Strike an Elizabethan Pose: Early Music Diplomacy—Queen Elizabeth I’s Clockwork Organ Gift to the Ottoman Court

In 1599, England’s Queen Elizabeth I dispatched a most unusual present to Sultan Mehmet III of the Ottoman Empire. The present, sent onboard the merchant ship, The Hector, was a golden jewel-encrusted automated musical clockwork organ. At sixteen feet high, the clockwork organ was an ingenious piece of craftmanship and automaton engineering. Built by an English musician and organ-maker named Thomas Dallam, the organ was a self-playing automatic device assembled with a chiming clock, mechanical singing birds and rotating statues. Strategically placed in its center was the bejeweled and diamond- dripping figure of the benefactor of the spectacular gift, a mechanical figure of Queen Elizabeth I, surrounded by a celestial constellation of eight rotating figures (Mole 2012, 161). To ensure that the diplomatic gift arrived in perfect working conditions and to present and perform the clockwork organ gift in a grandiose ceremony in the presence of the Sultan and the court, Thomas Dallam was accompanied by an engineer, a carpenter, and a painter (16).