In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, Fernand Braudel described a vast interconnected world of Christian-Islamic rivalry, military conflicts and diplomatic and commercial cooperation. Braudel's Mediterraneanism came to a close with the weakening of the two empires that had dominated that basin: the Spanish and the Ottoman. These superpowers that had come together in the Mediterranean, sometimes unwillingly, began to retreat as new European fleets sailed through Gibraltar. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, according to Molly Greene, ‘the northern invasion’ of the western Islamic Mediterranean by France, the Netherlands and England/Britain was underway.Footnote ¹

In this context, one of the limitations that Braudel conceded regarding his project was leaving the Arabic archive unexamined. In his discussion of sources, at the end of volume ii, he called upon historians from the Middle East and North Africa to ‘fill in the spaces’ that he had left out in the book. Braudel further stated that he had not used the English archive extensively: he took only one trip to the British Museum and The National Archives (formerly the PRO). Braudel was fully aware of the importance of these two archives: in addition to documents about commercial interactions, they hold personal narratives and letters that help to identify names, nationalities, biographies and other information on slaves and converts – the most transcultural community of the early modern Mediterranean. There is also consular correspondence and the determinations of Muslim jurists that unravel the history of inter-Mediterranean negotiations. The Arabic archive, in this case of Morocco, can shed light on relations between the two sides of the religious divide at a time when the balance of power between western Europeans on the one hand, and North Africans on the other, was still equal, and when apocalyptic religion still played a determining role in political and commercial strategy.

By the time of Braudel's terminus ad quem, 1598, English sailors and commercial agents were exploring avenues of Mediterranean exchange as they sailed to Algiers, Alexandria and Izmir, while Muslim ships set out from the North African shores to England and Ireland, even Iceland. In the early 1600s English seamen and factors traded in ports extending from Aghadir to Tunis, and listened to their counterparts speak and negotiate in Turkish and in Arabic. In the case of one Englishman, John Harrison (d. c. 1638), he never forgot what was reported to him about the Moroccan mahdi ‘rightly guided’, Abu Maḥilli (d. 1613), the man who was to establish a rule of peace and justice in the world.

The story of Harrison the merchant and Abu Maḥilli the Sufi rebel shows an Englishman's inclusion of a Muslim messianic figure into his Christian eschatology – an inclusion that became a fixation, dominating his commercial and religious plans for decades. At the same time, it was, for the Sufi, the story of a brief dialogue with British and Dutch Protestants (not yet ‘northern invaders’), and the dreams that he had of establishing a kingdom of peace, justice and trade from Marrakesh to Tangier to Madrid to Rome and Istanbul. The two men never met, but their religious and imperial ideologies overlapped in a manner that was unique for early modern Christianity and Islam – and that could only happen in the Kulturraum of the Mediterranean. Their writings tell of messianism and mahdism, at the same time that they capture a phase in Mediterranean history when Christian trading agents were driven by eschatological expectations into the lands of Islam at the same time as Muslim Sufis led revolts that dabbled in international politics. Although Braudel ignored the varieties of early modern religious expressions and eccentricities, and concentrated instead on geographical, maritime and demographic infrastructures, these two men show that personal beliefs and ideologies wielded significant influence on regional commercial and diplomatic history.

Bringing together the narratives and texts from two different traditions, in a kind of contrapuntal association, interrogates the methodology that Braudel used – of focusing on trade and commerce, diplomacy and war, routes and ships, to the exclusion of what he called the mere ‘surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their backs’.Footnote ² But on the ships that traversed the Mediterranean were men such as John Harrison, with their tobacco and eschatology, their dreams of trade, Christianisation and the millennium. By expanding the archives of the study of the Mediterranean, and by moving further than Braudel's historiographical parameters to include the religious, the personal, even the eccentric ‘crests of foam’, an important set of intersections can be added to the Christian and the Islamic Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the early modern period.

Aḥmad ibn ‘Abdallah ibn Abu Maḥilli (1560–1613) was the first Magharibi in the early modern period to leave a kind of spiritual autobiography-cum-travelogue about himself: Al-Iṣlīt al-khirrīṭ fī qaṭ‘ bul‘ūm al-‘ifrīt [The sharp sword cutting the throat of the demon].Footnote ³ He was born in 1560 in Sijilmasa in south-eastern Morocco and studied in Fez at the Qarawiyyīn mosque, the most distinguished educational institution in the Maghrib and the Islamic West.Footnote ⁴ In 1578, rather conveniently at a time of imminent war with the invading Don Sebastian,Footnote ⁵ he went into seclusion, after which he returned in 1594 as a spiritual leader to whom followers flocked from all parts of Morocco as well as from Tlemcen (in western Algeria) and Tunis. He had witnessed, as he wrote, famine and drought,Footnote ⁶ whilst the ruler, Aḥmad al-Mansūr (r. 1578–1603), led an opulent lifestyle. Jacques Berque described the turmoil at the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in the Maghrib as part of the search for legitimacy in governmentFootnote ⁷ – which may well have pushed Abu Maḥilli toward mahdism. During his earlier Sufi trances he had repeatedly declared ‘ana sultan, ana sultan’ [‘I am in power, I am in power’], perhaps a premonition of the role that he would assume years later.Footnote ⁸

Mahdist claims had been part of the ideology of the Sa‘dian ruling dynasty of Morocco since the founder had adopted one of the epithets of the mahdi: Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad added the word al-Qā'im [the one who has arisen] to his name. At the same time, there were mahdist movements in al-Andalus that migrated to North Africa with the flight of the moriscos from Iberia after the Albujarras revolt in the late 1560s.Footnote ⁹ With the approach of the hijri year 1000 in 1590–1, mahdism gained momentum: Aḥmad al-Mansūr declared himself the mahdi and encouraged his court scribes to promulgate that image. In that same year, al-Mansūr's ambassador to Istanbul, Abu Ḥasan al-Tamjrūti recalled in his travelogue, al-Nafḥa al-miskiyya [The fragrant breeze], the writings of previous jurists on the mahdi, as he confirmed how people in North Africa believed al-Mansūr to be the awaited one.Footnote ¹⁰ Consistent with traditional Muslim exegesis, al-Tamjrūti declared that on the last day the Prophet Muḥammad would lead believers in prayer, with Jesus and all muslimūn/submitters to God behind him. In that year, too, the Moroccan jurist, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Ṣiddīq, wrote a whole treatise for the single purpose of refuting Ibn Khaldūn's views against the mahdi, and to support the claims of his master.Footnote ¹¹

The mahdi in Moroccan thought represented a leader who would bring back God's justice to earth, defend Islam and rule according to the laws of the Qu'rān. Inspired by mahdist, even prophetic, claims, al-Mansūr sent his armies to conquer sub-Saharan ‘Sudan’/Niger.Footnote ¹² Initially, after the Moroccan victory over poorly-armed warriors (reputed to have been 80,000), Abu Maḥilli supported al-Mansūr's mahdist appellation, stating that ‘the conquest of the city of Tinbekt in Sudan is a sign of the appearance of the mahdi’.Footnote ¹³ But as voices began to criticise al-Mansūr for attacking fellow Muslims, Abu Maḥilli turned against the invasion, and soon afterwards denounced it as the mark of ākhir al-zamān (end of time), which would bring woe and destruction on al-Maghrib al-Aqsa (the farthest west/Maghrib).Footnote ¹⁴ In 1597 Abu Maḥilli declared himself the ‘sun of his time’, and by 1603 jurists were corresponding with him seeking to join his movement in order to receive his baraka (blessing).Footnote ¹⁵ The death of al-Mansūr that year marked the beginning of internecine wars among his three sons, leading to ‘hunger and plague [causing] the death of multitudes’,Footnote ¹⁶ as Abu Maḥilli wrote. In order to bolster his mahdist claim, Abu Maḥilli went on the pilgrimage to Mecca. As he reached Libya, he heard about a wanderer who claimed to be the mahdi among the Christians – so ‘they followed him … hoping he would help them against the Turks’, but the man was merely a pretender to mahdism.Footnote ¹⁷ Abu Maḥilli stopped in Egypt, just as al-Shaykh al-Mahdi, the first Sa‘dian mahdi, had done, where he met with numerous scholars, urging closer ties between the four legal schools (of Sunni Islam). By 1607 he had proclaimed himself a sharīf, a descendant from the family of the Prophet, which was a necessary qualification of the mahdi. He declared that his family descended from ‘Abbas ibn ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib, Muḥammad's uncle, in the same manner that the Sa‘dians had claimed descent from ‘Ali, the Prophet's cousin, through Ḥasan, Ali's son. Abu Maḥilli explained that the Abbasid caliphate was still thriving among the Ottomans, but that the sultan was not the caliph, merely his deputy.Footnote ¹⁸ And so he called upon his countrymen to support him: ‘If an honest man, zealous for religion, stands up [against the ruler], Muslims should support him so he can reveal the religion of God. Whoever opposes him opposes God, as the imams have declared.’Footnote ¹⁹ The jurist Abu Abbas Aḥmad al-Tawāti recalled how he saw Abu Maḥilli entering into aḥwāl rubbāniyya (Sufi trances) and how people then flocked to him whereupon he started pointing to himself as al mahdi al-ma‘lūm (the foretold mahdi). Again, in his trances, he reiterated ‘ana sultan, ana sultan’.Footnote ²⁰

The appeal to sharīfian descent on the part of Abu Maḥilli brought him support, as it had to al-Qa'im in his revolt against the Wattasids, whom the Sa'dian dynasty replaced. Another factor that contributed to the positive response to Abu Maḥilli's proclamation was its similarity to writings about the mahdi and the Last Day that had appeared in the Libros plumbeos [The lead books].Footnote ²¹ As Aḥmad ibn Qāsim reported in his autobiography, these books had been copied by moriscos in Spain (including himself) after which they were carried over to North Africa by escapees (like himself) fleeing the Iberian Peninsula.Footnote ²² One of the longer books, Kitāb mawāhib al-thawāb li-‘ibād Allah al-mu'minīn fi ḥaqiqat al-injīl [The book of the rewards of virtue to the worshippers of God through the truth of the gospel], spoke about ākhir al-zamān (the end of time) as a time of thawābihim (reward), and emphasised how the Arabs would be the anṣār (defenders of religion) at that critical time.Footnote ²³ The Arab/ic element was magnified in the Libros since the apocalyptic king would be min mulūk al-‘arab (from among the kings of the Arabs), and, significantly for Abu Maḥilli, not from the mashriq (east), which was the land of the enemy, al-inlanīn (Hellenes). Indeed, Abu Maḥilli repeatedly emphasised his Arab descent from the ‘arabun ‘āriba (Arabs of the Arabs of Qays).Footnote ²⁴ The Arab king would be sent by God at the time of great moral deterioration when women would live in pride and men commit fornication and qillat al-ḥayā’ [indecency], when Satan would rule, language would become deceptive and metaphoric [kunya], and the righteous would be humiliated in the mosques (p. 66). He will appear ‘with the light of ‘ilm wa fiqh wa raḥma [knowledge and law and mercy]’ (p. 35), and he will perform miracles. The number of his followers will be small, but they will be all pure Arabs, for victory is for none other than the Arabs (p. 40). He will be of moderate height, with bashasha [comeliness] in his face, and clarity in his speech (p. 41).

These specifications in the Libros were propitious. After the humiliating surrender of the Moroccan port of al-‘Ara'ish to the Spaniards by al-Ma'mūn (son of al-Mansūr) in November 1610, Abu Maḥilli announced the beginning of the rule of the mahdi who ‘would bring mercy to the [Muslim] believers, and punishment to the unbelievers’.Footnote ²⁵ With an army of followers behind him, Abu Maḥilli launched his revolt against the Sa‘dian ruler of Morocco, Mulay Zaydān, another son of al-Mansūr.

Like Abu Maḥilli, John Harrison was a prolific writer and produced the first English archive about Morocco (most of which remains in manuscript at The National Archives).Footnote ²⁶ In the first part of the seventeenth century no other Englishman knew Morocco or the Moroccans better than he. He sent regular dispatches to James i and Charles i about developments in the region, and wrote letters to Moroccan intermediaries and leaders of religious communities. He also published the first – and only – information about Abu Maḥilli in English thereby introducing his countrymen for the first time to the concept and practice of Islamic Mahdism. In this respect, R. S., whose letter Harrison published in 1613, is the first Englishman to capture in print the actual words of a ‘Moor’, drawn not from hearsay or invective, but from personal experience – and to present his English readers with an inside view of a Muslim ‘saint’ and the dynamic of Islamic eschatology.

In May 1610 John Harrison, Groom of the Privy Chamber to Prince Henry, arrived as the representative of the ‘Barbarie merchants’ to Morocco.Footnote ²⁷ He stayed there until the following April of 1611 during which time he heard about the proclamations of Abu Maḥilli. The latter drew huge crowds as he grew in messianic and military stature, so much so that the Spanish chronicler, Jorge de Henin, heard (and wrote) about an Englishman by the name of ‘Martin’ who went to see Abu Maḥilli. Martin claimed that he had had a dream in which the Prophet Muḥammad appeared to him and told him to go to Morocco where he would find the man who would lead him to the Straight Path. Upon hearing those words from him, Abu Maḥilli confirmed that he had had the same dream and so the Englishman, who spoke Arabic fluently, converted to Islam, adopted the name of ‘Ali ibn ‘Abdallah, and assisted Abu Maḥilli in his miracles.Footnote ²⁸ The fame of Abu Maḥilli, along with his English henchman, as a performer of wonders spread far and wide,Footnote ²⁹ and so, on 20 May 1612, and confident of his mahdist leadership, Abu Maḥilli told his followers not to fear bullets, which would melt upon touching their bodies – which helped him to defeat a large contingent that had been sent against him by Mulay Zaydān.Footnote ³⁰ He then moved against the capital Marrakesh from where he drove out the Sa'dian incumbent.

The victory encouraged the European resident factors in Morocco to seek him out, in order to gauge his views on trade with their countries, and to learn about his foreign policy. Actually, it may well be that Abu Maḥilli wrote to them, along with the various ‘tribal leaders and dignitaries of nations’ with whom he corresponded.Footnote ³¹ In July 1612 two English merchants, R. S. and G. B., accompanied by other Europeans, went ‘to welcome him; he entertained vs very kindly’, later wrote R. S. (9 September 1612).Footnote ³² Abu Maḥilli had prophesied that news of the mahdi's appearance would be known to Christians and JewsFootnote ³³ – which may explain his willingness to meet with the delegates. R. S. continued: ‘I was in his Almahall at first fowre days, and spake with him, and saw his behauiour, and found him very humble and courteous, with many good speeches.’ R. S. then described the political and religious goals of Abu Maḥilli's movement. Regarding the first, R. S. mentioned how the ‘Saint’ was intent on conquering Spain (‘Granada, Andaluzia, &c.’), Italy and France by rebuilding ‘a bridge in the mouth of the straights, which hath been in former time (and so recorded in their writings) & sunk in the sea’.Footnote ³⁴ Abu Maḥilli assured his English audience that he and his followers did not approve of Mulay Zaydān's dealings with Spain, which is why ‘for England, Flanders, or other parts they haue not to doe [nothing to fear], they will haue friendship with vs, and desire trade and traffique with vs in loue and friendship’.Footnote ³⁵ Practising some Realpolitik, Abu Maḥilli knew that he would need weapons and munitions in his rebellion – which could well be supplied to him by the anti-Catholic Protestants, specifically, the Dutch who had been dealing with Mulay Zaydān for years. R. S. was pleased that Abu Maḥilli could prove a valuable ally to England and facilitate trade: he ‘told vs he would shew the English what fauour he could, and permit them free trade, willing vs to take knowledge that he was sent by Gods appointment to releeue the oppressed as wel Moores and strangers, as Christians, and al sorts’.Footnote ³⁶

On the the messianic claim of Abu Maḥilli R. S. continued:

R. S. was quite accurate in all these descriptions: the historian al-Ifrānī, over a century later, confirmed that Abu Maḥilli invoked the Fatimid ancestry of the mahdi – an ancestry that Ibn Khaldūn had specified among the markers of the mahdi.Footnote ³⁸ Equally accurate was R. S.'s report about Abu Maḥilli's proclamation that he would reign for forty years after which ‘must com Christ, whom they call Sidie Nicer: and he [Abu Maḥilli] must surrender all to him; for he must judge the world, and then all must end’.Footnote ³⁹ The Dutch member in the delegation explained that Abu Maḥilli saw himself as the king of the two seas and the deserts, all the way to China, sent by God to bring peace and obedience to the Law.Footnote ⁴⁰ Again, the report was accurate: in his own writings, Abu Maḥilli declared that he was to ‘tie the Mashriq with the lands of the Maghrib’.Footnote ⁴¹ His mission was to help the persecuted, to abolish evil from the world, and to implement the divine law. He saw himself as the instrument of God on earth.Footnote ⁴²

In one of the Arabic sources about Abu Maḥilli, it is reported that he was asked by his followers what they should do in the face of the persecution inflicted upon them by the Moroccan king. Abu Maḥilli replied: ‘Do as the followers of ‘Isa ibn Maryam [Jesus son of Mary] did who were carried on wood and sawn with saws … dying in obedience to God is better than living in disobedience.’Footnote ⁴³ This appeal to Jesus drew on al-khalīfa al-yasū'iya [the Christ successor] who was mentioned in the Libros: the Arab who would be like one of the anṣār – the Yathribites who had supported the Prophet after his flight from Mecca in 622. Abu Maḥilli emphasised that the mahdi was Jesus-like (ṣūratuhu ‘īsawiyya) in his asceticism, mystical aḥwāl (trances) and princely imāra (principality); also, the mahdi would follow the sunna (teachings) of ‘Isa.Footnote ⁴⁴ Abu Maḥilli used the Christ example to inspire his followers, who, as R. S. indicated, had included Christians, but also to move beyond the theological to the universal, and thereby unite Muslims with (Protestant) Christians against Spain and other Catholic adversaries (especially the dangerous Maltese).Footnote ⁴⁵ These allusions to Jesus are significant: previous proponents of Mahdism had appealed to a Hadith that there would be no mahdi except ‘Isa ibn Maryam – because none, as the Qurān had shown, spoke in the crib other than he (Qurān 5:11).Footnote ⁴⁶ It is also possible that Abu Maḥilli used the Christ imagery to win over European allies and to inspire his followers: the Christ factor could legitimise his claims as well as facilitate religious commonality and politico-military cooperation. In this emphasis on the leadership role of Jesus in bringing about the rule of the mahdi, Abu Maḥilli differed from contemporary European apocalyptic where the beginning of the kingdom of God was ushered by an eschatological cataclysm of destruction. Rather, as the mahdi, Abu Maḥilli would revert to the teachings of the Qurān, reclaim lands and peoples to the Prophet, and assume leadership of the Muslim umma, which included the Christian – Protestant, not Catholic – community.

R. S. included some of this information in a letter which he sent to Harrison in London. Both men had known each other in Morocco and R. S. knew that Harrison was interested in the latest developments because they could have a direct impact on trade. Merchant that he was, R. S. did not express any hostility to Abu Maḥilli in his letter: his tone is factual, suggesting that he was awed, or perhaps confused, by this messianic Muslim. Although he thought that Abu Maḥilli's followers would see through the claims made by the mahdi, R. S. conceded that Abu Maḥilli had won enough military victories to maintain himself, for many ‘great Saints and Sheckes resorted together, and would goe to visit him’.Footnote ⁴⁷ R. S. may well have believed, rightly, that such a figure was part of the religious tradition of North African Islam: that he did not react negatively to Abu Maḥilli could also be credited to the fact that English and continental Christianity had been producing messianic claimants since the Reformation. Abu Maḥilli could well be a messiah from among the Muslims and, if R. S. were aware of the anti-Christian apocalyptism that had spread in the eastern Levant under Sultan Murad iii, then he might not have been unwilling to welcome a mahdi who would be amenable to Protestant Christians.Footnote ⁴⁸

But such amenability was anathema to Harrison, who, a zealous theologian-cum-merchant, grew anxious at the indifference of the visitors to Abu Maḥilli's messianic claim. The false Abu Maḥilli had invoked Christ's example and used Christ's words, and he could prove effective in converting/alluring Englishmen living and trading in North Africa. Equally disturbing, and new, was Abu Maḥilli's internationalist ambition. Previous Sa‘dian mahdis had confined their visions to their own regions, although al-Qā'im thought of conquering Egypt and evicting the Turks after uniting the two kingdoms of Marrakesh and Fez. By the time of Aḥmad al-Mansūr, the kingdom of the mahdi had expanded in Moroccan ambition to include al-Andalus (to be conquered with English help), as well as the North African regions under Ottoman rule. At no point, however, did any Moroccan mahdi proclaim his desire to conquer the Christian West and the Mediterranean basin, all the way to China, as Abu Maḥilli did.Footnote ⁴⁹ And he had a plan for conquest with which Harrison may well have been familiar: Abu Maḥilli would build a bridge to link Africa with Europe – the same dangerous ambition that Dr Faustus had declared so frequently on the English stage.Footnote ⁵⁰

Soon after receiving the letters, Harrison published them, both the one from R. S. and the shorter letter from G. B. The title he gave to the publication was Late newes out of Barbary in a letter written of late from a merchant there to a gentl. not long imployed into that countrie from his majestie (1613). He assured his readers that he had received correspondence ‘out of Barbary, from an honest English Merchant, who hath long time sojourned there, very religious’. But then, to the letters, he added a preface in which he gave expression to his fear of the heretical and politico-military danger of Abu Maḥilli: the internationalism of Abu Maḥilli's mahdism, or rather, intermediterraneanism, was not just an intra-Islamic/Magharibi movement among North African Muslims, but one with a wider, and more threatening, geographical reach. So, in the preface, he denounced the ‘saint’, showing ‘how busily the Diuell acteth’.Footnote ⁵¹ But, at the same time, Harrison felt that the news about the Muslim messiah was auspicious because the appearance of a false messiah was one of the signs of the second coming of the true Christian messiah. Abu Maḥilli fitted into the Christian eschatological scheme where Christ's coming would be preceded by the appearance of a false pretender such as Abu Maḥilli, ‘the Ape & imitator of God’ who embodied the ‘Antichrist in this last age of the world whereof we haue been so long since forewarned.’Footnote ⁵² Further, the appearance of Abu Maḥilli confirmed that the end of time was approaching, ‘these last daies, “vpon whom the ends of the world are come.” [in the margin] Forty years (saith this new saintish king or Prophet of his) & then Christ must come to iudgement as in the letter’.Footnote ⁵³ For Harrison, this false ‘Prophetical King’ was being used by God to alert humanity that only the elect would be saved on the last day, unlike ‘these miserable Moores giuen ouer, beyond measure, to the idle & superstitious vanities…of blind prophesies, dreams, necromancie and such like, wherein these Saints professe themselues’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Soon after, the same publisher (Arthur Jonson) reprinted the text under another title, The new prophetical king of Barbary.Footnote ⁵⁵ Evidently, Harrison had struck a chord, which may explain the reprinting of the pamphlet soon after.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like others of his contemporaries, he believed that the world was approaching its end, an end that was confirmed by the storms of winter 1612–13 when hundreds of ships were sunk and many villages flooded with heavy loss of life.Footnote ⁵⁷ He also subscribed to a new strain of eschatology in English Protestant exegesis, which, since the late Elizabethan period, English theologians such as Thomas Brightman, Hugh Broughton and authors of disparate pamphlets, had begun to promulgate. Inherent in these views was the conversion of the Jews to Christianity as a precursor of the second coming of Christ.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1595 a short pamphlet entitled A most strange and wonderfull prophesie upon this troublesome world announced the imminent bridling ‘vp the Turke, that rageth against the happie state of Israell’ (fo. Biiiv).Footnote ⁵⁹ Just over ten years later, in 1606, another pamphlet declared that the Jews would march from the ‘West’ toward Palestine to fulfill the biblical prophecies of conversion,Footnote ⁶⁰ and two years later, in 1608, Thomas Draxe published a treatise, The worldes resurrection, or The generall calling of the Iewes, the subtitle of which explained that Christ would give the Jews grace to ‘returne and seeke Iehovah their God, and David their King, in these latter dayes’ – and convert.Footnote ⁶¹ Eager to join the effort to hasten the coming of the eschaton by converting the Jews,Footnote ⁶² Harrison decided to contribute to the effort by writing his own treatise. In 1610 he wrote The messiah alreadie come in which he furnished Moroccan Jews with evidence about Christ's messianic calling. He completed it rather quickly, soon after his arrival, having become worried that the Jews might be seduced by the false messiah of Morocco.

While the civil war raged among the sons of al-Mansūr, the condition of Jews became precarious – as Kitāb al-twarīkh [The book of histories], compiled by the rabbis of the Ibn Dannan family, shows. During the struggle against Mulay al-Shaykh, the third son of Mulay al-Mansūr, they had been told to pray for the warriors who had gone to fight him in al-‘Ara'ish – which they did.Footnote ⁶³ Other Jews, however, had been attracted to Abu Maḥilli, seeing in him a messianic redeemer who would free them from the burdensome taxes of Mulay Zaydān. Hoping to remove the ‘yoake’ of the captivity [title page of The messiah alreadie come] of the Jews, Harrison preached to them about the real Christian messiah and against the false Islamic one. The world was in its last days, he urged, as Abu Maḥilli's appearance proved: the man had convinced his followers that he was ‘sent by God’, and had sought to make known his ‘miracles and acts … abroade the world’. That he was, in his own words, a precursor of Christ could not but mean to Harrison that he was the AntiChrist, harbinger of the messiah. Meanwhile, Harrison had consulted the writings of the Jews’ own ‘Rabby Moses ben Maimon in his Epistle to his countrymen in Africa, concerning the time of the Messiah, which he thinketh to be past according to the Scriptures’.Footnote ⁶⁴ He also talked with locals, after which he was able to cast doubt on the information that had been brought to the Jews by the ‘Moores’ about ‘a people or nation of the Iewes, inhabiting in a farre countrie’. Harrison questioned a Moor about that information, but the latter was unable to tell him ‘the place where’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The message of his treatise to the Jews was that the (Christian) messiah had already come and there was no need for them to await their messiah: even ‘Mahomet in the Alkoran’ affirms Christ ‘to have beene a great Prophet’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Since Christ's ‘rival’ recognised the prophethood of Christ, there was no need for further proof.

When Harrison left Morocco for England in 1611, he was accompanied by Samuel Pallache, Mulay Zaydān's envoy to the States-General. Pallache introduced Harrison to the large Jewish community in Amsterdam, with whom Harrison had been unfamiliar.Footnote ⁶⁷ The sight of such an active community in Holland reawakened Harrison's hopes for conversion, for by this point in his intercontinental career, Harrison was beginning to view himself as a man of divine mission, travelling from Morocco to Holland to England as the intermediary of kings, and conveying messages from Muslims to Christians in the company of Jews. In Amsterdam, Harrison preached to the Jews – only to find them as unwilling to convert as their Moroccan brethren. So he shelved the manuscript of the treatise – but remained concerned about the Jews' attraction to Abu Maḥilli. The death of Abu Maḥilli in the battle of Jebal Guiliz near Marrakesh on 30 November 1613Footnote ⁶⁸ may have motivated him to dig up the treatise and send it for publication in Amsterdam so that it would be easily available to the community. In his preface to Late newes out of Barbary in 1613, he indicated that he was ‘encouraged to reuise some papers of my owne, all this while throwne aside’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The publisher was Giles Thorp, who published writings by the exiled English church in Holland, including those of theologians like Henry Ainsworth.Footnote ⁷⁰ The eschatological strain in Harrison's work would have appealed to Thorp and to his English readers in the city.

Harrison dedicated The messiah alreadie come; Or proofs of Christianitie, both out of the Scriptures, and auncient rabbins, to convince the Iewes, of their palpable, and more then miserable blindnes to the ‘Mightie Prince, Maurice, Prince of Orange’.Footnote ⁷¹ He explained that there were large numbers of Jews in the country, who ‘hauve their habitation in peace and safetie: not in that slaverie as in other nations, accounted of in the basest maner that may be’.Footnote ⁷² They were clearly in a better condition than the Jews of ‘Barbarie’, and perhaps therefore more willing to listen to his message about Christ. They were ‘children of the promise’ who were ‘expecting with patience their conversion in due time’.Footnote ⁷³ With Abu Maḥilli dead, the ‘Prophetical King’ had been shown to be a false messiah – another sign of the imminence of the Christian eschaton. ‘Els’, he continued, ‘what meaneth so manie Sects, and Schismes in our Church at this day? Diseases arising from some bad humours and corruptions in the bodie?’Footnote ⁷⁴ It was crucial for Harrison that the Jews realise that their expectation of the messiah as ‘a temporall King, to rule and conquer in this world’ was falseFootnote ⁷⁵ – for that was the exact claim of the false messiah of Morocco, ‘one of these fanaticall Saints now become a King’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The rise and fall of Abu Maḥilli was used by Harrison to prove to the Jews that the politico-military messiah whom they expected was as false as Abu Maḥilli.

Harrison may have felt encouraged about publishing the treatise after talking with Samuel Pallache. The latter had followed the career of Abu Maḥilli and had been disturbed by his community's attraction to the man. There is little doubt that Pallache denounced Abu Maḥilli to Harrison during their time together – for after the death of Abu Maḥilli, Pallache wrote a vicious attack on the Moroccan claimant.Footnote ⁷⁷ Harrison travelled back to Morocco in 1614 and in 1615 on more royal missions, delivering letters from Mulay Zaydān to King James i and to the States-General. In one of those letters Mulay Zaydān thanked James for his letter which had been delivered by ‘John Harshoun’ (on his second journey in April 1614), proving how much monarchs cared for the welfare of each other. He assured the king that ‘God had now relieved us’ of the ‘fitan’ (civil disturbances) of Abu Maḥilli. Thank God, continued Zaydān, ‘that He made a link among the kings of the earth, notwithstanding differences in religion’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The defeat of Abu Maḥilli with his false religious claims confirmed the need for monarchs and princes to cooperate with each other. But in Morocco Harrison discovered that the followers of Abu Maḥilli believed that their mahdi had not died, and they were awaiting his return.Footnote ⁷⁹ So he renewed his efforts with the Jews and, in 1619, he published The messiah alreadie come again in Amsterdam (and again with Giles Thorp), followed by another edition in that year (also with Thorp), in which he included a dedication to Frederick Henry, king of Bohemia, son-in-law of King James. As he explained to Frederick, the conversion of the Bohemian Jews would occur after the destruction of the ‘Mysterie of Iniquitie Babylon’/papal Rome and would mark ‘the very period of all Prophecies’.Footnote ⁸⁰

But in November 1620 the Protestant Frederick was defeated at the Battle of White Mountain by the Catholic forces of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand ii. With the loss of Bohemia, and the flight of Frederick to Holland, Harrison was forced to consider an alternative eschatological scheme. In 1609 the Spanish king Philip iii had begun to expel the moriscos from his kingdom, a project that would take five years of violent uprooting, expropriation and murder. In Morocco, specifically Tetouan and Salé, Harrison met with the exiles who thought that the English Protestants might support them in their revenge upon their former compatriots.Footnote ⁸¹ Some of the recently arrived exiles organised naval squadrons and began to attack Iberian shipping and coasts, while raising the banner of mortal enmity to Catholicism, the papacy and the inquisition. For Harrison, this anti-Catholicism was tantamount to the sounding of the trumpet of the eschaton: the moriscos, he determined, were fighting the papal AntiChrist after which they would convert to Protestantism and welcome Christ's second coming. Their struggle against papist idolatry put them on the same military and ideological footing as Britain in the last battle between Christ and the AntiChrist. Harrison was now in high gear, and in a fit of missionary zeal, penned two letters on the same day to all the prospective converts. On 27 June 1625 he wrote ‘A generall letter to the Moores’ (a letter which he opened with the words, ‘Bismilla’, in a typical Muslim fashion): Moors, Turks, even Jews, he wrote, should join with those who profess ‘the Reformed Religion’ and fight against ‘the enemies of both nations, yea of all nations, and all likewise enemies to them – the “Romane” Spaniards’.Footnote ⁸² Harrison then wrote to ‘the Jewes To whom pertaineth the adoption and the glorie and the covenante’. He knew that they were expecting the messiah and assured them that upon their being ‘raised … into the holy land … [you would] mete your long looked for Messiah. There shall be one People … both Turkes, Moores, Jews and Christians Even all Nations’.Footnote ⁸³ A month later, and still in Tetouan, a morisco stronghold, Harrison grew confident that the conversion not only of the Jews but also of the moriscos was at hand. In a letter addressed to the commander of the English fleet in the Mediterranean, he wrote that ‘All Africa both Moores, Jewes, and all others (especially the Moriscoes or Andaluze)’ rejoiced at his coming and prayed for his ‘good successe’ against the Catholic adversaries.Footnote ⁸⁴ The moriscos, added Harrison in another letter, were eager to read ‘Calvin and other bookes of our religion … Yea, both, Moores, Jewes and all … with generall disposicion and inclination both towards our nation, and even to Christian religion, havinge observed, and no doubt God hath a finger in it, who ruleth in the heartes of all men and can turne them which way soever he pleaseth’.Footnote ⁸⁵ He was convinced that the moriscos were seriously inclined to Christianity, ‘having also some old prophecies of their owne, tending to that effect’. He then quoted from a morisco letter:

Unfortunately, the alliance between Britain and the moriscos that the latter desired and Harrison urged did not materialise. Much as Harrison tried to convince King Charles of the need to attack Ma‘mūra where the moriscos would help him against the Spanish contingent in that presidio, the king did not listen.Footnote ⁸⁷ Harrison did not give up, remaining hopeful of the eschaton, which is why, and for years to follow, he continued to recall the death of Abu Maḥilli as a decisive sign. Toward the end of 1627 Harrison wrote an account of his ‘proceedings in Barbarie’ in which he recalled Abu Maḥilli:

A year later, in 1628, fifteen years after the death of Abu Maḥilli, Harrison wrote another account of ‘The state of Barbary’ in which, again, he described ‘Bumhalli’ and how he and others like him ‘got to themselves a great opinion among the simple people and are reverenced as pettie Popes or rather demy-gods, thinking they know all things and can doe all things what they please . . sent of God’. Harrison emphasised how this false claimant had met with death, proving thereby that the ‘vaine hopes’ of his followers were ‘but mere delusions’.Footnote ⁸⁹

At least Harrison could feel satisfied that his mission of discrediting Abu Maḥilli had been effective, and although none of his conversionary goals had been realised and the eschaton had not begun, he had prevented Jews and moriscos from following a false messiah. The supposed disillusion of the moriscos with Abu Maḥilli assured Harrison that they would be amenable to conversion, and when a white dog came from the countryside into Salé and started fawning over the English merchants but biting the Moors, everyone in ‘citie and countrie’ declared that the dog had ‘turned Christian’ and was a ‘prognostication that the Moores should turne from their lawe’. Harrison reported that the ‘dog did shew the way and what they ought to doe’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The dog confirmed that the messianic age was about to begin.

The intersection between Abu Maḥilli and John Harrison in the early modern Mediterranean captures the moment of eschatological confluence between Christianity and Islam, England/Europe and Morocco/North Africa.Footnote ⁹¹ Throughout the sixteenth century there had been eschatological movements in both the Ottoman East and the Christian West. Among the Ottomans, the unprecedented military victories and territorial expansions produced a sense of divine purpose which Sultan Suleyman was eager to exploit.Footnote ⁹² On the Christian side, the astronomical discoveries which unsettled earth and man, and the rending of the common corpse of Christendom at the Reformation, produced theological and socio-political challenges that could only find legitimacy in the world-changing prophecies of the Bible and its exegetes. In the case of the Mediterranean encounter between English eschatology and Moroccan mahdism, the causes of eschatological expectations were quite different, since Abu Maḥilli was drawing on an indigenous tradition of revolution and leadership. Be that as it may, Magharibi religio-political thinking was running in a parallel, albeit distinct, course to English and European aspirations. Just as the latter eschatology was underpinning the emergent ‘millenarian conception of imperial destiny’ in Europe, so it did in North Africa: as the universal monarchy of Spain had spread in the Atlantic and the Pacific, Abu Maḥilli hoped for a mahdist kingdom in the whole of the Mediterranean basin; and just as Protestant and Catholic powers framed their territorial and economic rivalry ‘in terms of apocalyptic battles of salvation history’, so did Abu Maḥilli who envisioned the re-conquest of al-Andalus as a prelude to the establishment of the mahdist kingdom of peace. And just as ‘millenarian theories of empire, especially in Spain and Portugal, celebrated expansion’, so did Harrison envision British expansion at the same time that Abu Maḥilli sought mahdist domination.Footnote ⁹³

That Harrison continued to think back to Abu Maḥilli, so many years after the latter's death, reveals the fixation at the centre of Harrison's messiano-political aspirations. In a region where Muslims were in the ascendancy, where ‘saints’ could proclaim and nearly achieve messianic hegemony, Harrison felt vulnerable. Abu Maḥilli was a danger to English regional aspirations; he was also a danger to Jewish and Morisco conversion which, Harrison hoped, would be a factor in hastening the second coming – and in advancing British economic interests in a region rich in sugar and saltpetre and ready for English cloth and tobacco (Abu Maḥilli smoked, and defended tobacco against jurists who attacked its use). For the first time in the history of Anglo-Islamic relations in North Africa, an English factor openly associated commercial cooperation with conversion: Harrison wanted to convert the moriscos and the Jews not only to save their souls before Christ's second coming, but also to co-opt them into the project of a British trading hegemony in Morocco. Nowhere earlier in English commercial records does the intersection of ideology and Christianisation, national goals and Protestant zeal, appear more starkly. Harrison became so firmly dependent on Abu Maḥilli, in both his exegesis and his trading aspiration, that the latter's rise and fall became the cornerstone of his expectations, and the living (and dead) proof of his eschatological proclamations. Abu Maḥilli became a Muslim means to a Christian end, but an indispensable means providing proof of the imminence of the second coming, and the conversion, or destruction, of all who did not submit to the Prince of Peace.