***In the decades surrounding the Moroccan crisis and the emergence of Peele’s
play, Queen Elizabeth was carrying on negotiations with each of the Alcazar
Moors—Mulai Mohammed, Abd el-Malek, and Ahmed el-Mansur.^13 For by
the time of Alcazar, the lucrative Barbary trade, especially in sugar, had al-
ready become important to the English. James Alday, traveling with Thomas
Wyndham, professed “himselfe to have bene the first inventer” of the “traf-
fique into the kingdom of Marocco in Barbarie, begun in the yeere 1551 ,”
though undocumented ventures may have preceeded (Hakluyt, 6 : 136 ); Alday
claims that “in the first voyage to Barbary” “two Moores,” were “convayed”
“into their Countrey out of England” (Hakluyt, 6 : 137 ). Wyndham captained
a second voyage in 1552 , its gains “Sugar, Dates, Almonds, and Malassos or
sugar Syrrope” (Hakluyt, 6 : 139 ). By 1559 , English factors had established
themselves in Morocco.^14 And in the 1570 s, through the efforts of one of them
(John Williams), the trade expanded to include saltpeter, an ingredient En-
gland needed for the making of gunpowder.^15 When Edmund Hogan set out
for Morocco in 1577 , the year before Alcazar, his extended negotiations with
Abd el-Malek climaxed and concluded with the acquisition of that prize.
After Alcazar, relations between England and Morocco seem to have slowed;
but just as Peele was bringing the Moor to the English stage for the very first
time, el-Mansur was sending his own ambassadors to the queen, establishing
an economic and political alliance which lasted until the end of both their
reigns.^16 Matar has speculated that, as far as England was concerned, “as long
as there was profitable trade with the Barbary region, there was no need to sail
far and wide in dangerous search of colonial conquest and settlement.”^17 “If
Elizabethan England wondered where its economic future was going to lie,”
he argues, it would look first to Barbary.^18 Barbary may not have been the
only “future” England could foresee, but it was there that England gained an
important foothold in the Mediterranean and entered the global marketplace
that was shaping “the world.”
England’s relations with Barbary were no simple or local matter, politi-
cally or economically; from the start, they were inextricably triangulated with
by the competing presence of Catholic Iberia.^19 Well before the English
started exchanging armor, ammunition, timber (for ships), metal (for
canons), and such for the much desired Moroccan sugar, a papal bull author-
ized a Portuguese monopoly over trade in Barbary as well as Guinea and a
papal ban outlawed trade of weapons by Christians to the “infidel.” England’s
24 chapter one