culturally superior superpower, to be
regarded with fear but also admiration.
Martin Luther saw things slightly
differently. As he launched his attack on
Rome, he argued ingeniously that the
Ottomans were part of God’s divine plan,
and that “to make war on the Turks is to
rebel against God, who punishes our sins
through them”. He regarded the pope and
the Turk as two versions of Antichrist, but
his initial refusal to support a holy war
against the Ottoman empire led the papacy
to brand him as a heretic and little better
than a Turk.
Writing in his Dialogue Concerning
Heresies (1528), Sir Thomas More echoed
these attacks, referring to “Luther’s sect”
as worse than “all the Turks, all the Saracens,
all the heretics”. By the 1530s, as Luther’s
reformed religious beliefs found favour
in England, Catholics were conflating
Protestants and Muslims as two versions
of the same heresy.Anglo-Moroccan alliance
With her excommunication in 1570, the wily
queen was quick to turn this situation to her
political and commercial advantage. Since
the 13th century, various church councils
had forbidden trade with Muslim societies,
which was punishable with excommunica-
tion. Covert trade still continued – Venice
and France notoriously turned a blind eye to
the injunctions – but by 1570, as a Protestant
nation led by an excommunicated sovereign
placed beyond papal sanction, Tudor
England was suddenly freer than any other
Christian country to trade with the Islamic
world with ecclesiastical impunity.
Even before her excommunication,
Elizabeth had cautiously encouraged trade
with lands such as Morocco, and by 1570
English merchants were importing goods
worth £28,000 a year (more than the entire
revenue from the Portuguese trade),
including 250 tonnes of sugar (much to the
infamous distress of the queen’s teeth)
valued at £18,000. Most of the transactions
were undertaken with Morocco’s sizeable
Jewish community, particularly its wealthy
‘sugar barons’; one, called Isaac Cabeça,
traded sugar for English cloth before going
bankrupt in 1568 and being named in a
series of insolvency trials in the High Court
of Admiralty and Chancery.
By the 1570s Elizabeth sent Edmund
Hogan, a member of the Mercers’ Company
from Hackney, to negotiate with the Saadian
sultan Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik I, trading
English weapons for Moroccan saltpetre
(a key ingredient in gunpowder).
Encouraged by the Moroccan trade’s
success, Elizabeth and her counsellors –especially Francis Walsingham – proposed
an even more ambitious alliance with the
Ottomans. There were good reasons to
believe that the two religions could establish
a common political cause against what they
both regarded as the imperial aggression of
the Spanish Habsburg king Philip II.
Walsingham was particularly attracted to
the Ottomans’ wooing of Protestants by
stressing the commonalities between their
faith and that of Islam.
In an extraordinary letter written by the
Ottoman Chancery in 1574 and addressed to
“the members of the Lutheran sect in
Flanders and Spain”, the reformers were
praised because they did “not worship idols”,
and had “banished the idols and portraits,
and bells from churches, and declared your
faith by stating that God Almighty is One
and Holy Jesus is His Prophet and Servant,
and now, with heart and soul, are seekingand desirous of the true faith; but the
faithless one they call Papa [the pope] does
not recognise his Creator as One, ascribing
divinity to Holy Jesus (upon him be peace!),
and worshipping idols and pictures which
he has made with his own hands, thus
casting doubt upon the Oneness of God
and instigating how many servants of God
to that path of error”.
Obviously such claims were driven as
much by shrewd realpolitik as belief in a
commonality between the two religions, but
they enabled a remarkable flourishing of
Anglo-Ottoman commercial and political
relations over the next two decades.Ambassador to the Ottomans
In 1578 the Norfolk-born factor William
Harborne was sent to the Ottoman capital of
Constantinople with precise instructions to
establish diplomatic relations with the court
of Sultan Murad III. The resident Catholic
Spanish, French and Venetian ambassadors
were appalled at the arrival of a Protestant
interloper, Harborne, openly flouting the
papal injunction against trading with
Islamic ‘infidels’. The Spanish ambassador
Bernardino de Mendoza complained bitterly
that “the Turks are also desirous of friend-
ship with the English on account of the tin
which has been sent thither for the last few
years, and which is of the greatest value to
them, as they cannot cast their guns without
it, while the English make a tremendous
profit on the article, by means of which alone
they maintain the trade with the Levant”.
Over the next 10 years Harborne estab-
lished himself as what the Ottoman court
called the ‘Lutheran ambassador’ to Murad.
He negotiated England’s first-ever trade
agreement with a Muslim power, established
a string of English trading posts throughout
the Mediterranean, and encouraged the
Ottomans to attack the Spanish navy to fore-
stall the sailing of Philip II’s Armada in 1588.
The venture was so successful that in 1581
Elizabeth granted a charter to the newly
created Turkey Company, with Harborne as
its formal representative and England’s first
ambassador to the Ottomans. He oversaw GETTY^ IMAGES/AKGIMAGES/BRIDGEMAN/MAP^ ILLUSTRATION:^MARTINSANDERS–MAPART.CO.UK/ALA
The holy war YM
Pope Pius V (top), whose papal bull
inadvertently opened the way for English-
Muslim relations; Martin Luther (bottom)
argued for a pragmatic approach to IslamElizabeth believed
that Protestants and
Muslims could
establish a common
cause against Catholic
Spain’s aggression
Elizabethans and the world / Islamic allies