[7]. Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Islamic Conversion & Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage, Edinburgh UP (2010), p.61

[8]. J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990); Edith L. Klotz, ‘A Subject Analysis of English Imprints for Every Tenth Year from 1480 to 1640’, Huntington Library Quarterly, I (1937–38), pp. 417–19; Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court, 1558–1625: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998).