“At war with Catholic Europe, Elizabethan England turned to the Ottomans”
On a May morning in 1570 a papal bull, nailed to the door of the Bishop of London’s palace, sealed Protestant England’s break with Catholic Europe. But the excommunication of Elizabeth I had another consequence, one that posterity has been slow to acknowledge, and which this timely book is among the first to treat in substantial detail: the isolated English queen’s pursuit of ties with the sultans and shahs of Islamic Turkey, Morocco and Persia.
There is no question that Jerry Brotton’s exploration of “a much longer connection between England and the Islamic world” than is generally appreciated has currency. His canvas takes in places with “tragic resonance” for our age, among them Raqqa, Aleppo and Fallujah. But resisting the temptation to draw parallels between then and now, Brotton crafts a purely 16th-century narrative set on two geographical fronts. We follow pioneer embassies to Constantinople, Marrakesh and Qazvin (the former Persian capital) alongside the growing hold the Islamic world exerted on the English from the time of Henry VIII, a fascination that would find powerful expression in Elizabethan cuisine, fashion and theatre.
But it is overseas where the best of the book’s drama takes place. Brotton’s cast of intrepid itinerants – merchant envoys, adventurer spies and maverick chancers – were to prove remarkably resourceful in charming or bribing high-ranking court officials among Turkey’s ruling Ottomans, then at the height of their power, as well as Morocco’s Sa’adian Dynasty and the Safavids of Persia. Chief among these proto-diplomats was William Harborne, who in 1578 successfully petitioned the Grand Vizier to instigate a formal but increasingly warm correspondence between Sultan Murad III and Elizabeth. In just two years Harborne secured for English merchants full commercial rights, or “Capitulations”, which were to last until the Ottoman Empire’s demise in 1923.
Brotton is at his best when he analyses the glue – a mix of expedience and ideology – which bound this “Turco-Protestant Conspiracy”, as it was seen by the outmanoeuvred representatives of Constantinople’s competing commercial powers, mainly the French and Venetians.
posted by f.sheikh