THROUGHOUT THEIR STAY, the ambassador and his men had audiences with the English sultana at Greenwich and Nonsuch palaces and hosted her and her people in turn to feasts à la Turkeska at the ambassador’s residence, where they slaughtered all their meat themselves in the correct manner. For months, official negotiations were conducted in the cold rooms of the queen’s palaces or upon her green parklands. Conclusions were reached in matters of sea-lanes and free overland passages, the exchange of captured pirates/sailors, various immunities and protections for Englishmen voyaging in the empire of the Ottomans. Much of the diplomacy was a duel of imaginations, conceptions of events that had not yet occurred but were suddenly pressingly possible.
“And if an Englishman traveling in Qustantiniyya should wish to convert to the religion of Mohammed?” asked the ambassador’s chief adviser, Cafer bin Ibrahim. This particular question amused those of the English negotiators who had never left England but deeply troubled those English who had traveled, especially in Mahometan lands. There was much to be said for any religion that promised wealth, opportunity, and wives in this world. (This was a truth as obvious as air to the Turks, one they lived with daily. Back in Constantinople, bin Ibrahim always hurriedly sold any of his Christian slaves who were considering converting to the true faith, or else he would have had to free them at a loss, enslavement of his co-religionists being illegal.)
Conversely, the question arose of Turk merchants traveling within England and of their free and safe passage throughout the kingdom, of what protections the queen might guarantee a hypothetical Mahometan buyer of, say, tin. Could such a one reside unmolested in London? Or travel to mines farther inland? And pray to Allah and his saints as his law demanded, five times daily? Even when it was pointed out that Jews (who were obviously worse and more dangerous) sometimes were free to move about, the English found the prospect of a freely roaming Turk so astonishing and obviously unsanitary to the body politic that the topic was temporarily set aside. But then one of the queen’s privy councillors, Robert Beale, pointed out that if (as the Turkish negotiators insisted) any Englishman in the Ottoman Empire who of free conscience wished to swear allegiance to Mohammed could not be prevented from doing so, then any Ottoman wishing to profess his devotion to Jesus Christ was similarly at liberty to do so while in England. The Ottoman ambassador readily agreed to this reciprocity, unable to conceive of any Ottoman who would see an advantage—spiritual or economic—in apostasy or, for that matter, take up permanent residence on this island. England was simply too poor and Christianity too unpromising in this life. After all, they were scarcely able to convince some of the English pirates to return from Constantinople. Even those in prison.
Meanwhile, at the suggestion of Dr. Ezzedine, all the men of the embassy performed zakat by paying, as their wealth allowed them, for the release or well-being of Turkish prisoners held in England. Ezzedine went further and, under escort, searched in the darkest parts of London for a rumored community of Moors awaiting passports or funds to sail for happier places. Dr. Ezzedine would have given generously to these unfortunates, if he could have found them.
What would Saruca and Ismail think of this place? He sketched it for them, in pictures and words, the palaces and the creaking wooden buildings where mythological Moors could not be found. But it was impossible to properly capture with paper. Ismail often claimed he would explore the world, to see every corner of the sultan’s empire, but he still was shy around other boys and hid behind his father’s legs, and Ezzedine suspected that the sight of these houses painted with the sign of plague would ruin his sleep for days. “Sometimes, it’s much nicer to stay at home,” he had told his father almost every night for a few weeks when he was smaller.
Later, Ezzedine had brought Ismail to see the chamber of maps at the Sublime Porte, showed him the far-off corners of the empire, where Sarajevo and Buda and Athens and Jerusalem and Cairo sat, so many difficult months away from Constantinople and Ismail’s beloved caged birds. As a mark of respect to his father, Ismail was permitted to see the globes and even to set one of them to turning. Ezzedine watched as the question of scale began to trouble the child. “Are we all residing on this one tiny dot? But how can that be?” It seized the boy’s mind for a month to come, and at times Ezzedine despaired of getting Ismail to understand. “Even Mother? Even my birds? Even you? All of us live on a black dot? But it is not black on the ground outside….”
Finally, Saruca succeeded where Ezzedine had failed. Ismail explained to his father, “Look how small the boats are on the water when we stand on the top of the hill. But they are not small when we are near them. They don’t change, but they seem small. So if a bird flew very high, we would seem small enough to fit on a spot.”
Saruca teased her husband that night: “If you would like me to take over the boy’s education, I will make time in my day.”