Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World > Status Update

'King James had ended England's diplomatic isolation from the rest of Europe and the need for English alliances with Muslim kingdoms to act as a bulwark against Spain's religious and imperial menace... As the Spain and English sat down at Somerset House to agree the Treaty of London, the only visible sign that remained of the Anglo-Ottoman alliance was the Turkey carpet that covered the table between them.'

'In March 1603, Queen Elizabeth died at Richmond Palace. While most of England lamented, Sherley must have celebrated, as the queen's death brought one of his greatest supporters to the English throne, King James VI of Scotland. James, never renowned as a shrewd judge of character, had been flattered by Sherley's prolix correspondence... He asked the Venetians to hand over one brother'

'Sherley lied, bullied and borrowed his way across Ottoman territory, travelling through Crete, Tripoli and Aleppo, where he obtained more money from the English consul. News of his behaviour was already reaching London, where in December 1598 John Chamberlain noted, 'Sir Anthony Sherley has wrung £400 from our merchants at Constantinople, and has scraped together £500 more at Aleppo'

'As The Merchant of Venice's Prince of Morocco left the stage, so did the Barbary Company. In July 1597, just a year after Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, with its charter expired and private trade promising to offer better returns, the company was quietly dissolved. It was now every man for itself in Morocco.'

'Elizabeth's relations with 'the great Turk' were taking on a new dimension. Rumours were circulating through Europe's royal courts that Elizabeth was providing financial and military support 'to help the Great Turk to invade Christendom', partly inspired by the success of Barton's embassy. Barton was also petitioning Burghley to send Murad gifts from the queen to endorse his appointment.'

'Of more than sixty plays featuring Turks, Moors and Persians performed in London's public theatres between 1576 and 1603, at least forty were staged between 1588 and 1599. Of the thirty-eight extant plays performed between 1587 and 1593, at least ten acknowledge explicit debts to Marlowe's Tamburlaine.'

'By the autumn of 1589, Catholic Spain, Protestant England and Muslim Morocco were locked in a three-way power struggle, each side playing off the others in a complex dance of politics, religion, money and military one-upmanship, with the first round going to the wily Philip.'

'Both the Sa'adian and Ottoman rulers had watched tiny, insignificant England overcome the mighty war machine of the monarch whom al-Fishtali called 'the great tyrant of Castile', and they now regarded Elizabeth with respect as an important political player on the international stage.'

'frustrated by the sultan's persistent broken promises of a formal military alliance, Harborne told Walsingham that he was ready to 'depart presently'... He believed the Ottomans remained more interested in war with Persia than with Spain, and offered the forlorn hope that Don António could lead an anti-Spanish force to recapture the Portuguese throne, diminishing Spanish power in Iberia, North Africa and beyond.'

'How sincere and enduring was anyone's religion in the face of the sheer variety of forced, strategic or spontaneous conversions taking place between various faiths at this time? This included Protestantism, a theology barely seventy years old, now riven with its own factionalism and fighting for its survival in late sixteenth-century Europe.'