Cut off from much of Catholic Europe,
Elizabeth I’s regime embarked on
a remarkable relationship with the
Islamic world, as Jerry Brotton reveals
BR
IDG
EM
AN
/G
ET
TY
common enemy of both Islam and
Protestantism: Catholicism.
The reasons for this surprising and
generally overlooked alliance go back to the
rise of Islam since the time of the crusades,
and the more unforeseen consequences of
the 16th-century Reformation. The fall of
Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453
proved to be just one particularly dramatic
moment in the apparently irresistible global
rise of Islamic power in the face of a weak and
divided Christianity. The papacy preached
that the Muslim faith was nothing more than
a garbled mixture of paganism and apostasy,
though such claims were difficult to square
with the power of a theocracy that, at the time
Luther was calling for reform within the
Christian church, ruled north Africa, the
Arabian peninsula, Greece, the Holy Land
(including Jerusalem), central Asia, most of
the Indian subcontinent and large swathes of
eastern Europe, and had even reached China.
This should not disguise the conflicts and
tensions inherent in (to use a rather unsatis-
factory term) ‘the Islamic world’. The Sunni
Ottoman empire clashed with the neighbour-
ing Persian Shia empire, and had defeated the
powerful Egyptian Mamluk sultanate in 1517
to become undisputed defenders of Islam’s holy
cities and pilgrimage routes. In north-west
Africa, the Saadian dynasty (of Arab descent)
played fast and loose with their theological dis-
tance and independence from the Ottomans.
Nevertheless, to most Christian princes the
Islamic world looked like a militarily andExcommunication
allowed the Tudors
to establish alliances
with the Islamic
world on a scale
never seen before
O
n 25 February 1570,
a papal bull issued
in Rome by Pope
Pius V, entitled
Regnans in Excelsis
(‘Reigning on
High’), excommu-
nicated Queen
Elizabeth I. The
bull condemned “Elizabeth, the pretended
Queen of England” for “having seized on the
kingdom and monstrously usurped the place
of supreme head of the church in all England”.
It concluded: “We do out of the fullness of
our apostolic power declare the aforesaid
Elizabeth as being a heretic and a favourer of
heretics, and her adherents in the matters
aforesaid, to have incurred the sentence
of excommunication.”
The bull’s consequences are well known.
It divided English Catholics over whether
or not to rebel against Elizabeth, while
strengthening patriotic support for the queen
and pushing her towards more aggressive
Protestant policies at home and abroad. Pius’s
decision tacitly supported a series of attempts
to assassinate Elizabeth, and ultimately led to
the sailing of the Armada in 1588. But it also
had another, less well-known but equally
significant outcome: it allowed the Tudors to
establish a series of commercial and military
alliances with the Islamic world on a scale
never seen before in England.A common enemy
Over the next 30 years, Elizabeth would
broker deals with the Ottoman, Persian
and Saadian (Moroccan) empires that saw
hundreds, if not thousands, of Elizabethan
men and women travelling across Muslim
lands. Some converted to Islam, others
merely traded amicably, while Elizabeth’s
diplomats travelled back and forth between
Whitehall, Marrakech, Constantinople and
Qazvin (the Persian empire’s capital),
concocting Anglo-Islamic alliances as
a bulwark against what at the time was the