The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622

J. Grogan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137318800
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 studies the conception of Persia in the literary, political and pedagogic writings of Renaissance England and Britain. It argues that writers of all kinds debated the means and merits of English empire through their intellectual engagement with the ancient Persian empire.

1

Classical Persia: Making Kings and Empires

‘Vivimus jn Smithi Rep: non in Mori Utopia; aut Platonis Politeia; aut regno Xenophontis. Phantasticarum Reru[m]p[ublicarum] Vsus tantummodò phantasticus’. ¹

‘Civil Barbarians’

Promoting his voyage to locate the northwest passage, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother to Walter Ralegh, restated an old argument that America must be an island rather than a land-mass connected to Asia on the basis that no ‘ciuil’ people have been found there by other colonizing European nations,

which Spaniardes, or Frenchemen, must then of necessitie, haue seene some one Ciuil man in America, consideringe how full of ciuil people Asia is: But they neuer sawe so muche as one token, or signe, that euer any man of the knowen part of the worlde, had beene there.²

Not trespassing on another ‘ciuil’ people’s territory or causing ‘iniurie […] to any Christian prince by crossing them in any of their ‘vsed trades’ seems to be Gilbert’s point – although coming from one of the hardline colonists of the era, it is difficult to credit such delicate protestations. On the other hand, for Gilbert’s point (and his larger argument about the existence of a northwest passage) to have any traction, its premise – ‘how full of ciuil people Asia is’ – must be beyond doubt. It is a salutary reminder of a prevailing English respect for certain eastern peoples to which Gilbert – a deeply racist and vicious man – could appeal without troubling to provide corroborating evidence. For Gilbert and his contemporaries, the peoples of the east comprise more than just the maligned ‘Scythians and Tartarians’ of European popular polemic. It is also the home of such ‘civil’, prosperous, even enviable peoples as the Chinese, Ottomans and Persians, known in part from Mandevillian lore or travellers’ reports but primarily thanks to an ethnographic and geographical tradition originating in classical antiquity. Chief among these paradoxically ‘civil’ territories and peoples was Persia, land of the original ‘barbarians’: the international, polyglot armies threatening the Greeks in the fifth century BCE.³ To know them was to admire them. And to look east to Persia was to confront a ‘knowen part of the worlde’, an Old World empire that continued to supply the terms and values with which early modern England addressed the New World.⁴ This chapter sets out to counter scholarly tendencies to read early modern conceptions of the east and eastern peoples as invariably and uniformly ‘Other’ and/or hostile by foregrounding the classical writings on ancient Persia by Xenophon in particular, and showing how embedded these texts are in the political, pedagogic and poetic cultures of early modern England.

Such acceptance of how full of civil people Asia is, even by those for whom ‘civility’ is little more than cultural chauvinism, is a neglected aspect of the complex story of European conceptions of and relations with Asia in the early modern period. That story has been dominated by divisive paradigms of barbarism, antipathy and conflict, not just in Orientalist accounts but even in more recent models of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and transnationalism.⁵ This is not to say that some of those paradigms have no historical basis in early modern thought. ‘Barbarism’ certainly does: with its well-known classical antecedents, the concept has been used to politicize the eastern and the foreign too often to need reminding. But this soon breaks down into hierarchies and qualifications. Conflict is only one part of a far more complex matrix of encounter, and one that has been allowed to dominate for too long. Even the case of ‘barbarism’ confirms this. Gilbert, for example, is also engaged in peddling a political and moral concept of barbarism implicitly opposed to the very civility he assumes. Not all Asians are so ‘civil’ as the Chinese with whom he hopes to trade, or the Persians whose enviable ancient empire still graces them in early modern English eyes. So, for example, a 1597 pamphlet probably by Giles Fletcher (uncle of the more famous John), takes pains to distinguish the first appearance of the ‘Turks’ in Asia: ‘they followed a barbarous and sauage life, according to the Scythian vsage and farre different from the ciuill customes and manners of the Asians, they remained long vnknowne vnto these partes of the world vntill this time of their first discent into Persia’.⁶ In this series of fine and tendentious distinctions, Fletcher’s recognition of the topos of barbarism as mobile political capital could not be clearer. The binds into which this presses those who live the discourses of barbarism are brilliantly exposed in Shakespeare’s Othello. Here the barbarian topos attaches itself both to the Ottomans and to Othello himself, and the very slippages between those uses make Othello’s final act of stabbing himself, as ‘in Aleppo once’ he had stabbed a ‘turban’d Turk’ (5.2.348–52), almost unreadable. Yet in scholarly narratives of the period, the ‘barbarian’ has become simply a static stereotype, a polemical shortcut, a straightforward example of the familiar process of ‘Othering’ that New Historicism has taught us to find.

Neither in qualities nor object is the ‘barbarian’ an absolute or homogeneous category of early modern thought. And its structural reliance on distance in time and/or space, a feature that heightened its uses as displacement strategy, is clear even to its most enthusiastic advocates.⁷ Ania Loomba, like John Gillies, observes a Herodotean structure (as François Hartog described it) shaping New World encounters too: ‘if New World natives were placed within a discourse of primitivism, the peoples of the East – Turkey, Egypt, India and Persia – were embedded within a discourse of cultural excess. Both discourses fed into the notion of barbarism, and both played with the idea of alien monstrosity.’⁸ Writing of another prominent set of texts in which the barbarian topos appears, Tudor and Stuart tracts about Ireland by Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies, Debora Shuger has shown that the figure of the barbarian is made the vehicle for ‘a drastic critique of a whole aristocratic culture of honour’ as much domestic as Irish, shaped more by concerns about the political structures of England (‘a bourgeois commonwealth’) than about those of Ireland.⁹ Certainly the term ‘barbarian’ was vigorously and viciously applied, particularly in colonial activities and writings. As with the Brut myth, however, its proponents cannot but have been aware of its skimpy basis in historical and ethnographic reality. Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland is a good example: in the very text that depends on the identification of the Scythian heritage of the Irish to paint them as barbarians best supplanted, we find open acknowledgement that ‘it is but even the other day since England grew civil’.¹⁰ The paradox of the prevalence of interest in the ‘barbarian’ in English writing is that its speciousness and purely polemical nature must have been clearest to the English, more than any other European nation. The barbarian is held close: friend, enemy and ancestor.

Nor did the barbarian’s origins in Hellenic patriotism escape the notice of early modern English writers either. In fact, the argument from English nationalism was actively invested in repudiating the pejorative values of the ‘barbarian’, particularly in the literary sphere.¹¹ Thus in his Defence of Ryme (1603), Samuel Daniel makes no bones about the matter:

Nor can it be but a touch of arrogant ignorance, to hold this or that nation Barbarous, these or those times grosse, considering how this manifold creature man, wheresoeuer hee stand in the world, hath alwayes some disposition of worth, intertaines the order of societie, affects that which is most in vse, and is eminent in some one thing or other, that fits his humour and the times. The Grecians held all other nations barbarous but themselues, yet Pirrhus when he saw the well ordred marching of the Romanes, which made them see their presumptuous errour, could say it was no barbarous maner of proceeding.¹²

Like beauty, it seems, barbarism is in the eye of the beholder. A letter written half a century later by Pope Gregory XV to the Persian Shah ‘Abbas I soliciting his support against the Ottomans illustrates wider European understanding of the tendentious origins of the term ‘barbarian’ bequeathed by classical authorities – as well as its enduring currency:

The old wisdom of the Greeks so despised the human race as compared with themselves that they called the rest of the nations of the world barbarians and so exalted with such great honours the abilities and talents of their own citizens that they rashly uttered the falsehood that by heaven itself a youth had been sought from a Greek isle to be ruler of the sun and parent of days. Yet they so admired the virtues of the Persians, whose arms they feared, that he who would describe in perpetual literary memorials the pattern of the perfect king cast his eyes nowhere else than on Persia, and therefrom out of the royal dwelling brought into the light of fame Cyrus, that outside nations and the whole of posterity might learn from him the true ways of ruling.¹³

No more than the idea of perpetual and irresistible conflict between ‘east’ and ‘west’, the barbarian is a myth variously applied, one that needs tempering and more careful historicizing.

It is no coincidence that Persia and the Persians recur in these demurrals and qualifications of the topos of the barbarian. Those Asians with the strongest claims to ‘civility’ – as well as the oldest imputations of ‘barbarity’ – are the Persians. Both ideas have their origins in the ‘old wisdom’ of ancient Greece. Detailed accounts of this ancient and prosperous eastern peoples were available from the very earliest Greek sources where Persia and the Persians were usually identified as the original barbarians, the formidable enemy of the Ionian Greek cities and later of Athens itself. Edith Hall has shown how the concept of the barbarian solidified in the shadow of the Persian wars. ‘The invention of the barbarian in the early years of the fifth century was a response to the need for an alliance against Persian expansionism and the imposition of pro-Persian tyrants.’¹⁴ But if the concept was fitted for contemporary purposes, it nonetheless acquired an astonishingly long lease of life. Fifth-century (BCE) Persia’s wealth, power and ethnic diversity were rewritten in darker moral shades in the polemical figure of the barbarian in Aeschylus’s Persae and Thucydides’s History. Even here, the barbarian was no two-dimensional stereotype: a sympathetic ghost of the Persian emperor Darius appears at one point, plangently disrupting the play’s carefully calibrated indictment of Xerxes’s Persian vices.¹⁵ Nor was there only one kind of barbarian in fifth-century Athens: those of the cold north were imputed with qualities of toughness and savagery while those of the east (including Troy) with luxury and over-civilization, concepts that Mary Floyd-Wilson has shown to be still present in the ‘geo-humoral’ ethnographic theory of early modern England.¹⁶ In both classical and early modern times the barbarian is neither wholly a political nor an ethnic category, and it contains multitudes within it. Even where it is used divisively, its values are multiple. Within the classical world, one-note versions of Persian barbarism were countered by the writings of Xenophon and to a lesser extent Herodotus, texts which invoked the category of the barbarian but peopled it with fewer hostile values and often went so far as to provide hortatory cues. Their work in turn informs later writings by Diodorus of Sicily, Justin and Strabo, such that the strand of the ‘old wisdom of the Greeks’ that finds virtues, peoples and models of governance to admire in Persia is never entirely extinguished. Ancient Rome in turn consolidated the Persians’ barbarian stereotyping, thanks in part to ongoing Roman wars with the Sassanians and Parthians who later occupied the Persian lands.¹⁷ But the Romans, too, had read their Greeks carefully, and the more positive and hortatory image of Persia promulgated by Xenophon and later writers found its way into Roman republican as well as imperial thought. Ironically, it was Cicero who would give Xenophon’s Persian writings about its successful monarchical empire their strongest endorsement for early modern Europe.

The authority and familiarity of this long, appreciative classical tradition lent Persia a pronounced appeal for early modern English readers. In this, the survival, early circulation and popularity of authors such Plutarch, Xenophon and Herodotus were crucial. In fact, the revival of these authors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries helped to rework medieval ideas of Persia as yet another Islamicized enemy-state and fantasy world of wealth, blasphemy and iniquity, into a more moderate quasi-utopian space of good governance and hardy people.¹⁸ Hints of early English interest in Persia generated by classical sources can be found in texts associated with the man sometimes deemed the first English humanist, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester.¹⁹ But just as importantly, this long tradition of writing about Persia, whatever it said, made it a known place in the English cultural imaginary, appealing for its very familiarity and for having attracted the careful attentions of the ancients, something Britain had rarely managed – or rarely to its credit. Far from the British barbarism attested by Tacitus, for example, the ‘civility’ of the Persians had a provenance as distinguished as it was lengthy, and visitors to sixteenth-century Safavid Persia were quick to corroborate its continuity. One of the first printed reports from the English Muscovy Company travellers to Persia, for example, is followed by the conclusion that ‘[t]he Persians are of liberall nature, of muche ciuilitie and curtesie, greatly esteeming artes and sciences: they acknowledge a certaine worthinesse or nobilitie among men, wherin they differ muche from the Turkes, which make no difference betweene slaues and worthier men or Gentelmen’.²⁰

The comparison with the ‘Turkes’ is another important element in favourable English conceptions of Persia. Ducket’s flattering comparison of the Persians to their neighbours and longstanding enemies, the Ottoman Turks, gives voice to a cultural commonplace with a long provenance, one so well-established that it was less often stated than simply assumed in scholarly as well as travel texts.²¹ Within the self-conscious logic and aspirational articulations of English barbarian discourses, the Persians are congenially ‘like’ the English, the Ottomans not so much; a ‘barbarian’ history and a ‘civil’ future are aligned through the English understanding of barbarism as political trope. And although this favourable sense of the Persians owed much to the fact (sometimes more than the details) of their documentation in classical antiquity by Greek and Roman writers, at this point mid-century it was also attuned to contemporary geopolitics, notably the perceived belligerence of the Ottomans towards Christian Europe as well as towards their Shi’a Persian neighbours. (Pope Gregory’s attempt at finding common cultural ground with the Persians was deployed in a letter openly seeking Persian support against the Ottomans, after all.) A contiguous people for whom no respectable classical pedigree could be found, the Ottomans’ success in building an enormous empire provoked envy, fear and a begrudging admiration in European observers. (In fact, European fear of Ottoman imperialism mirrors Athenian fears of Persian imperialism a thousand years earlier, and the European rush to empire-building in response looks very much like the rise of Athenian imperialism following the success of the Delian League.²²) Attempts to account for the Ottomans in the texts of classical antiquity produced only derisory imputations of Scythian and Tartarian antecedents, neither the subject of classical admiration.²³ For early modern Europeans, aspirationally immersed in the works of classical Greece and Rome, the reputation of the Persians is therefore curious...