and cotton, drink sweet wines and
consume aniseed, nutmeg, mace,
turmeric and pistachios. The demand for
currants alone from Ottoman-controlled
Greek islands was so great that at the height
of Elizabeth’s reign 2,300 tonnes were being
imported annually.
Slowly but surely the Tudors were changed
by their encounter with Islam – in the trade
they practised, the diplomacy they pursued,
the clothes they wore and the things they ate.
Yet with Elizabeth’s death in 1603,
James VI and I’s accession and peace with
Spain in 1604, the need for an anti-Spanish
Anglo-Islamic alliance collapsed. Over the
subsequent centuries, academic ‘orientalism’
denigrated Islamic societies as decadent,
despotic and backward, a myth reinforced
by the ideolog y of British imperial rule over
Islamic communities across the Middle East
and east Asia. It is only in recent years – with
the rise of religious fundamentalism, the
infamous ‘war on terror’ and ‘clash of
civilisation’ thesis – that the long and
fraught history of Christian and Islamic
encounters is being re-examined to find
some response to the conflicts currently
raging in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and even on the
streets of Paris, London and Madrid.
Elizabeth’s reign saw a brief and extremely
strategic flowering of a rapprochement with
the Islamic world and, though it was
confused and misunderstood, it was a time
at which those on both sides of the theologi-
cal divide put aside faith to try to find ways
of accommodating each other’s differences.
A truly multicultural approach to world
history should acknowledge that Tudor
England was not insular and parochial
but outward-looking and international,
and that relations with the Muslim world
were an important part of its story. If we
want to understand the role played by many
different faiths in this island’s history, from
Christians and Jews to British Muslims,
then it is a story we need to acknowledge
now more than ever before. GETTY^ IMAGES/V&A^ IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN/DREAMSTIMEBOOK
This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England
and the Islamic World by Jerry Brotton
(Allen Lane, 2016)DISCOVER MOREListen to Jerry Brotton discussing the
Tudors and Islam on our weekly podcast
historyextra.com/podcastsON THE PODCASTJerry Brotton is professor of renaissance studies
at Queen Mary University of LondonThe Tudors were
changed by their
encounter with
Islam, in the trade
they practised, the
diplomacy they
pursued and the
clothes they wore
Changing tastes Nutmeg, currants and
ornate Turkish fabric, all highly prized
commodities embraced by prosperous
Elizabethans as a result of the new tradeMuslim stars of
Shakespeare’s plays
By the 1580s, Elizabeth’s amicable
relations with the Islamic world had
drawn the attention of dramatists
including Christopher Marlowe and
William Shakespeare. Plays featuring
Turks and Moors became a fashion.
Between 1576 and 1603 more than
60 were written with Muslim charac-
ters, though ‘Muslim’ only entered
the language in 1615; before then
‘Mahometans’, ‘Ottomites’, ‘Sara-
cens’, ‘Moors’, ‘Pagans’ or ‘Turks’
were used interchangeably to
describe Muslims.
Shakespeare’s plays are full of
references to Moors and Turks. In
1592 his first history play, Henry VI,
Part 1, mentions ‘Mahomet’ (Muham-
mad); two years later, the villainous
Aaron the Moor appeared in the
revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus.
Shakespeare put a different Moor
onstage in The Merchant of Venice
(1596): the Prince of Morocco, who
tries unsuccessfully to woo the
heroine Portia.
Shakespeare’s interest in such
characters culminated in Othello
(c1600–03), subtitled ‘The Moor of
Venice’. Othello is a notoriously
ambiguous figure, subject to racial
slurs but also admired as a Moor who
has converted to Christianity (though
from what, we are never told) and
whose marriage to the Venetian
noblewoman Desdemona is de-
stroyed by his jealous lieutenant Iago,
whose name in Spanish is Santiago,
or Matamoros – the Moor killer.Laurence Fishburne as the brooding
‘Moor’ Othello. Moor was one of the
early terms used for MuslimsElizabethans and the world / Islamic allies