Brotton - This Orient isle Elizabethan England and the Islamic world

Jerry Brotton

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THIS ORIENT ISLE

Elizabethan England and the Islamic World

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First published 2016

Copyright Jerry Brotton, 2016

Cover image: detail from Album of Shah Tahmasp I, 16th century Roland and Sabrina Michaud/akg-images
Cover design: Antonio Colao

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-00403-6

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For my wife, Charlotte

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house

Against the envy of less happier lands;

This blessd plot, this earth, this realm, this England

Shakespeare, Richard II, 2.1.4050

1. Muhammad al-Annuri, the Moroccan ambassador and Morisco (Spanish-born Muslim convert) who arrived in London in August 1600 to propose an Anglo-Moroccan alliance. Shakespeare probably started to write Othello six months later.

2. Willem de Pannemakers tapestry showing Catholic Habsburg forces triumphantly sacking Tunis in 1535. These scenes of slaughter and enslavement were first displayed in London following Mary Tudor and Philip of Spains marriage in 1554.

3. After his marriage to Queen Mary in 1554, the Catholic Philip of Spain was technically also king of England. This joint portrait was painted in 1558, the year of Marys death.

4. The Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I, c. 1600. The jewels and fabrics are all recognizably oriental, a reminder of the extensive Anglo-Islamic trade.

5. Diogo Homems map of the Mediterranean from the Queen Mary Atlas (1558), showing Ottoman flags flying over North Africa.

6. The idealistic but naive king Sebastian I of Portugal, whose defeat and death (alongside two rival Moroccan rulers) at the battle of Alccer-Quibir in 1578 sent shockwaves throughout Europe.

7. A view of Marrakesh, the capital city of the Saadian dynasty, from a seventeenth-century engraving by the Dutch artist Adriaen Matham.

8. Hans Eworths portrait of sultan Sleyman the Magnificent on horseback (1549), one of many pictures of Islamic rulers owned by the Elizabethan elite.

9. Sultan Selim II, surrounded by his army, receiving homages after the death of his father sultan Sleyman in 1566.

10. Samson Rowlie, a Norfolk merchant captured by the Turks in 1577. As the Latin inscription states, he was castrated, converted to Islam, renamed Hassan Aga and became Chief Eunuch and Treasurer of Algiers.

11. Needlework hanging showing a personification of Faith looking remarkably like Queen Elizabeth and Muhammad, commissioned by Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury at the height of the Anglo-Ottoman accord.

12. A portrait of Sultan Murad III from an Ottoman album of 15889. Murad and Queen Elizabeth corresponded about politics and commerce for over two decades.

13. Copy of a letter from Sultan Murad III to Queen Elizabeth dated 20 June 1590 in praise of the queen, with the Ottoman calligraphic tughra