Sunday 27 October 2024

Leicestershire’s Marco Polo? Anthony Jenkinson (1529-1611)

LAHS Trustee, Elizabeth Tingle explores themes of travel, globalisation and slavery, through the life of this Tudor merchant adventurer.

In the churchyard of Holy Trinity church, Teigh, in Rutland, lie the mortal remains of one of the first recorded English travellers to Russia and Central Asia. Anthony Jenkinson’s grave is no longer marked, but the records of his travels and his surviving letters comprise the first English descriptions of the lands and peoples of Muscovy and Tartary. With recent historical interest in travel, life writing, and perceptions of ‘other,’ the story of Jenkinson adds a Leicestershire and Rutland dimension to the processes of globalisation and empire that made the modern world.

Anthony Jenkinson was born in Market Harborough on 8 October 1529.[1] His father William was a property owner in the town, with a particular interest in inns – the town was on the main road to and from London to Carlisle so hospitality was good business – and Jenkinson senior is recorded as building stables near to the town square in 1550. Anthony trained as a merchant and from 1546, travelled extensively in Europe and the Mediterranean, including the Levant and North Africa.[2] By the time he was thirty, he was an experienced and widely travelled trader.

It is for his journeys to Russia and central Asia that Jenkinson is best known. In 1557, the Muscovy Company (founded 1555) appointed Jenkinson to captain a four-ship convoy to Russia, to accompany the returning ambassador Osip Nepea to the court of Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible). Nepea had led the first Russian diplomatic mission to England in 1556-7, with the aim of securing trade relations. Jenkinson’s mission was to secure English trading privileges for the Muscovy Company and to explore eastern trade routes, within Russia and further south, to Persia. To this end, he stayed at the court of the Tsar across Christmas and New Year 1558. After, Jenkinson travelled south, down the Volga into the Caspian region, wintering at Bukhara and returning to England via Moscow in 1559. While Jenkinson’s attempts to sell woollen broadcloths to the Tartars were unsuccessful, his trip opened possibilities for English trade.

Jenkinson aspired to travel to Persia through Russia, and he made two further journeys to attempt this mission. In 1561-2 he travelled to Shirvan via Moscow and gained trading privileges for the Muscovy Company. In 1566, he made a third journey and took letters from Queen Elizabeth I to Tsar Ivan; he wrote to William Cecil about the war and terror wreaked by ‘the Terrible’. Later, in 1577, Jenkinson was sent again as an ambassador to the Russian court but was detained in the north of the region because of plague and war. However, he did facilitate another exchange of letters between the Tsar and Queen Elizabeth, and he secured further Muscovy Company privileges, although these were soon cancelled by the Russians.

We know about the Jenkinson’s travels because he left detailed, published descriptions of his journeys. His most famous output was a map of Muscovy and Tartary, the first map of Russian territories to be produced in England. This was printed in Abraham Ortelius’s atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570. In later life, Jenkinson wrote an account of his travels, and they were incorporated in the enormously influential Principal Navigation of Hakluyt published first in 1589 and in an expanded form in 1598-1600.[3]

In recent years, there has been great scholarly interest in the history of travellers’ experiences and perceptions of other cultures, which has resurrected an interest in Jenkinson. In 2000, Market Harborough Museum curated an exhibition ‘From Harborough to Tartary’ and published a catalogue to accompany it. Recently, with high profile public debates about the ‘decolonisation’ of contemporary culture, particularly linked to past exploitation of indigenous and enslaved peoples, there has been a focus on Jenkinson’s attitude to slavery. During his expeditions to Russia, Jenkinson frequently encountered slavery, for the wars between Muscovy and central Asian states resulted in the taking, ransoming and selling of slaves on all sides. As part of his first expedition in Russia, Jenkinson redeemed twenty-five Russian slaves and took them back to Moscow. He also purchased an enslaved girl in central Asia, the subject of a Radio 3 Essay.[4] Whether he had any more dealings in enslaved people we do not know.

In 1559, in a letter to Henry Long, the Muscovy Company Resident in Vologda, Jenkinson thanks him ‘for my wench, Aura Soltana’. This name is unlikely to have been her birth name, for it is typical of exotic, regal names given to enslaved people by their owners. Aura Soltana was a young Tartar girl probably enslaved during recent Russian campaigns in central Asia. Jenkinson commented that a Tartar child could be purchased for the cost of a 6d loaf of bread in England. Aura Soltana was brought back to England and presented as an exotic ‘gift’ to Queen Elizabeth in 1561.[5] She was baptised and given the name of Ippolita, and for the next seven or eight years she remained at court, for her name appears in the wardrobe accounts as the recipient of clothing. Thereafter, she disappears from the documentary record.

From the mid-1560s, Jenkinson settled in London. In 1566, he was rewarded for his missions to Russia with a life annuity of £40 from the Crown. In 1568 he married Judith Marshe, daughter of John Marshe, a Merchant Adventurer and relative of Thomas Gresham who was an original founder of the Muscovy Company. In 1569, Jenkinson was granted a coat of arms with a crest featuring a heraldic sea horse. Henceforth, he focused on business and property management closer to home.

In 1577, Jenkinson’s interest turned to the Midlands, and he acquired Sywell Manor in Northamptonshire from his wife’s family, extending the estate over the next few years. In 1606, he sold his Sywell properties and moved to Ashton Manor, Northants, probably as a lessee of the Crown.

Jenkinson drew up his will on 13 November 1610, his wife having predeceased him. He was buried on 16 February 1611 at Teigh, where he was staying with his nephew the rector Zachary Jenkinson. Jenkinson had been visiting his friend William Sherard at nearby Stapleford Park, but by November was too frail to sign his will. Jenkinson left a pension of £30 to his son Henry, as long as he should remain, ‘as he is now, of weak state of mind and body’, but if he was restored to his health and memory, he should have £50 annually. As his only son was clearly unwell, Jenkinson left the majority of his estate to his eldest grandson Henry Jenkinson, in cash and goods, once Henry reached 21 years of age. Bequests were also made to son Henry’s younger children William and Mary Jenkinson, with small amounts left to Jenkinson’s four married daughters and some of their children. [6]

Jenkinson lived an extraordinary life of travel and trade. While his journeys were exceptional, for their pioneering nature and because they were described in print, the mobility of people in this period was notable. Royal spouses, merchants, soldiers, enslaved people, servants, labourers, the vagrant poor, all moved, whether forced or voluntarily. People frequently had to adapt to unfamiliar places, languages, foods and social customs at some point in their lives. Jenkinson had many advantages. Although he was born in a small market town in Leicestershire, he profited from the wealth and mercantile contacts of his family, and the relative proximity of London, to create an exceptional career for himself. He may have returned periodically to Market Harborough and its neighbourhood to visit relatives – his brother William lived locally until his death around 1600, and as we saw above, his nephew Zachary lived in Teigh. Jenkinson’s final journey took him to Rutland, where he remains to this day.

Elizabeth Tingle. Email Elizabeth.tingle@dmu.ac.uk

Notes and further reading

[1] A biography can be found in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - John H. Appleby, ‘Jenkinson, Anthony (1529–1610/11), traveller and writer,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 

[2] A detailed account of Jenkinson’s life and travels is Yuri Galitzine, ‘Rutland, Russia and Shakespeare,’ Rutland Record 11 (1991), 3-13. There is a story of a romance in which Jenkinson fathered an illegitimate daughter, Anne Beck, sometime sweetheart of William Shakespeare, but there is no hard evidence for this paternal relationship.

[3] The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques And Discoveries Of The English Nation, ed. Richard Hakluyt (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons: 1903), vol. 2.

[4]  BBC Radio Programme Aura Soltana The Essay Broadcast 27 April 2023.

[5] “Ipolita the Tartarian:” A Living Diplomatic Gift for Elizabeth I | MEMOs (memorients.com)

[6] Will of Anthony Jenkinson 13 November 1610. The National Archives PROB-11-117-230.