The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam by Jerry Brotton

The fascinating story of Queen Elizabeth's secret outreach to the Muslim world, which set England on the path to empire, by The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps We think of England as a great power whose empire once stretched from India to the Americas, but when Elizabeth Tudor was crowned Queen, it was just a tiny and rebellious Protestant island on the fringes of Europe, confronting the combined power of the papacy and of Catholic Spain. Broke and under siege, the young queen sought to build new alliances with the great powers of the Muslim world. She sent an emissary to the Shah of Iran, wooed the king of Morocco, and entered into an unprecedented alliance with the Ottoman Sultan Murad III, with whom she shared a lively correspondence. The Sultan and the Queen tells the riveting and largely unknown story of the traders and adventurers who first went East to seek their fortunes--and reveals how Elizabeth's fruitful alignment with the Islamic world, financed by England's first joint stock companies, paved the way for its transformation into a global commercial empire. Editorial Reviews ...England's...interaction with the Muslim world [is] a neglected aspect of Elizabethan history that Jerry Brotton...brings vividly to life in this elegant and entertaining book. - The New York Times Book Review - Jason Goodwin 08/08/2016 Brotton (Great Maps), professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London, details the difficult diplomatic shifts Elizabeth I maneuvered in the wake of her excommunication in 1570. Having lost much of her previous access to Catholic commerce, Elizabeth found new connections in fellow Protestant lands as well as the Islamic world, notably the Ottoman Empire. An unstable triangle of Protestant-Muslim-Catholic alliances followed. Brotton successfully details the "unlikely" alliance through intriguing portrayals of England's first ambassadors to Iran, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire, noting the uneven growth of trade between the island nation and Muslim powers. Thanks to the greater number of resources from the Western travelers, the narrative remains strongest when focusing on the East, but Brotton offers a glimpse of the impressions Muslim diplomats and traders made when visiting London. He also explores their impact on British culture through the evolution of characterizations in Elizabethan theater, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The book's true action occurs in smoothly written descriptions of delicate negotiations set in the East, highlighted with the attempts by Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim rulers to pit rivals against one another. Brotton blends meticulous research with a deft touch of the mysterious, resulting in a fascinating shared history of East and West. (Oct.) - Publishers Weekly 09/15/2016 History watchers know that 2016's Brexit doesn't mark the first time England has divorced itself from Europe. With the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I's excommunication in 1570, England looked to the south (Morocco) and east (the Ottoman Empire and its enemy, Persia) for new allies in trade and war. In this work, Brotton (A History of the World in 12 Maps) tells the story of England's daring, often misguided attempts to bridge the physical, cultural, and political divide among empires. The author brings the nuanced account to life with an abundance of primary source material--correspondence, dramas, and histories of the day--and readers will want to take the time to parse the 16th-century language. The result is a vivid picture of the era's military vicissitudes, shifting alliances, xenophobia, and fascination with an Islamic world that wielded far more power than Elizabethan England. These machinations, powered by a colorful cast of diplomats, pirates, historians, playwrights, and politicians who distrusted yet needed one another, offer a window into a complex early chapter of East-West relations. VERDICT This microlevel history for nonhistorians is strong on realpolitik; not a quick read but a rewarding one.--Lisa Peet, Library Journal - Library Journal 2016-07-05 An intriguing look at England's contact with the Ottoman Empire and its enormous influence on Elizabethan commerce and culture, especially the theater.Brotton (Renaissance Studies/Queen Mary Univ. of London; A History of the World in 12 Maps, 2013, etc.) explores the fascination of Britain with the Islamic world before Queen Elizabeth first wrote to the young sultan, Murad, in 1579, in response to his granting of commercial privileges to the English merchant William Harborne. During the reign of her father, the English world was crazy about commodities from the Islamic world, such as sugar and indigo as well as rich silks and textiles. Yet over the next 17 years of Elizabeth's reign, the commercial and cultural contact intensified, especially as the Protestant queen, excommunicated by the pope in 1570, used the exchange to wily purpose in countering the Catholic opposition to her reign, especially from Spain, against which the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur proposed a military alliance in 1600. The Catholic world excoriated Elizabeth for her alliance with the Turkish "heathens" (as did plenty of internal critics), yet she was clever in the keeping of peace and prosperity considering Ottoman Turkey was a world military power and England a fairly insignificant player on the stage. Brotton looks into the early English travelers to that fabled land of the Mahometans or Moors (the term Muslim was not yet being used)--e.g., the young merchant Anthony Jenkinson, who became head of the new Muscovy Company and traveled to meet and charm the Moorish leaders; Harborne, the "apt man in Constantinople" who navigated the Anglo-Ottoman Capitulations of 1580; and the vainglorious Sir Anthony Sherley, who gained a mention in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. In several chapters Brotton explores the Elizabethan theater's fairly stereotyped representations of the Moors, culminating in Shakespeare's fully fleshed, sympathetic Othello. An erudite work that presents a fresh facet to Elizabeth's reign. - Kirkus Reviews Jenkinson is just one of the fascinating characters who forged England's first sustained interaction with the Muslim world, a neglected aspect of Elizabethan history that Jerry Brotton brings vividly to life in this elegant and entertaining book... Out there, for all the talk of idolatry and infidels, discussions could be brisk and purposeful, boundaries porous, identities fluid. Even in that religiously charged era, the so-called clash of civilizations could sound very faint indeed." - Jason Goodwin, The New York Times Book Review "We are accustomed to seeing Elizabeth as a dazzling but essentially limited monarch, obsessed with defending her small corner of northwest Europe. . . But as Brotton shows, for the last quarter of her reign, England was also deeply engaged with the three great powers of the Islamic world. The Sultan and the Queen is both a colorful narrative of that extraordinary time and a reminder that our own fortunes and those of the wider Islamic world have been intertwined for much longer than we might think." --Dan Jones, The Times "Queen Elizabeth I had bad teeth. The snaggle-toothed sovereign owed her decay to copious amounts of sugar that began flowing into England from Morocco in the 16th century. Candied fruits were her absolute favorite. The story of Elizabeth's unfortunate smile is but one facet of a much larger and far more important history of economic, cultural and political relations between the queen's rather negligible island, the sultan of Morocco and the fabulously wealthy Muslim world that dominated half of the Mediterranean and controlled Europe's access to the east. Jerry Brotton's wonderful book reveals this instructive history of Protestant England's intense interactions with Islam, showing how Muslims shaped English culture, consumerism and literature during the half-millennium between the Crusades and the rise of the British Empire in the Middle East." -- The Wall Street Journal "Impressive and highly readable. . . Brotton emphasizes the extent to which Elizabethan England was shot through with influences, stories, individuals and products drawn from the Islamic world. The orient is not elsewhere but already here, both thrillingly and uncomfortably close to home. . . Brotton's book crackles with an energy that illuminates and vivifies its larger claims." --Financial Times "The Sultan and the Queen evokes an England struggling to find a place for itself in a world that it had not yet learned to dominate, and often making colossal diplomatic blunders in the process. Brotton is a gifted writer who is able to present this history as an exciting series of critical and suspense-filled encounters." -The Washington Post "Jerry Brotton's sparkling new book sets out just how extensive and complex England's relationship with the Arab and Muslim world once was. . . It seems extraordinary that, in a time before mass travel, when most people died a stone's throw from where they were born, there were nevertheless those whose adventures led them to the edges of the known world - and to cultures so different from their own as to seem dreamlike. But Brotton's book is full of them. . . At a time when many see Islam as a recent and strange intruder, Brotton's excellent history is a reminder that a careful study of England's 'island story' shows just how wrong they are." --The Guardian "I adore this book. It resonated deeply with me." - Elif Shafak, author of The Bastard of Istanbul "Fascinating and timely. . . An illuminating account of a neglected aspect of Elizabethan England: its rich, complex, and ambivalent relations with the Muslim world." --Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve "A lively, smart, exhaustively researched book... Traders, using the new-fangled concept of joint-stock companies to spread the commercial risk, shipped home everything from Oriental carpets and luxurious silks to sugar and saltpetre, essential in making gunpowder... Brotton delves into diaries, letters and archives to uncover a long-ignored part of English history. Trade was anything but smooth or orderly. English adventurers struggled to understand the cultures, rivalries and religious differences. (The term Muslim would not be used in England until 1614.) Pirates and shipwrecks were constant dangers, as was capture." --Macleans "An exceptionally rich and brilliant book. In bringing to life Elizabethan England's ambivalent engagement with Islam, Jerry Brotton shows how profoundly that encounter shaped English trade, diplomacy, and the Islam-obsessed drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The story he tells could not be more timely." --James Shapiro, author The Year of Lear: 1606 "This fascinating account uncovers the lively exchange between Elizabeth's England, the Ottoman Empire, and Morocco. Christianity and Islam were still at odds, but Elizabeth gladly sought alliance with Muslim lands against the shared threat of Catholic Europe." --Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre - From the Publisher