{"product_id":"this-orient-isle-elizabethan-england-and-the-islamic-world","title":"This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1570  when it became clear she would never be gathered into the Catholic fold  Elizabeth I was excommunicated by the Pope. On the principle that my enemys enemy is my friend  this marked the beginning of an extraordinary English alignment with the Muslim powers who were fighting Catholic Spain in the Mediterranean  and of cultural  economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age. England signed treaties with the Ottoman Porte  received ambassadors from the kings of Morocco and shipped munitions to Marrakesh. By the late 1580s hundreds  perhaps thousands  of Elizabethan merchants  diplomats  sailors  artisans and privateers were plying their trade from Morocco to Persia. These included the resourceful mercer Anthony Jenkinson who met both Sleyman the Magnificent and the Persian Shah Tahmasp in the 1560s  William Harborne  the Norfolk merchant who became the first English ambassador to the Ottoman court in 1582 and the adventurer Sir Anthony Sherley  who spent much of 1600 at the court of Shah Abbas the Great. The previous year  remarkably  Elizabeth sent the Lancastrian blacksmith Thomas Dallam to the Ottoman capital to play his clockwork organ in front of Sultan Mehmed. The awareness of Islam which these Englishmen brought home found its way into many of the great cultural productions of the day  including most famously Marlowes Tamburlaine  and Shakespeares Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice. The year after Dallams expedition the Moroccan ambassador  Abd al-Wahid bin Mohammed al-Annuri  spent six months in London with his entourage. Shakespeare wrote Othello six months later. This Orient Isle shows that Englands relations with the Muslim world were far more extensive  and often more amicable  than we have appreciated  and that their influence was felt across the political  commercial and domestic landscape of Elizabethan England. It is a startlingly unfamiliar picture of part of our national and international history.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44964097654837,"sku":"ByrdShop_0241004020","price":91.53,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780241004029.jpg?v=1770448820","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/this-orient-isle-elizabethan-england-and-the-islamic-world","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}