Elizabethan England and the Islamic World
In 1570, when it became clear she would never be gathered into the Catholic fold, Elizabeth I was excommunicated by the Pope. It was the beginning of an English alignment with Muslim powers, and of cultural, economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age. England signed treaties with the Ottoman Porte, received ambassadors from the kings of Morocco and shipped munitions to Marrakesh in the hope of establishing an accord that would keep the common enemy of Catholic Spain at bay. By the late 1580s hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Elizabethan merchants, diplomats, sailors, artisans and privateers were plying their trade from Morocco to Persia.
The awareness of Islam which these Englishmen brought home found its way into many of the great English cultural productions of the day, including most famously Marlowe´s Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare´s Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Less well known is that English merchants had reached Persia in the 1560s, and that by the 1580s Elizabeth was corresponding with the Ottoman sultan, having installed an ambassador in Constantinople with the express intention of fomenting conflict with Spain. In 1599 Thomas Dallam, a Lancastrian blacksmith, was sent to the Ottoman capital to play his clockwork organ in front of Sultan Mehmed and the adventurer Sir Anthony Shirley was at the court of the Persian Shah Abbas the Great. The following year the Moroccan ambassador, Abd al-Wahid bin Mohammed al-Annuri, spent six months in London with his entourage. Shakespeare wrote Othello six months later.
This Orient Isle shows that England´s relations with the Muslim world were far more extensive, and often more amicable, than we have ever appreciated, and that their influence was felt across the political, commercial and domestic landscape of Elizabethan England. It is a startlingly unfamiliar picture of a part of our national and international history that Jerry Brotton recreates in vivid and timely fashion.