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

The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam

Jerry Brotton
Viking (2016)

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Tags: History, Middle East, Turkey & Ottoman Empire, Europe, Great Britain, Renaissance
Historyttt Middle Eastttt Turkey & Ottoman Empirettt Europettt Great Britainttt Renaissancettt
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    The gripping story of Queen Elizabeth’s bold alliance with the Ottoman sultan by The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps ( published in the UK as *This Orient Isle) *
    Long before Thomas Jefferson confronted the Barbary Pirates, Queen Elizabeth sent a secret message to the Ottoman Sultan Murad II, inviting him to open his markets to her merchants and to embark on a pathbreaking new alliance. Islam and the West crossed paths much earlier than we think—and originally the Muslims had the upper hand.
    When Elizabeth was excommunicated by the pope in 1570, she found herself in an awkward predicament. England had always depended on trade. Now its key markets were suddenly closed to her Protestant merchants, while the staunchly Catholic king of Spain vowed to take her throne. In a bold decision with far-reaching consequences, she set her sights on the East. She sent an emissary to the shah of Iran, wooed the king of Morocco, and entered into an unprecedented alliance with the powerful Ottoman Sultan Murad III.
    This marked the beginning of an extraordinary alignment with Muslim powers and of economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age. By the late 1580s, thousands of English merchants, diplomats, sailors, and privateers were plying their trade from Morocco to Persia. To finance these expeditions, they created the first ever joint stock company, a revolutionary new business model that balanced risk and reward.
    Londoners were gripped with a passion for the Orient. Elizabeth became hooked on sugar as new words like  candy ,  turquoise , and  tulip entered the English language. Marlowe offered up  Tamburlaine  and Shakespeare wrote  Othello  six months after the first Moroccan ambassador’s visit. Jerry Brotton reveals that Elizabethan England’s relationship with the Muslim world was far more amicable—and far more extensive—than we have ever appreciated as he tells the riveting story of the traders and adventurers who first went East to seek their fortunes.
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    Review
    "An illuminating account of a neglected aspect of Elizabethan England:  its rich, complex, and ambivalent relations with the Muslim world. The Sultan and the Queen  is a fascinating and timely book."
—Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve

“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
    “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 Elizabeth’s 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 *
    “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 wer nevertheless those whose adventures led them to the edges of the known world – and to cultures so different from their own as to