Abstract
On his first visit to the Safavid capital Qazvin in 1561, Anthony Jenkinson delivered to Shah Tahmasp a letter from his own sovereign seeking support for his ‘honest intent to establish trade of merchandise with your subiects, and with other strangers traffiking in your realmes in Persia’. Although it was his first time at the Persian court, Jenkinson had previously travelled as far east as Bukhara on an earlier voyage in his capacity as an agent of the Muscovy Company, the first English joint-stock trading company.’ Trade in Persia was not the original honest intent, however; trade in China was. But failing to reach China by the ostensibly ‘very easie’ ‘northeastern passage’, the Company’s ships retreated south from the White Sea to Muscovy where new opportunities presented themselves.2 The Tsar’s recent military successes as far south as Astrakhan, his development of the Volga river-system and his willingness to grant free passage through his lands gave the English merchants access to the Caspian Sea and thence to the rich markets of Persia, a route that, although by no means easy, had the virtue of avoiding all of England’s enemies in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Arriving at the Persian court, then, Jenkinson’s was a historic first English embassy to Persia, from a queen for whom this kind of occasion must still have been relatively new — as, indeed, her letter shows.3 Shah Tahmasp seems to have been either amused or annoyed by Elizabeth’s naïve circumspection in writing to him in Latin, Italian and Hebrew, but Jenkinson reports rebounding his objection as compliment, and matters proceeded.
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Notes
‘The voyage to Cathaio by the East is doutlesse very easie and short’, the geographer Gerardus Mercator wrote to Richard Hakluyt, ‘and I haue oftentimes marvelled, that being so happily begun it hath bene left of[f], and the course changed into the West, after that more then half of your voyage was discovered’. Richard Hakluyt, The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts $12 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), vol. 1, p. 161.
He was not, however, the first Englishman sent on embassy to the Safavid court. The cloth merchant Robert Brancetour was sent by Charles V in 1529. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounteres in the Early Modern World (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), pp. 82–3.
On Achaemenid iconography in Safavid royal ideology, see Colin Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion and Rhetoric (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011).
Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558–1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 14.
Richard III, 5.4.13; Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 111; Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London: Richard Grafton, 1553), sig. 2F1; Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 38.
See Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3.
On the medieval European constructions of Islam in which these representations partake, see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
The Faerie Queene, I.iv.7. These particular examples are cited by Samuel Chew in The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Octagon Books, 1937; rpt. 1965), pp. 234–5, but there are many more.
See Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Thomas Hoby, William Thomas and Mid-Tudor Travel to Italy’, in The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, ed. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 404–17.
Roger Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 118.
Carole Levin and John Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 51–2.
Anthony Parr, ‘Foreign Relations in Jacobean England: The Sherley Brothers and the “Voyage of Persia”’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 14–31 (p. 20).
See also Su Fang Ng, ‘Pirating Paradise: Alexander the Great, Dutch East Indies, and Satanic Empire in Milton’s Paradise Losi’, Milton Studies 52 (2011): 59–91.
‘Linguistic cues signaled the reader to engage the conceptual operation of relating.’ Frances Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 15.
See Stewart Mottram, ‘Reading the Rhetoric of Nationhood in Two Reformation Pamphlets by Richard Morison and Nicholas Bodrugan’, Renaissance Studies 19 (2005): 523–40.
See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 70–81. The 1580s also witnessed some of England’s foundational imperial moments: the Munster plantation in Ireland, the first settlements of what would become the Virginia colony.
David Harris Sacks, ‘The True Temper of Empire: Dominion, Friendship and Exchange in the English Atlantic, c. 1575–1625’, Renaissance Studies 26 (2012): 531–58 (pp. 531–2, 534–5).
On Renaissance republican thought see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
On the strained efforts of Italian humanist scholars to identify some kind of classical origins for the Ottomans in the absence of evidence, see Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 117–54.
See Mitchell, The Practice of Politics, especially pp. 19–67 (p. 17) and Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; first published 2003), p. 107.
On British efforts to escape or rewrite its ‘barbarian’ past, see Neil Rhodes, ‘Shakespeare the Barbarian’, in Early Modern Civil Discourses, ed. Jennifer Richards (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 99–114
Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)
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On the tarnish of Roman Catholicism in English historical engagements with Rome, see John E. Curran, The Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, 2002).
Willy Maley, ‘Postcolonial Cymbeline: Sovereignty and Succession from Roman to Renaissance Britain’, in His Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 37. See also Rhodes, ‘Shakespeare the Barbarian’.
Cited in G. C. Moore-Smith (ed.), Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), p. 10.
Thomas probably came across Barbaro’s text in Venice, where it had been printed by Antonio Manuzio, son of Aldus, in his 1543 collection Viaggi fatti da Vinetia, all Tana, in Persia, in India, et in Costantinopoli. See Cathy Shrank, ‘“These fewe scribbled wordes”: Representing Scribal Intimacy in Early Modern Print’, Huntington Library Quarterly 67.2 (2004): 295–314.
Travels to Tana and Persia by Josafa Barbaro and Ambrogio Contarini, trans. William Thomas and S. A. Roy, ed. Lord Stanley of Alderley (London: T. Richards for the Hakluyt Society, 1873), pp. 1–101 (pp. 3–4). The original manuscript (Royal MS. 17.C.X) is held at the British Library.
See Brenda Hosington, ‘“A poore preasant off Ytalyan costume”: The Interplay of Travel and Translation in William Barker’s Dyssputacion off the Nobyltye off Wymen’, in Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carmen G. diBiase (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 143–55, and Woolfson, ‘Thomas Hoby’, pp. 407–8.
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On Greek studies at the grammar schools see Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pp. 487–53
Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), pp. 43–4, 108–18.
On the endurance of classical paradigms alongside the ‘new geographies’ of Ortelius and Mercator in Shakespeare’s work, see John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
George Manwaring notes the large number of ‘ruinated places’ that had fallen to Timur, and Tamburlaine had also been remembered on the Ortelian map of Persia. In E. Denison Ross (ed.), Sir Anthony Sherley and his Persian Adventure (London: Routledge, 1933), pp. 197–8.
Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 139–68 (p. 143). The Habsburg ambassador Ogier de Busbecq describes pursuing his numismatic interests while in Persia in his popular Latin letters, published in 1581 and 1582 in Antwerp.
Hebrew studies at the universities (primarily Cambridge) spawned Arabic learning and Persian only later. See G. J. Toomer, ‘Eastern Wisedome’ and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), especially pp. 53–104.
Thomas North’s 1570 translation of an Indian author, The Philosophie of Doni, came from Europe by way of Persia. See Marion Hollings, ‘Spenser’s “Men of Inde”: Mythologizing the Indian through the Genealogy of Faeries’, in Indography: Writing the Indian in Early Modern England, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 151–68. On eastern scientific
See Javad Ghatta, Persian Icons, ‘Shi’a Imams: Liminal Figures and Hybrid Persian Identities on the English Stage’, in Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, ed. Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 53–72, and Mitchell, The Practice of Politics, p. 32.
On the Minadoi—Leunclavius exchange, see Nancy G. Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 257–8.
Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 11 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), vol. 10, p. 118.
See Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 177. See also pp. 21–3 on Persian ‘as a language linked to state-building, but also to religious and intellectual ferment’ from the fifteenth century onward.
The account is from Anthony’s French servant, Abel Pinçon. E. Denison Ross (ed.), Sir Anthony Sherley and his Persian Adventures (London: Routledge, 1933), p. 174.
On the Muscovy Company, see T. S. Willan, The Muscovy Merchants of 1555 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978)
W. S. Page, The Russia Company from 1553 to 1660 (London: William Brown & Co., 1912)
Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 17.
Firmans were also obtained from Shah ‘Abbas for East India Company factories/trade in Isfahan and Shiraz’. See Rudolph P. Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 96–9.
Giovanni Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi … (Venice: Giunta, 1550–59), 3 vols. See Florio’s dedicatory epistle to his translation (from Ramusio) of Jacques Cartier, Navigations to Newe France (London: Henry Bynneman, 1580). For helpful tables showing the ownership of geographical and travel books in England in the period (and the continued dominance of ancient authors), see Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 151–5.
On Coryate’s travel writings, see Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 102–27.
William Parry, A New and large discourse of the Trauels of Sir Anthony Sherley Knight, by sea, and ouer land, to the Persian Empire (London: Valentine Simmes for Felix Norton, 1601), sig. C3v. See also Rudolph P. Matthee, ‘The Safavids under Western Eyes: Seventeenth-Century European Travelers to Iran’, Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009): 137–71, especially pp. 162–8.
On the English arms trade with the Ottomans, see Matthew Dimmock, ‘Guns and Gawds: Elizabethan England’s Infidel Trade’, in A Companion to the Global Renaissance, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 207–22.
Jean Howard, ‘Shakespeare, Geography and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage’, MLQ 64 (2003): 299–322 (p. 304).
Joan-Pau Rubiès, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 391.
Said has given this historical development a longer history and more inevitable shape than it warrants. Richmond Barbour describes the period as one ‘before Orientalism’; scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writing tend to concur. Barbour, Before Orientalism; Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
For a recent review of the latest theoretical models of European engagement with the East, see the introduction by Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet to Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 3–7.
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Grogan, J. (2014). Introduction: Reading Persia in Renaissance England. In: The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549–1622. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318800_1
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