Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery

At the same time Muslims were going to England, Britons were going to North Africa and the Levant in greater numbers. They went (or were taken) in the thousands, with the highest proportion consisting of captives who were at one time reported to have numbered over five thousand in Algiers alone.¹ Hundreds of other Britons visited the Muslim Mediterranean world on their own initiative and stayed there either to conduct business, to seek employment, to visit for weeks, or to settle for years. The majority of these Britons were men but there were a few women too. But on the whole the British exposure to Muslims was predominantly confined to the male population.

The writings of a few of these Britons—particularly those of William Harborne, Thomas Roe, and Dudley North—are both fascinating and informative about the Renaissance interaction with Muslims. But the careers and writings of soldiers and captives, along with the sundry other “small” Britons who lived and worked among the Muslims, provide a more intimate and careful portrait. These writings reflect the British experience from a position of defensiveness and sometimes subservience. Hired soldiers and seamen, captives and slaves, traders and artisans, did not enjoy the luxury of ambassadors or royal emissaries, who described the “Turks” from a position of distance and diplomatic carefulness. Nor were they like travelers so secure in their status that they rarely engaged the Muslims (or learned their language). Rather these were men who lived among the Muslims as servants or mercenaries, as slaves, pirates or merchants, and were always at the mercy and whim of the Muslim ruler and his subjects. Despite the agenda some of these men had for constructing a heroic image of themselves, their writings, along with documents about them, provide a unique perspective on the interaction between Britons and Muslims on Muslim soil. Not only do they show a variety of personal interactions with Muslims, they also span the main cities of Islam along with the hinterlands in an area extending from Morocco to Egypt and from Mocha to Istanbul. Based on firsthand experience, these texts constitute the first authentic English writings about the Muslim world since the Crusades.

From the reign of Queen Elizabeth until the Caroline period Britons joined the armies of the Muslim dominions, both in the Levant, in central Asia, and in North Africa. Some of these Britons were from the nobility but most were either common soldiers who found reliable pay among the Muslims or seamen and gunners captured by the North Africans and willingly or unwillingly put to military service. The regencies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli, along with Morocco and Persia, offered both attractive employment and honorable service: “Your Wars are manly, stout and honourable,” Sir Anthony Shirley is supposed to have said to the Persian Sophie/Shah in a play published in 1607. “Your Armes have no imployment for a coward.”² As a result, Renaissance Britons entered Muslim military service: North Africa, the Ottoman, and the Persian Empires fulfilled for Britons their military ideals and financial needs. It is no wonder that throughout his reign King James repeatedly issued royal proclamations calling on English and Scottish sailors and soldiers to return from abroad and serve at home. There was too much allure in the dominions of the Muslims.

Some of the Britons who went to the Muslim empires in the Mediterranean and in Central Asia were men who found themselves without military employment at a time in Renaissance England when there was no professional army or class of soldiers with a secure pay. (The first professional army only came into being at the beginning of the Civil War.) Denied the opportunity for work at home, these men left England to pursue their careers and fortunes among the Muslims. Surprisingly, rather than being castigated by their countrymen for serving the “infidels,” these men were celebrated in biographies and dramas, and were nearly always viewed as great English heroes. These men served—and many of them died while fighting for—the Muslims, and judging from the surviving literary and historical documents, their numbers were in the hundreds. Although they did not leave writings behind describing their experiences, they made a strong impression on Elizabethan and Jacobean imagination and culture. In particular they showed that it was acceptable and rewarding for Britons to live and work among the Muslims. These writings, with their heroic image of the Britons, may have served to promote such a career to the reading and theatergoing public in England.

Two changes occurred in Renaissance England that were instrumental in driving Britons to join the Muslim military establishment. The first was the change that occurred during the reign of the last of the Tudor monarchs and the first of the Stuarts, concerning the military “career.” By the second half of the sixteenth century, English nobles, for whom military service was an honorable duty to the sovereign, had to contend with the decline of chivalry in the “organic scheme” of Elizabethan England.³ “The humanists’ political and educational ideals” that they had cherished were drastically changing in what was becoming an “increasingly complex, commercial, and degenerate society.”⁴ Simultaneously, the common soldiers, who were conscripted before battles and disbanded afterwards, were viewed as no better than unwanted vagrants with “no meanes to maintaine them selves but by stealinge and lewde practize.”⁵ They were, as Robert Barret wrote in 1598, “corrupt weeds” and “scumme of their countrie.”⁶ In Elizabethan England the self-image of both the common and the noble soldier underwent irreversible changes that resulted in the redundancy of thousands of fighting men and the marginalization of the military values by which they had lived. Meanwhile, the Ottoman military establishment was widely known for its discipline and commitment to its soldiers. As the author of The Traveller’s Breviat (1601) wrote, the Muslim army was successful because of its “numbers . . . and organised provisions” ⁷—qualities that would have attracted Britons and other unemployed Christians.

Another change that occurred was in war technology. From the middle of the sixteenth century on, English soldiers found that their reliance on archery, battle-ax, pike, and stave was preventing them from competing with their compatriots and continental soldiers who were trained in gunnery. Military manuals showed how many of the English looked down on gunnery as a retreat from the heroic values of medieval Albion; other manuals showed gunnery as innovative and essential.⁸ This change particularly affected the common soldiers, since those who could not adapt to the new technology found themselves without employment or income. What exacerbated their situation were the policies James I adopted: Jacobean drama widely reflected the dwindling battlefield opportunities for the common soldier after the king signed peace treaties with Spain and the Netherlands, and after he persistently resisted involvement in what was to become the Thirty Years War on the Continent.

As a result of these transformations in the idealism and technology of war, sizable numbers of Elizabethan and Jacobean Britons sought service in foreign armies–both Christian (Protestant on the Continent) and Muslim (in North Africa). Such service proved so attractive that as early as 1575, Queen Elizabeth had had to intervene in an effort to end it. In November of that year she passed a bill “prohibiting any of Her subjects from engaging in the service in the Low Countries, or of any other foreign prince or state, as mariners or soldiers.”⁹ But a bill could not always deter a desperate soldier in search of employment and pay. Indeed that same year Ralph Lane asked the queen for letters to commend his service to the kings of Fez and Algiers.¹⁰ Three years later John Wanton went to Morocco and became the first English arms dealer to reside there and openly serve the North African ruler by arranging shipments of military hardware from England. In 1584, Captain Roger Williams wrote to Secretary Walsingham that unless the latter could help him find work he would go to Holland and get a letter from “the Prince of Orange to the Turk” to show that he was a soldier.¹¹

The first English soldier/captain to serve the Muslims and win national acclaim appears in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1591), a play about the death of King Sebastian of Portugal, “Muly Mahamet king of Barbarie,” and Tom Stukley in 1578. ¹² The play commemorates the failure (although a heroic one) of English policy in North Africa: Queen Elizabeth had supported the Portuguese contender Don Sebastian, who had promised to assist Ahmad bin Abdallah to regain the Moroccan throne after the latter was ousted by Abdel Malek in 1572. In return, Ahmad offered Sebastian all of Morocco as a fief to Portugal. And England, eager to support anti-Spanish policy, joined in what was widely viewed as an anti-Spanish campaign, especially because Abdel Malek was supported by Philip II, who wanted to undermine Sebastian’s plans. The battle of “Alcazar,” or Wadi al-Makhazin, on 4 August 1578, ended with the total defeat of the Portuguese-Moroccan-English alliance and the death of Sebastian and Ahmad.

Thomas Stukley was the English captain who joined with a few hundred of his compatriot soldiers in the alliance against Abdel Malek. Although in the numerous European and Arabic accounts about the famous battle no mention is made of him, within a decade of his death on the North African battlefield he had become a model of English military heroism. When Stukley comes on stage in Peele’s play, which in the title page of the 1594 edition emphasizes the role of Stukley (“The Battell of Alcazar, Fovght in Barbarie betweene Sebastian King of Portugall, and Abdelmelec King of Morocco. With the Death of Captaine Stukeley”), he is described as fighting “against the devill for Lord Mahamet” (3.4.964)—the “devill” being the Spanish-backed Abdel Malek. As he is fighting with Muslims he is serving England’s cause by opposing its supreme enemy, Spain. This portrait of Stukley among the Moors may well have mirrored any one of the thousands of English (and British) soldiers who were believed by Catholic intelligence gatherers to have been committed to Queen Elizabeth’s African war against Spain. In 1577, when Francis Drake arrived in Safi, the Muslim population thought that his soldiers were “the forerunners of the King of Portugals,” who were preparing to join in alliance with the king of Morocco.¹³ A decade after the battle of Alcazar it was reported from Brussels that “30,000 Moors” and “ten to twelve thousand Englishmen” were joining forces against Spain’s Holy League.¹⁴ By the mid-1590s the cooperation between the queen and the Moroccan ruler was so widely known that the queen was believed to be preparing to assist the “Moors” against Spain, and to “throw her entire force into Mauretania for the benefit of the Kinge of Morocco and Fez.”¹⁵ That there were such high numbers of Britons fighting with the Muslims of North Africa is very unlikely—the queen might have been willing to support the principle but not the expense. Nevertheless, the reports reveal how widely it was believed that English soldiers were serving the Muslims.

For Peele, Stukley was the model soldier who never compromised his Englishness, even while serving the “Lord Mahamet.” He was a “warlike Englishman,” as Celybin described him (4.1.1023), whose “knell” England would “kindely ring” (5.1.1368) at his funeral. The presentation of Stukley as a heroic captain of high ideals did not correspond to his image in the few surviving Elizabethan sources. During his life Stukley had been described by Camden (and quoted by Hakluyt) as “a ruffian, a riotous spend-thrift, and a notable vapourer”;¹⁶ more damning was the report that William Cecil received from the Florentine envoy in London denouncing Stukley as “prodigal, false, vile, without faith, conscience or religion.”¹⁷ Furthermore, and just before he had gone to North Africa, Stukley had been given by the Pope—the same one who had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth—the title of Marquess of Leinster, and had been directed to launch an invasion of Ireland.¹⁸ Whatever the official view of Stukley was, however, the popular view Peele dramatized presented Stukley as a model English fighter and confirmed through him the chivalric values of Christendom. To Peele’s audience Stukley was a great Englishman who had gained honor while serving with Muslims, and who had met his death at the hands of Italian Papists—the most nefarious of enemies.¹⁹ While the “official” view of Stukley was antipathetic, the popular representation was heroic; it was the latter portrait that defined for writers, ballad singers, and theatergoers the model of the English soldier among the Muslims.

A chronicler confirmed that Stukley had boasted before the final battle that “when you come to action, you shall look after me, and shall see manifestly that Englishmen are no cowards.”²⁰ For readers who included numerous common soldiers who were nearly always represented as cowardly and undisciplined in contemporary drama, Stukley’s words would be welcome. So admired was Stukley that another play about him was entered in 1605—The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley—although it may well have been performed as early as the 1590s. This play covered more events in the life of Stukley than Peele’s, but concluded with the war in North Africa and the hero’s death there. Shortly before he was killed, Stukley showed his generosity of spirit by reconciling himself with his English friend and rival Vernon, another English soldier who had joined Sebastian’s campaign into Muslim North Africa. Both soldiers died with pride as their English blood mixed with the blood of a Portuguese and a Muslim king (ll. 2721–24). ²¹ The play confirmed to the English audience that numerous Britons had fought and died in the battle of Alcazar. The account written by Hohannes Thomas Freigius and reprinted in Hakluyt explained “that divers other [than Stukley] English gentlemen were in this battell, whereof the most part were slaine.”²² There was heroism for both the English common soldier and gentleman in the battlefields of Islam. Later in the seventeenth century, when Thomas Fuller reflected on Stukley, he again praised him for having “behaved himself most valiantly.” Nearly everything negative about him had been forgotten.²³

In the first years of the 1600s there was a surge in the number of English soldiers and gunners who became involved in Morocco’s military affairs. The last years of Mulay al-Mansur’s reign witnessed a violent rivalry among the claimants to the throne, and with al-Mansur’s death in 1603 that rivalry turned into a civil war (accompanied by plague) in which each of the claimants sought every military assistance possible. In 1603 it was reported that Mulay Sidan (Zaidan), one of Mulay al-Mansur’s children, “unprovided of skilfull Gunners for his Ordnances . . . procured from Salie out of certaine English men of warre, who at that instant were there, two English Gunners, to whom he committed the charge of his Artillerie.”²⁴ Evidently the English were not unwilling to sell their services to the Moors, who, in turn, did not have any qualms (or choice) about having Christians take over the artillery. Later, Zaidan increased the number of the English gunners, and when he fought with another of the contenders, Mulay Abdallah, he lost “betwixt thirtie and fortie,” who were captured by the latter claimant; other Englishmen fled with the defeated army but were spared by the victor.²⁵ In 1607 it was reported that Zaidan refused to release the English (and Dutch) captives in Morocco because they were “cannoniers” on whose military expertise he had grown to depend.²⁶

A more detailed account of those English soldiers in the service of Zaidan appeared in R. C.’s A True Historicall discourse of Muley Hamets rising to the three Kingdomes of Moruecos, Fes and Sus (1609), which described the actions of “divers English Gentlemen, in those Countries.” These “Gentlemen” were two hundred English soldiers, along with other continentals, led by the “valiant Captaine Iohn Giffard,” who had joined “Mulay Sidan” in his war against his brother. The author praised Giffard as “a Gentleman of a worthy spirit,” whom Zaidan had honored with gifts and riches and even personal visits. R. C. confirmed that an English captain among the Muslims gained status and pay—25 shillings per diem to be exact, along with supplies. Furthermore, among the Muslims, all the needs of the English fighters were met by the ruler’s bounty, which is why Giffard had had no difficulty assembling around him some of the finest English and continental soldiers: there was his kinsman, “one Maister Philip Giffard,” “Captain Iaques a verie valiant souldier, captaine Smith one of the most esquisite enginers in Europe, captaine Baker an ancient Byzantine souldier, captaine Tailer, captaine Faukes, captaine Chambers, captaine Isack, men euerie way able to undergo their seuerall commaunds.”²⁷ For R. C. these were glorious men who were earning good money. Each received twelve shillings a day, except the sea captains who earned four, while every common soldier earned twelve pence that was “truly payed them.” R. C. wanted to assure his readers—particularly the common soldiers who were often left without pay and who subsequently had to plunder to survive—that there was regular pay among the Muslims and that Muslim rulers were prompt and generous.

Much as R. C. was advertising the good financial conditions of English soldiers among the Muslims, he continued to invoke the idea that English captains and soldiers were fighting with the Muslims not only for pay, but more importantly, for honor. They were men of courage and chivalry who not only lived by those ideals, but died by them too. As Mulay Zaidan was preparing to flee after the defeat of his Moorish soldiers he “sent th the [sic] English Captaines to be gone, and to captaine Giffard a good horse to saue him selfe. The English returned word, that they came not thither to run, but rather die an honourable death.”²⁸ Again, as in the plays about Stukley, the English captain and his common soldiers would all die together in battle; they were noble and courageous Englishmen who upheld their honor among the Muslims. According to the French consul in the Netherlands, forty-five Englishmen, all of whom had manned the canons, died in the battle (22–25 February 1607).²⁹ The Britons were clearly playing an important military role in inter-Muslim feuding and warfare.

Many Britons (and other Christian Europeans) were trained in gunnery, and filled the technological gap in the Muslim military establishment. Obviously they joined the Muslims because they found satisfactory and reliable pay. Both the soldiers who joined of their own free will and the captives who were forced to serve at the cannons found reward among the Muslims. Because they were “nothing expert in Artillery,” the Muslims either enticed or forced their captives into military service, as was the case with Richard Hasleton, who, after his capture in Algiers, was charged with “certain pieces of ordnance . . . which I refused not to do, trusting thereby to get some liberty.”³⁰ It took a lot of commitment to his country, religion, and family for Hasleton to turn down the offers made to him by the Muslim ruler. As he recalled his captivity in the late 1580s, he listed what the “King of the Cabyles” promised him if he agreed to become a Muslim and to serve him as a gunner: “the King offered to give me 700 Doubles by the year, which amounteth to the sum of £ 50 of English money; and moreover to give me by the day, 30 Aspers, which are worth twelve pence English, to find me meat; and likewise to give me a house, and land sufficient to sow a hundred bushels of grain yearly, and two Plow of oxen furnished, to till the same; also to furnish me with horse, musket, sword, and other necessaries, such as they of that country use. And lastly he offered to give me a wife, which they esteemed the greatest matter.”³¹ The preciseness of the figures attests to Hasleton’s recognition of the admiration such payments would evoke in his readers and unemployed countrymen.

In Tamburlaine: Part One (1590), Bajazeth the Turk boasted that he had as many “warlike bands of Christians renied, / As hath the ocean or the Terrene Sea / Small drops of water” (3.1.9–11). In 1596 an anonymous Englishman, “a Trumpeter,” wrote Sir Thomas Glover, defected and betrayed the castle of Agria to the Turks.³² In the Letters from the great Turke lately sent vnto the holy Father the Pope (1606), the Turkish leader boasted that his army had thirty thousand Christians who “are the founders of our artillerie, and other Instruments of warre” and all of whom are “Renegados” fighting “in defence of our lawe, and with vs to conquer your country.” Not only would such a number have consisted of the Janizzaries (Christians who had been converted to Islam in their youth), but of Christian Europeans, too.³³ Sir Thomas Shirley, after denouncing “renegadoes” as “roagues, & the skumme of people, whyche beinge villanes and atheistes,” added that many of them find themselves “vnable to liue in Christendomme, [and] are fledde to the Turke for succoure & releyffe.” Conveniently, Thomas forgot about his brother, Anthony, who in 1606 was described as having “benn ymployed by the Emperour” of Morocco.³⁴ Thomas Coryat described the Grand Signior who, upon entering Istanbul, was followed by “French Souldiers, a company of fugitive Rogues, that to get a large pay somewhat more then they have, either in their owne Countrey, or could get in the Low Countries”—a view that was confirmed by Sir Thomas Roe who saw the “false French regiment, and their colonell” in December 1623. ³⁵ In 1622 John Rawlins mentioned how the Algerians took for their gunners “two of our soldiers, one English and one Dutch Renegade” because they wanted to use them for their ordnance, while John Chamberlain lamented the following year that “seven or eight hundred of our mariners, among whom many gunners and men of best service at sea” had been captured and put to use by the rulers of Algiers and Tunis.³⁶ Sir Henry Blount, after repeating Shirley’s condemnation that the “Renegadoes” were “Atheists,” admitted that the converts “left our cause for the Turkish as the more thriving in the World, and fuller of preferment.”³⁷ From the Elizabethan to the Stuart period, the Muslim dominions were attractive sources of military employment for both Britons and other Christians.³⁸

The cooperation between Englishmen and Muslims continued well into the second half of the seventeenth century. “The captain” of a Tunisian ship that captured Edward Coxere in the 1650s “was an English renegade, as also was the gunner,”³⁹ and in 1664 “an English engineer…supplied the most certain advantages for the progress of the Ottoman arms.”⁴⁰ “So eight Englishmen told him [the Moroccan ruler] they knew what belonged to the Guns, and they would go with him [to battle],” wrote Francis Brooks about his experience as a captive in 1681. ⁴¹ That same year “William . . . Gunner of ye Francis” ran into the castle of the bey of Tripoli in order to serve in the bey’s fleet.⁴² In the 1690s Joseph Pitts, who had been captured in 1678 and converted to Islam, fought alongside his master in Algeria, and in 1715 Thomas Pellow of Penryn converted to Islam and served as a soldier in the army of Mulay Ismail.⁴³ To serve as a soldier/gunner among the Muslims was viewed by Britons as a venue of military opportunity. It is no wonder that a certain English “Gun-Smith” who was ransomed after his captivity, “Reneg’d and chose rather to be a Mohammetan than to return to his own Country.” ⁴⁴ He must have realized that among the Muslims he would play a more prominent role and receive higher pay than among his countrymen.

Although some Britons reneged on their commitment to king and country to serve the Muslims, others were known to serve so well as intermediaries that they were able to gain the confidence of both the Muslim and Christian rulers. Jasper Tomson, whose family was closely associated with Lord Cecil, participated in the campaign of Sultan Mohammad III against the Spanish emperor and became, at the end of the 1590s, the confidant of Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco, whose grand design was to join his Muslim army with Elizabeth’s Protestant forces against Catholic Spain.⁴⁵ In 1627 John Harrison, the English agent, wrote to encourage King Charles I to send two thousand soldiers to fight there.⁴⁶ Nine years later, while travelling in the Levant, Sir Henry Blount was asked by the Ottoman sultan to join his army; he declined the offer only because he had another engagement.⁴⁷ As long as there was political cooperation between London and Marrakesh or Istanbul, there was the possibility of military cooperation between the two peoples. English travelers, traders, and foreign policy strategists were eager to see their compatriots actively involved in the military affairs of Islam. And Muslim rulers, aware of the growing technological gap between them and Christendom, were eager to employ European soldiers.

Perhaps the most important event in the history of Renaissance Anglo-Islamic military cooperation occurred in 1637. This was the first time an English monarch actually approved his fleet’s support for one faction of Muslims against another. There had been hundreds of English soldiers, gunners, and military personnel in North Africa for decades, but they had never been specifically sent by the monarch to carry out military action on the Muslim side. In 1637, King Charles authorized his fleet to assist Siddy Hamed al-Ayyashi of Old Salee against his rival in New Salee: “English gunners” were sent to the old town and “did fearful execution among the crowded defenders of New Sallee, battering the walls beyond repair.”⁴⁸ By so doing the gunners helped reduce “Sally to the obedience of the [Moroccan] Emperor.” Soon after, however, a rebellion broke out against the emperor, and eighteen English gunners were sent to fight on his side until victory, “and then with love and leave” returned to England.⁴⁹ For the first time since England had entered the Mediterranean, its fleet succeeded in altering the course of events among the Muslims—with royal approval.

There were military advantages for England in having its soldiers serve among Muslims since it could secure access to maritime bases on the Mediterranean. But there was another advantage for the soldiers themselves—heroism. One of the reasons service in the Muslim Empires was described in praiseworthy terms was the egalitarianism of heroism Britons were shown to share. Numerous Elizabethan and Jacobean plays emphasize the difference between the supposed heroism of captains and the cowardice of the common soldiers,⁵⁰ but in the literature set among the Muslims, both categories of the English shared in honor and military dedication. Among the Muslims, where a military meritocracy was known to prevail in sharp contrast to the elitism of the British military establishment, Britons shared with each other, across military rank and social status, in heroism and glory. That is why the Muslim Empires were repeatedly portrayed in English writings as places of military fulfillment; Britons (and other Christians) could go there to realize their dreams of battle.⁵¹

These descriptions of Britons among the Muslims tell more about Britons than Muslims; these plays, biographies, and historical accounts were produced amid the frustration redundant soldiers were experiencing in a monarchy that had adopted a less militaristic foreign policy than its Elizabethan predecessor. The focus of these writings was therefore on the British soldier and his achievement among the forces of the Turks, the “present terror of the world.” By placing the Britons among the Muslims, praising their military and diplomatic capability, and showing that they could work among non-Christians while retaining their commitment to their monarch and God, writers confirmed a heroic image of their compatriots and explicitly advertised the Muslim dominions to the unemployed, the unfulfilled, and the ambitious.

Simultaneous with this idealized view of soldierly activity among the Muslims, and for another kind of British cooperation with Muslims, it is important to consider seamen and those who came to be described as pirates, either by their compatriots or the Muslims. In the period under study, as Fernand Braudel, A. Tenenti, and C. M. Senior have shown, British seamen played an important role in the Mediterranean, particularly in the Muslim dominions.⁵² Captains and sailors established extensive contacts with Muslims by providing them with transportation. At times of high traffic, especially when Muslim pilgrims headed to Cairo on their way to Mecca, English and Scottish ships and their crew fulfilled a much needed service by providing them with safe transit across the North African coast. Often such services developed into personal friendships. In 1603 Henry Timberlake recalled how he had carried three hundred pilgrims from Algiers to Cairo (which was the North African hub of pilgrimage to Mecca) on his ship, the Troyan. Later, one of the passengers surprised Timberlake by remembering his name and offered to help him get into Jerusalem: “such kind care had the Infidel of me, as he would not leaue me unaccompanied in this strange Land.”⁵³ The “Infidel” (whose name Timberlake seemed not to have remembered) stayed with him throughout his journey in the Holy Land. In 1614 William Davis recalled how the English ship on which he was serving, the Francis, carried “Turkish Goods by Turkes, and some Turks aboard with us.”⁵⁴ Although such services were sometimes condemned by Britons, who were offended at their compatriots’ collusion with the Muslims, English and Scottish ships were very active in the Mediterranean. As a result, many Britons established friendly relations with Muslims—with great benefit to themselves. It was the letter sent by a Moorish sea merchant on behalf of Sir Henry Middleton to the basha that “saved my Life,” recalled the Englishman after his captivity in the Arabian harbor of Mocha.⁵⁵

While some sailors were able to establish amicable (and legal) relations with the Muslims, others turned to piracy. Ever since the Middle Ages, English monarchs, like their Western European counterparts, had issued letters of marque to legitimate the piracy of their subjects against their adversaries. But the line between royally legitimized plunder (privateering) and lawless piracy was never clear, and privateers did not always abide by the limitations set by the foreign policy of their monarchs. Although in the second half of the sixteenth century, English privateers such as Raleigh and Drake specifically targeted Spanish ships,⁵⁶ other Britons were not as discriminating; despite the amicable relations between their queen and the rulers of Turkey and Morocco, they attacked Muslim traders and travelers. In 1586, pirates from England attacked a Spanish ship in Moroccan waters, and as a result the Moroccan ruler imprisoned an English merchant. “I am here impryssoned amongeste a nomber of heathens,” he wrote, adding that he would stay there until the pirates made proper restitution to the ruler.⁵⁷ In 1600, Sultan Mohammad III complained to the English agent in Istanbul about “injuryes and piracyes” committed by English pirates against Turkish ships; the queen was so embarrassed that she sent a letter, written “with her owne hand,” to her agent offering her apologies to the Grand Signior. ⁵⁸ Three years later, in 1603, the sultan complained to the French King Henri IV about English corsairs, and in 1607 the king in turn complained to the ruler of Morocco about the piratical depredations by Britons.⁵⁹ So outrageous and continuous were the piracies of the Britons that in 1626 Sultan Murad IV complained to King Charles in the following words:

certyn men of war apperteyning to yowr kyndomes had, contrarye to the capitulations, assalted the merchants, which with their goods returned from Indya, and fought and taken their ships; and it being made knowne to the sayd Fazeli bassa, that our merchants had beene damaged, to the valew of 600000 dollers…the sayd men of war, not conteyning themselues in due bounds, haue armed a-new seauen ships from your countrye, and haue come and assalted 14 ships of our merchants, which from Indya were sayling to the scale of Ayman; and hauing taken the masters prisoners, haue made spoyle and depredation of all their facultye.⁶⁰

Between 1580 and 1615, according to Alberto Tenenti, the English “showed themselves to be pirates more ruthless and dangerous than any others” in the Mediterranean.⁶¹ It is no wonder that the Arabic and Turkish words for pirate or corsair, qursan and corsar, entered the two languages through Western Christendom.⁶² In the same way that many Britons knew Muslims only as Barbary Corsairs, so did many Muslims know Britons only as infidel pirates.

Britons were involved not only in piracy, but in the slave trade too. Although they were more successful in their sub-Saharan African trade with the Americas (thus the “Gvinea” on the Virginia Company Chart p. 86 below), they did not hesitate to profit from North African slaves. In 1623, Sir Thomas Roe recorded the complaint of the Tunisians that English ships were capturing and selling Muslim “subiects and passengers”;⁶³ a year later a “Mr. Madox, of London” captured a Salee ship and sold its crew of one hundred fifty Moors and Andalusians into slavery.⁶⁴ In October 1631, Harrison confirmed that Salee captives had been sold by the English to the Spaniards; and in June 1639, a “Mr. Marriot, master of the Blessing” sold eleven Turks in Spain and made over a hundred pounds in profit, which he offered to share with the King.⁶⁵ In 1658, the ruler of Algeria complained that English ships were selling “Mussulmans” as slaves to Venetians and other Christians;⁶⁶ in 1664, “Capt Chichley gave consent with the rest of the Capts that Tauries, a Turk, should be sold for 100 dollars to the Consul, Don Juan Vincent Raby”; by 1669 the enslavement and sale of Muslims was a common practice among English sea commanders.⁶⁷

While some Britons attacked and captured Muslims, others settled in sea towns and served in Algerian, Tunisian or, Moroccan navies.⁶⁸ After James I criminalized piracy, and after he suspended his warfare against Spain and the Netherlands, hoards of seamen found themselves without employment—except as pirates (no longer could they claim to be privateers attacking England’s Catholic enemy). Their search for harbors in which to dock and safely sell their loot coincided with the need of North African navies to learn maritime technology from the Europeans, and with the willingness of the North African rulers to accommodate the British (and other Christian) pirates in their harbors on condition of sharing with them in the profit. The result of this cooperation between Britons (and other Christians) on the one hand, and the Barbary Corsairs on the other, was the proliferation of piracy committed by Christians and Muslims together. In a 1611 deposition of some English sailors who were taken at Plymouth it was revealed that there were “40:sayle, and 2000: men, all English” and all pirates, who operated out of “Mamora in Barbarie.”⁶⁹ Five years later Captain John Smith lamented that his countrymen were more eager to join Mediterranean piracy than to colonize New England: “our mindes” are so set “vpon spoile, piracie, and such villany, as to serue the Portugall, Spanyard, Dutch, French, or Turke (as to the cost of Europe too many dooe).”⁷⁰ Britons were more interested in the Mediterranean than in America, and more zealous to join “Turkish” pirates than to colonize Virginia. Over a century later, in 1731, J. Morgan was still recalling the denunciation by Sir William Monson in 1617 of “Englishmen” who were “too busy in trading with [Algerian] Pirates, and furnishing them with Powder and other Necessaries.”⁷¹

These English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish seamen learned the language of their hosts and clipped their beards as Muslims did rather than let them grow, as was the style in England. They ate their food, dressed in their clothes, and learned their games, especially backgammon, which they referred to as “tables” ⁷²—a translation from the Arabic (tawla). They also advanced the Muslims’ knowledge of navigation, maritime technology, and shipbuilding. (The majority of navigational terms in Arabic and Turkish derive from European languages.) It is no wonder, then, that the combined capabilities of the North African Muslims and the Christian Britons produced one of the most successful periods in the history of piracy in the Mediterranean and the Channel. From the beginning of the Jacobean period until the Commonwealth era, the western Mediterranean was ruled by North African pirates and their converted and unconverted Christian supporters; the Atlantic coast of Europe and Africa, as far west as the Canary Islands, was also under the sway of the Barbary Corsairs. Between 1604 and 1640, British piracy, much of which was centered in Mamora and Tunis, reached its zenith. Between 1640 and 1660, Salee enjoyed its golden age of piracy. Importantly, the corsairs who manned the ships or financed the operations were not all Moors or Turks—they were also Britons and other Christians who had “Mahumetized” and “donned the turban.” It is not surprising that the term ’allaj (’allooj and a’alaj in the plural) was coined in Turko-Arabic to designate the renegadoes—the Europeans in the service of Muslims—and that in Arabic sixteenth and seventeenth-century sources about North Africa, references to these a’alaj are numerous.

In 1577 occurred one of the earliest demonstrations of English-Moorish maritime interactions. Francis Drake, intent on piracy in the Caribbean, arrived in December in Mogadore, on the west coast of Morocco. Soon thereafter a few Moors boarded his ship after being assured that the fleet was English (friendly) and not Portuguese (hostile). Drake and his crew entertained the Moors well, “courteously, with a daintie banquet, and such gifts as they seemed to be most glad of.” The Britons even offered the Muslims some wine and learned that although Islam prohibits the drinking of alcohol, “by stealth it pleaseth them well to haue it abundantly.” The relations were openly amicable, but on the following day the Moors kidnapped one of Drake’s men, John Fry, in order to take him to their king, who wanted to be further assured that the fleet had no military designs on his kingdom. Although Fry was treated well and later released, he was unable to rejoin Drake, who had quickly sailed away. The Muslim ruler kidnapped Britons in order to learn about them in the same manner Drake kidnapped Indians to learn about them; Drake “discovered” the American Indians in the same way the Muslims of North Africa “discovered” the English.⁷³

Four years later, in 1581, there was an incident of English-Turkish cooperation that could be characterized as piratical. Fifteen Turks boarded the English ship Roe and began a conversation with the captain, Peter Baker, who seemed to be “very great frende with them.” Although the sailors wanted to attack the Turks, the captain was eager to entertain them and “sheyed them musicke and gave them a present.”⁷⁴ So friendly did the captain appear toward the Turks that the Maltese suspected him of being a pirate operating under Muslim protection. In 1607 it was reported from Bayonne, in the French Bay of Biscay, that English pirates had carried off a ship into Barbary to sell the captives into slavery. Such was the notoriety of these English pirates operating out of Morocco that R. Cocks wrote that the English pirates were “mercyles . . . there is noe mercy yf they meete with an Englishman, and very littell yf they meete with a stranger.”⁷⁵ That same year it was reported from Zante that a pirate ship from North Africa was carrying Englishmen, Turks, and Moors; and so was another pirate bertone, which carried ninety men made up “half of Englishmen and half of Turks from Tunis.”⁷⁶ Again that same year France complained to the High Porte about English (and Dutch) pirates who were using North African sea towns to attack French ships.⁷⁷ Three years later, in 1610, “Anglo-Turkish pirates” operating out of Tunis attacked French and Italian ships; the following year a bertone reached Valona with sixty Turks and forty English and French pirates.⁷⁸ So numerous were English pirates among the Muslims that they came to be known as the “new pirates” of Barbary. Sir Henry Mainwaring recalled in his Discourse on Pirates, which he addressed to King James I around 1617 or 1618, his years of cooperation with the Tunisian and Algerian pirates. He had become so successful that “The Dey of Tunis eat bread and salt and swore by his head (which is the greatest asseveration they use) that if I would stay with him he would divide his estate equally with me, and never urge me to turn Turk, but give me leave to depart whensoever it should please your Majesty to be so gracious as to pardon me.”⁷⁹

Mainwaring had joined the Barbary Corsairs and become quite familiar with their culture. The reference to eating bread and salt signifies an Islamic assurance of safety. So, too, was the swearing by the head. Mainwaring lived, ate, drank, and cooperated with the Muslim rulers who favored him because of the success of his piratical depredations. In his subsequent exposé of the pirates, Mainwaring confirmed that numerous English pirates operated out of Algiers and Tunis: the Algerian pirate ships were “manned out by the Turks, after the proportion of 150 Turks to 20 English, yet the English in their persons are well used and duly paid their shares.”⁸⁰ Lord Carew confirmed that “in the towne of Angire the Englishe are well enoughe intreated . . . [but] To assure themselves of renegados, the Turkes are so carefull as in every shippe there is three Turkes for one renegado.”⁸¹ Evidently there were many “renegados” from England and elsewhere in Christendom who were working on Muslim ships. At Tetuan, Mainwaring added, much of the material pirates bought was brought over by the English and the Flemish. Mainwaring himself had overseen much of the activity of the pirates of Mamora, to the north of Salee, where he had established a kind of pirate “republic” for them.⁸²

There were numerous pirates such as Mainwaring who must have acquired detailed cultural and military knowledge about the Muslims. Mainwaring returned to England, and after receiving a pardon from the king, rose in the naval hierarchy to become vice admiral. Similarly, a certain Captain Walsingham served in the Algerian navy, “(had ben a pirate)” as Chamberlain noted, was then pardoned by King James I, and served in the English fleet that attacked Algiers in 1621. Finding little reward in his position, however, Walsingham started “prattl[ing]” that he would leave England and return to the Algerians, a remark that resulted in his prompt dispatch to the Tower.⁸³ While he and Mainwaring returned to England, other pirates remained among the Muslims; John Ward, along with his accomplices, “James Procter of Southampton, and Iohn Fenth of Plimouth” and numerous other Britons were perhaps the most notorious figures in Renaissance English writings.⁸⁴ All were vilified in contemporary biographies while the play by Robert Daborne, A Christian Turn’d Turke (1612), specifically demonized Ward for enslaving many a “Brittaine.” ⁸⁵

Little is historically known about Ward except that he settled in Tunis and acquired a large fleet. He shared his loot with Cara Osman, the agha of the Janizzaries, with whom he became such good friends that he called him “brother.”⁸⁶ He lived in wealth and glory, quaffing wine instead of ale, and lording it over numerous compatriot “runnagates” such as Thomas Mitton, who was in Tunis for three years, William Graves and Toby Glanville,⁸⁷ and Anthony Johnson, who assisted Ward in the capture of John the Baptist in November 1606. ⁸⁸ Ward’s ships were often nearly completely manned by Britons, although sometimes there were Turks among them. Ward prospered as a result of his piracy, and by 1607 he had a huge ship manned by “an Anglo-Turkish crew of 400.”⁸⁹

Ward’s name was frequently associated with the Dutch/Flemish pirate Simon Dansker (or Danser), whose crew included both Britons and Turks.⁹⁰ These two men became so famous that they were remembered by a Tunisian writer toward the end of the seventeenth century. In his Kitab al-Munis fi Akhbar Ifriqiya wa Tunis, Ibn Abi Dinar described the successful activity of the Tunisian fleet under Yousef Dey who succeeded Othman Dey, and he made the only reference in Arabic sources to Ward, whose Arabic name had been changed to Wardiyya (“of the rose”): “During his time [Yousef Dey], the corsair captains [ru’assa’] of the sea increased in number, and his ships became famous and fearful. Of the greatest corsair captains in his time were Captain Samsom and Captain Wardiyya: they were Christians, and sailed in his time while still Christians, but they turned Muslim later. They were famous at sea.”⁹¹ It is significant that the two men were remembered at all by the Tunisian writer; evidently they had left their mark on the Muslim population, and stories must have been told about them for decades after their deaths.

Another corsair pirate was Sir Francis Verney, who, like Ward, converted to Islam. Before his life of piracy Verney had joined Captain Giffard as a mercenary to Mulay Zaidan. After the latter was defeated (Verney, unlike his distant relative Giffard, preferred not to die heroically), he joined Ward and settled in Algiers, whereupon he attacked and captured a string of English trading vessels that were chiefly from Poole and Plymouth.⁹² Another Briton who fraternized with Turkish corsairs in St. George’s Channel was John Nutt.⁹³ According to Captain Plumleigh, who had been sent with a warrant to arrest him, Nutt was in command of “twenty seven Barbary vessels.”⁹⁴ Meanwhile, a Cornishman named Ambrose Sayer was “a commander of a squadron of corsairs” operating out of Algiers.⁹⁵ In 1617, Sir William Monson feared that English pirates in Algiers might give their Algerian counterparts “Intelligence” about the plans to attack Algiers by the British fleet.⁹⁶ John Rawlins referred in 1622 to numerous Englishmen who had joined the “Pirates of Argier.”⁹⁷ The English captains, Kelley and Sampson, served on Turkish ships and “tooke part with the Turks thus to rob and spoyle vppon the Ocean.”⁹⁸ In 1625 the pilot of a Salee man-of-war, committing piracy near the coast of Devon, was “one Arthur Drake of Plymouth, that lyves amongest the Turkes a freeman.” Later that year “one Bennett, a merchant of London,” was captured with “a protection from the piratt Campaigne to all the picaroones of Salley.”⁹⁹ Many were the Britons, lamented Henry Byam in 1628, who joined the Turks and turned their weapons against their countrymen and kindred.¹⁰⁰ The attraction of piracy out of Muslim waters was so high that it worried John Harrison, the English agent in Morocco. After observing the numerous English ships that arrived in Salee to trade, he wrote the following warning to King Charles in 1630: “the feare is some [of these ships] maie abuse their commissions and turne pirattes, and Englishmen goe out to sea in their shippes, the shippes of Sallye, and serve under them and turn renegadoes; so His Majestie looseth subjects and God so many soules.”¹⁰¹ In 1636 it was reported by a James Davie of Lyme Regis, who had been a captive in Salee, that the “870 English, Scots and Welshmen” who were captive there were planning to unite with the Turks and “come into the Channel …where they might carry away good store of people and booty.” Although, he continued, the captives had desisted from so doing, they “vowed they will invite the Turks to do mischief in these western parts” unless they were ransomed.¹⁰²

English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish pirates flourished under Muslim flags. While many of them converted to Islam and settled in North Africa, others “worked” there until they made enough money to buy a pardon and return home. For them, settling among the Muslims was financially lucrative and professionally rewarding. Although these pirates operated chiefly in the Mediterranean, others were known to plunder from the Cape of Good Hope to China and Japan, including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Throughout this period, piracy was a thriving profession and British pirates among the Muslims were very successful professionals.

Morocco was the most attractive and accessible location in the Muslim world for English soldiers, pirates, and traders. The country had amicable dealings with England, and Britons felt relatively safe there—and relatively free from English social control and law. Some Britons viewed Morocco as an easy place to commit a murder against a hated compatriot. Such was the case in 1585 when Elizabeth’s envoy to Mulay Ahmed al-Mansur, Ralph Skydmoore, who had been in Morocco since 1579, was poisoned by an English merchant. The murderer was later extradited to face “condigne punishmente.”¹⁰³ Others saw it as a good place to escape to after a brush with the law at home. John Herman, an English rebel, fled England to Morocco in 1587, but was captured after the queen demanded his extradition.¹⁰⁴

Most importantly, as T. S. Willan’s Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade has shown in great detail,¹⁰⁵ Morocco was an excellent trading partner where numerous Britons resided for extended periods of time. In 1569, Mulay Abdallah al-Ghalib wrote to Queen Elizabeth assuring her that English traders would not be harmed in his realm; by 1572, there was already an English merchant, Thomas Owen, living and trading in Morocco (he would remain there until 1600), who, it was noted in a letter from a Moroccan customs officer, had mastered Arabic.¹⁰⁶ In 1574, Britons trying to establish a monopoly for trade with North Africa complained to the queen that “menye” Englishmen were already trading with Barbary, but not paying custom duties because they were using illegal harbors as points of departure and return.¹⁰⁷ No doubt before the incorporation of the Barbary Merchants (about which there were heated arguments for and against), numerous English traders and agents settled in North Africa without leaving any trace behind them. The “factour [long] resident” in Barbary, George Gyppes, is just one example.¹⁰⁸ In 1584, a trader described as “Artoos al-Ingleez” (perhaps translatable as Arthur the Englishman) delivered military hardware to “Dar al-Odda,” the house of armament, in Morocco.¹⁰⁹ In 1589, Elizabeth’s ambassador to Mulay Ahmad, Henry Roberts, reported that there were numerous English merchants living in the Moroccan kingdom, including “M. Richard Evans, Edward Salcot, and other English merchants.” In 1591 there were numerous “merchantts” from London working in the “realme and domynions of Barbery . . . about fower yeares now last past.” And in 1603, John Wakeman, an English merchant, was described as having had a “long residence in Barbarie.”¹¹⁰

Alongside these merchants and factors were assorted Britons ranging from musicians to spies to women relatives who interacted with Muslims. In 1577, the Moroccan ruler Mulay Abdel Malek asked Edmund Hogan to send him a few English musicians to reside in his court; he promised to “let them live according to their law and conscience.”¹¹¹ In 1579 in Morocco lived a Thomas Cely of Bristol at the house of “Thomas Butleres, a Yngleshe man, and heer a dweller,” whose function, in part, was to collect intelligence about the movements of the Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean.¹¹² In 1604 there were, according to Captain John Smith, many English “Gold-smiths, Plummers, Carvers, and Polishers of stone, and Watch-makers” living and working in Morocco. Each was being paid ten shillings a day, was given food and clothing by the king, and was allowed to import and export goods “custome-free.”¹¹³ In 1618 an Englishman succeeded in spending enough time in Algiers to be able to spy on Algerian military fortifications: “a certain individual . . . had been into Barbary to survey the fortress of Algiers, with the idea that by depriving the corsairs of that refuge the end would be in great measure obtained.”¹¹⁴ In 1620, Captain Gyles Penn was taken hostage by the Moors. After his release he remained a trader in Barbary for the next 20 years.¹¹⁵ In 1623, Samuel Cade, who had “lived some time at the Court of Syder Ali, Prince of Barbary, and made friendship with him and his people,” petitioned to take to Barbary “a ship laden with wares.”¹¹⁶ In 1631, Gertrude Lacon and Sara Bramforde were given passes to “goe into Barbara with a brother of theirs, being a marchant who liveth in those parts.”¹¹⁷ In 1638, Sir George Carteret met some “English Marchants” in Safi some of whom had lived “in ye Cuntry this 20 years.”¹¹⁸ And at Salee, the London merchants Henry St. John and Co. began trading in timber, wool, and military hardware in return for gold and saltpeter.¹¹⁹

It is clear, then, that the first Muslim country to which Englishmen were exposed was Morocco, and that as they moved outside their European parameter of commercial and financial interaction, the first people they encountered, traded with, and settled among, were the Moors. Other Englishmen traded with and resided in the Ottoman Empire. As early as 1560, William Dennis had been trading in Istanbul; so too were William Malim and Thomas Cotton.¹²⁰ In 1575 two merchants, John Wight and Joseph Clements, stayed a year and half in the Ottoman capital.¹²¹ A few years later, in 1580, one of the agreements between Sultan Murad and Elizabeth stated the following: “14 Item, if any Englishman shall come hither [Turkish Empire] either to dwel or trafique, whether hee be married or unmarried, he shall pay no polle or head money.”¹²² Not only was the Muslim sultan eager to see the English live and trade in his realm, but he was willing to make the necessary concessions that might encourage them to do so.

Again, as with Morocco, some Britons thought that the Ottoman Empire was a good place to conduct illegal activities. In July of 1599 a plot was discovered in London in which a number of men confessed to planning to counterfeit money in Turkey. Because neither the equipment nor the workers were available there, they were planning to make the “engine” in London and then smuggle it into Turkey.¹²³ A few decades later, Henry Robinson complained that religious instability and persecution in England were forcing numerous merchants “to goe and live in Turky”; ten years later Paul Haget confirmed that he had lived in “Turkey four years, and [was] acquainted with most of the officers of State in that port [Constantinople], and their inferior officers.”¹²⁴ Between 1642 and 1660 there were small English communities in Istanbul and Izmir that were not only working for the Levant Company, but colluding with the exiled royalists against the Commonwealth.¹²⁵ In 1657, William Ellis caused a diplomatic near-crisis between Whitehall and the High Porte: having served as a shipmaster to the basha of Memphis in Egypt, he had absconded with some of the basha’s property to Leghorn where he lived in luxury—until he was arrested after Cromwell sought help from the duke of Tuscany.¹²⁶ From the Atlantic coast to the Valley of the Nile, and from Istanbul to Salee, Britons lived and worked among the Muslims.

Merchants living in Morocco and elsewhere in the Muslim world were not always amicable to each other. They sometimes quarreled and sought justice in Muslim courts. In 1572 some Jewish merchants sued the English “Christian” merchant Richard Glassock for selling them poor quality cloth that was “burnt during dying and coarsely woven,” but they later withdrew their suit.¹²⁷ Trade in cloth was very important to England, which exported the material to Morocco in return for sugar and saltpeter (and, in the 1590s, gold).¹²⁸ Queen Elizabeth frequently wrote to the Moroccan ruler requesting legal action on behalf of her subjects. Sometimes she wanted him to arbitrate among her merchants and at other times between her merchants and other European merchants and traders.¹²⁹ By the time King James succeeded to the throne, this English submission to Muslim law and court was so prevalent that it scandalized John Harrison who saw in it stark anti-Biblical behavior (he cited the prohibition of going to “unjust” courts in 1 Corinthians 6:1). Harrison ordered his compatriots to stop using Muslim courts and to seek justice in England. He also warned them against ignoring their Christian duties in the presence of Moors and Jews, “especially concerning the observation of the Saboth daie.” Harrison started holding services for his compatriots, and was happy that they were willing to suspend business on Sunday to join in prayer. Only one merchant continued to trade, and when Harrison reprimanded him for his religious laxity the merchant claimed that the “common custome on the coaste of Barbarie [was] not to observe the Saboth daie.”¹³⁰ Harrison suspected that that trader, along with other merchants, was counterfeiting money and passing it on to the Moors. Later, the deception was discovered by the Muslims, who spoke out against the English merchants and their nation. That is why Harrison decided to take “a mynister or twoo with me, bothe to preache to the merchaunts and make them observe better orders then formerlie they have don.”¹³¹ Especially in the dominion of the Muslims, Christianity was needed to reform the merchants.

Just as Harrison and the Barbary Company had recruited ministers, so did the Levant Company recognize the importance of ministers and sent many of them to reside in Aleppo and Istanbul. Some of these ministers who served in Arabic-speaking countries, such as Edward Pococke, learned Arabic and other oriental languages and, upon their return to England, proved instrumental in the development of Arabic studies. Harrison, however, who was a deeply religious man and always quoted the Scriptures, evidently feared—as Sir Thomas Shirley had feared—that Britons living among the Muslims, whether in Salee or in Istanbul, would quickly adopt the customs of the Muslims and forget their own.¹³² That is why he felt there was a great need to keep a close religious watch over all who lived in the Muslim dominions. When in 1630 a treaty was signed between Charles I and Mulay al-Walid, the latter agreed not to force the English merchants to appear before the Muslim court on Sunday. If it was not possible to prevent Britons from submitting to Muslim law, it was possible at least to make them submit on days other than “their Saboth day.”¹³³

One of the areas in which an interesting exchange occurred between Britons and Muslims was in what might be described as industrial spying.¹³⁴ Throughout the period under study there was a sense of crisis surrounding the English cloth industry because of the decline in wool exports since the 1550s. The decline had exceeded a third of England’s overall export, and had been caused by multiple factors. The traditional woolen material made in England was heavy and thick, while the Mediterranean markets demanded lighter textures. Furthermore, English traders sometimes cheated their customers.¹³⁵ As a result of this decline, cloth producing regions in England such as Kent and Suffolk suffered economically, and London merchants realized that they had to improve their products and services. They also had to learn how to accommodate the demands of the export markets in terms of design, color, and texture. Richard Hakluyt recognized the implications of the industry’s decline and immediately set about to address it: he suggested that the only way Britons could improve their wool and dyeing production was to spy on the Muslims and learn their techniques. In 1579 the Privy Council advised London dyers to send two men “into Moscovia and Persia” “to learne and be instructed in a certaine perfecte arte of dyinge without woade used in thos countreyes.”¹³⁶ That same year Richard Hakluyt wrote to “M. Morgan Hubblethorne Dier,” who was on his way to Persia, telling him to learn all the Persian techniques used in dyeing.¹³⁷ Three years later Hakluyt gave his friend who was going to “Turkie” a list of things to look up and acquire (similar to the 1579 list of advice to the “Dier”) that would help England’s clothing and dying industry: “9. To note all kindes of clothing in Turkie, and all degrees of their labour in the same. 10. To endevour rather the vent of Kersies, then of other Clothes as a thing more beneficiall to our people … 12. To seeke out a vent for our Bonettos, a cap made for Barbarie, for that the poore people may reape great profite by the trade.”¹³⁸

In another dispatch that same year to the English agent in Istanbul, Hakluyt was quite open about the need to improve the quality of dyeing wool in England. It was essential, Hakluyt urged, that the English learn how the Turks dyed their wool and imitate them:

Forasmuch as it is reported that the Woollen clothes died in Turkie bee most excellently died, you shall send home into this realme certaine Mowsters or pieces of Shew to be brought to the Diers hall, there to be shewed, partly to remoove out of their heads, the tootoo great opinion they have conceived of their owne cunning, and partly to moove them for shame to endevour to learne more knowledge to the honour of their countrey of England, and to the universall benefit of the realme.”¹³⁹

Hakluyt continued by urging the agent to send to England the plants used by the Turks “by seed or by root in barrell of earth,” and to observe closely the “order of the degrees of labour used in Turky.” If the Turks did things better than the English, the agent should learn how things were done and bring that information home. Furthermore, added Hakluyt, the factor should locate a Turk who was expert in his “Art” and bring him to England so he would train Britons in the silk and woolen profession. Since it was difficult to get permission to send such a Turk to England, the agent should resort to bribing some “great Bassas” in order to expedite the matter.¹⁴⁰ By 1584, Hakluyt was hoping that the “Westerne discoveries lately attempted” would lead to improvements in England’s trade with the “Moores in Barbarie and Affricke,” particularly in the area of “wollen cappe,” since ships on their way to America had to stop in Barbary and could use that opportunity to expand their trade. London and Hereford, Hakluyt believed, would especially benefit from this trade, which would provide “greate reliefe to oure poore people.”¹⁴¹

Another area of engagement was in science and medicine. In 1582, a “Niqula,” possibly Nicholas Cabry, Walsingham’s apothecary, spent four years in Istanbul learning about drugs and remedies.¹⁴² Islamic medicine was an important discipline for Europeans: all physicians in the medieval period studied the writings of Rahzes, Avicenna, and Averroes.¹⁴³ In 1593, Avicenna’s Canons was published in Arabic and Latin in Rome to serve as a medical university textbook. Meanwhile there were technological innovations in Christendom that Britons were eager to sell to Muslims. In 1600, Edward Wright, a mathematician who was applying mathematical theory to navigation (and author of Certaine Errors in Navigation, 1599), was told by Thomas Bernhere, a resident of Morocco, that Mulay Ahmad would eagerly buy, at a good price, any “astrolabe that hath somewhat extraordinarie in it.” Bernhere suggested that the astrolabe along with other instruments be made of either brass or silver, and that space be left so that “Arabique words and figures” could be inscribed.¹⁴⁴ Bernhere also told Wright to show the Moroccan ambassador in England some of his experiments with the “loadstone.” Britons were to advertise their technology to the Muslims to impress them as well as to profit from possible sales. Bernhere recognized that scientific knowledge not only brought power, as Francis Bacon declared, but financial reward. Science and technology were part of trade.

Muslim rulers and their retinues eagerly sought to have English scientists and physicians reside in their courts to introduce the new sciences into their kingdoms. The study of al-keemya’, the changing of “lead into gold and copper into silver,” as the Arab historian al-Wufrani defined it at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was quite popular (and controversial) in Morocco in the period under study. According to him, Mulay Abdallah was reputed to be scientifically adept,¹⁴⁵ and his successor, Mulay al-Mansur was “much delighted in the studie of Astronomie and Astrologie, and valueth Instruments serving for the course of the Sunne and Moone.”¹⁴⁶ Not only was the latter interested in science but in the scientists too; in 1601,“one John Rolliffe, a mann of learning, and Richard Edwards, an apothecary” were sent by Queen Elizabeth to serve Mulay al-Mansur. ¹⁴⁷ In an attempt to ensure good relations with Morocco after the Moroccan ambassador had visited England the year before, the queen authorized passes for the two men and urged payment of all their expenses.

Such scientific engagement continued well into the Stuart period. In 1637 occurred a curious episode between the king of Morocco and Edmund Bradshaw. It seems that after arriving in Morocco “without any money,” as Robert Blake reported, Bradshaw had started dabbling in “chemistry” in front of the king and had “conversed with witches.” Bradshaw retorted that he had with him a chemical powder that he had given to the “Queene of Morocco also being sick,” which so relieved her that she sent “many thanks” and the king sent Bradshaw “a Barbary horse for ye powder hee had sent hym and after sent to him for more of the saide powder.” Afterwards, Bradshaw indicated, some “of the most learned sorts of people of that country” went to him to confer about “the said powder & other experiments in chymicall art.” Alchemy and chemistry had brought Britons and Muslims together.¹⁴⁸ Such interactions between Britons and Muslims show a wide and extensive range of mutual knowledge, familiarity, and engagement. They all show that the Muslim world, from Salee to Istanbul, provided the English and other Britons with opportunities to work, profit, and improve their social conditions. To many of the Barbary and Turkey traders, along with the soldiers and seamen, the Muslims were employers, partners, and sometimes accomplices. No other non-Christian dominions attracted more Britons to settle and work than Moorish North Africa and the “Turkish” Mediterranean.

Another dynamic relationship between Muslims and Britons on Muslim soil is portrayed in the important but as yet ignored writings of Englishmen who were captured and enslaved by Muslims, who lived and served among them, and then finally either escaped home or were ransomed by their compatriots. In this period, countless merchants and sailors, gunners and soldiers, cabin boys and preachers, lords and commoners, men and women, from England and the rest of the British Isles, were captured by pirates and taken to the slave markets in North Africa and the Atlantic coast of Morocco. These captives lived and worked among the Muslims, not as the mercenaries or traders that were needed and respected by Muslim potentates, but as prisoners and slaves at the beck and call of their Muslim owners. These men saw and wrote about the Muslim world from behind the galley oars or from within the bagnios (slave prisons), from the fields where they labored, or from the mansions in which they served. They experienced the Muslim world from below.

Between 1577 and 1704 there were twenty-two accounts written by Englishmen about captivity among the Muslims (see appendix A). In these accounts, former captives and editors were well aware of the many Britons who had renounced England and Christianity during their captivity, had converted to Islam, and had settled among the Muslims. Two of them, Joseph Pitts and Thomas Pellow (whose account appeared in 1739), had done exactly that. They along with the other captives knew that their home communities, which had heard a lot about renegadoes and apostates, were suspicious of them, and wondered how much captivity had changed them. In the majority of cases where a captive escaped and returned home, the community could only wonder whether he had apostatized and been physically marked by Islam. And short of stripping him naked to see whether he had been circumcised or not, which communities and sea captains sometimes did, there was no definite answer.

Such anxiety about the returning captive in seventeenth-century England suggests an identity insecurity. To have been among the Muslims did not necessarily mean that the English/British/Christian identity had been preserved. Rather, it had been tested, and there was no foregone certainty that it would have passed the test successfully. Long before the Stockholm syndrome was identified, communities worried that a captive would have started to identify with the captor—especially at a time when becoming Muslim might have led to advancement and financial gain. To have been among the Muslims was not just to have been a prisoner of war, but a prisoner of temptation too. And many of the prisoners reported on compatriots who had succumbed to Muslim allure and settled among the Muslims.

That is why in writing about themselves—or in submitting depositions and communicating with relatives—captives presented themselves as hardened Britons who had endured years of slavery and labor among the Muslims in order to preserve the integrity of their religious and national identity. Unable to present themselves as chivalrous Britons fulfilling their soldierly ideals amid Muslims, the writers transformed their accounts into intelligence reports about the military and strategic capabilities of the Muslims. Especially in letters they wrote to their relatives at home, they included military information hoping that the authorities would value them for their patriotism and reward them by paying their ransoms. In a letter to his sister about his captivity, Pethericke Honicombe included information about “thirtie saile of shipps att Sally now preparinge to come for the coastes of Englande in the begynninge of the sumer, and, if there were not speedy course taken to prevent itt, they would do much mischiefe.”¹⁴⁹ The captives hoped to be viewed as spies for England among the Muslims. That is why many accounts, especially the later and lengthier ones in the seventeenth century, described the topography, the fauna and flora, the social customs, and the religious habits of the Muslim world. The writers presented to the English reader what no ambassador or traveler could have seen or known about the military preparedness, the movement of the fleet, and the number of soldiers among the Moors and Turks. Although the captives informed their writings with an agenda of Christian resistance and victory, they also provided important information about the peoples and dominions of Islam.

It is noteworthy that returning captives did not appear in dramatic and literary documents. While there are plays about British soldiers among the Muslims, only a few allusions to English captives among the Muslims that appear in the course of poems and plays. In a “A devise of a Maske for the right honorable Viscount Mountacute” (c. 1570s), George Gascoigne presented a fictional account of the captivity of an English youth, and in A Challenge for Beautie by Thomas Heywood, two Englishmen were captured by the Turks. When asked about their country of origin, one answered “England,” to which the Turk replied “Y’ar Nobly Spirited,” because he found him and his companion strong in their infirmity.¹⁵⁰ In A Very Woman (1636), Philip Massinger depicted an “English Slave” in Sicily who overcame a Turk. That same year the author of A Brave Memorable and Dangerovs Sea-Fight mentioned the “too too many” British ships and men that had “beene sunke, slaine, and taken.”¹⁵¹ In January of 1638, William D’Avenant wrote and Inigo Jones designed the masque Britannia Triumphans in celebration of the victory of the English fleet over Salee the year before. In the description of the “Border of the Scene” there is reference to “two nearly nude [male] captives, with their hands bound”; in another variation a woman was added to the captives.¹⁵² This is the only occasion when the theme of captivity was broached in the masque. After all, it was not a happy topic since only rarely did the English monarch perform so heroically in ransoming his subjects.

Captivity did not appeal in England to the literary writers as it did in, for instance, France or Spain. There is no account in drama or fiction of capture, enslavement, and return similar to the one in Rabelais’ Pantagruel or Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Life in Algiers and The Prisoners of Algiers. ¹⁵³ The reason for this absence could be that such a narrative would evoke a humiliation of which writers did not wish to remind their audiences—until the Interregnum period, British sailors were nearly helpless before the attacks of the corsairs. Another reason why writers might not have wanted to tackle the subject of returning captives was that the captives were creating a social problem; having been ransomed, captives were finding themselves not only in debt to their ransomers, but destitute as a result of having to start their lives anew after years of absence from their professions and their country. In the Knight of Malta (circa 1618), Beaumont and Fletcher showed how poor and destitute a released captive was after returning to his home. After Colonna explained that he had been a slave among the Turks he added that, having been freed, he found himself “a stranger, and my wants upon me . . . The hand of pity, that should give for Heaven sake, / And charitable hearts, are grown so cold.”¹⁵⁴ For these and other reasons, captives and captivity were never explored psychologically or morally on the English stage or in English fiction. Throughout the period under study, no presentation of the social and historical context of captivity was offered, nor of the actual conditions of enslavement.¹⁵⁵

Captives appeared more frequently in depositions than in fiction–usually in first person accounts, some of which were inevitably quite “dramatic” in their self-image and content. Once a captive returned to England, he had to submit a deposition to the authorities about his enslavement. The deposition did not so much describe the captive’s personal experience as document the number and whereabouts of other captives, and provide information about the military and naval location of the corsairs. In the late Jacobean period two captives returned to England to report on fortifications in Algiers.¹⁵⁶ Numerous depositions have survived showing the carefulness with which the debriefings were conducted in the harbor towns where the captives had landed, and the precision with which information was documented and passed on to the Privy Council.¹⁵⁷ On 18 March 1635, the following report was submitted by the mayor of Plymouth to the Privy Council:

And my very good Lords. My duty in all humble manner: I saye lately arrived heere one Christopher Pige, a Marryner that hath liued long a captive in Argire, and speakes of diverse shipps now making readye there for the caost of England and Ireland, and likewise speakes of the strength of the Argerine, and Salye in shipping, and the number of his Ma[jes]ties Subiects that are prisoners there; this examinacon [was taken . . .] to make knowne to yor Honors, that some tymely course may be taken for theire redempcon, and soe rest.¹⁵⁸

In the mayor’s view, the purpose of the deposition was to document information about the North African pirates and encourage some action on the part of the captives. After all, many of the captives came from harbor cities like the mayor’s Plymouth. Attached to the mayor’s cover note was Pige’s deposition:

The saide Ex[aminant] saith that in or about five yeares [be]foure he was taken prisoner by twelue saile of Turkish men of warre—belonging to Argeere in a shipp called the Golden ffaulcon of London whereof was captayne one William Hokeridge and this Exam[inant] master of the said shipp and carryed to Argeere, and hath bin since continued a captiue there, duringe which tyme this Exam[inant] was often fforced to goe pylott in some of theire men of warre, And in december last this Exam[inant] was ransomed for nyntye three pounds; And this Exam[inant] further saith that [he saw] there sixe and thyrtye sayle of English Scottish and Irish shipps haue beene taken by men of warre of Argeare, And there are nowe fouer hundred captiues or there a bouts of English Scottes & Irish, And this Ex[aminant] further saith that there were tenn saile of shipps of Argeare which were to be made readye to come for the coast of England and Ireland this springe as he hearde, And this Exam[inant] further saith that in July last he was in Sally where he staied fiue weekes or thereabouts, and duringe his spring there there [sic] came in tenn saile of Sally men of warre which brought in three hundred Christians captives English Scotish Irish and French whoe had taken eight saile of English Scotish and Irish shippes, And then [the Examinant] further saith that he hath heared and beleeveth that there are one hundred and fiftye prisoners there in Sally of English Scotish and Irish, And further saith that there belonge sixe and thyrtye saile of men of warre to Sally, tenn saile to Tunnies, and fortye saile to Argeeare and most of them shippes of good force, And this Ex[aminant] further saith that Sally men of warre doe most of all frequent in sumer the English French & Irish coast, And that this last sumer some of them were as high as the Isle of Lundye in Scotland.¹⁵⁹

This deposition and others like it show that the captives were viewed as a much needed source of reliable information about Muslim military plans. Similarly, the long autobiographical accounts written by captives reveal the same goal: the captives wanted to show that they alone could describe the world of the Muslims accurately. Although many of the accounts (and the depositions) included a kind of adventure story of the captives and how they smartly or heroically or perseveringly escaped from among the “barbarous Turks,” there was always a religious/national purpose at the heart of the text—they were texts of confrontation between Christians and Muslims. In this respect, the captivity accounts are the first realistic documents in English that are situated within the conflict between Christendom and Islam.

The first account by an English captive who had been forced into the Turkish military was John Fox, a gunner.¹⁶⁰ After he escaped with 266 Christians (including three Englishmen) in 1577, he sought employment in Spain, where as a hardened soldier he received better pay than he would have in England. Although Fox did not have much information to convey about Turkish Egypt, his text was republished in 1608—under a different name—showing the need of English readers for any kind of information about the Muslim Mediterranean. That is perhaps why when Edward Webbe wrote his own account in 1590, Edward Webbe, Cheif Master Gunner, His Trauailes, he filled it with “information.” He told, for instance, about the Turkish foray, in which he had taken part, into the territory of Prester John, where he saw a beast “hauing 4 heades, they are in shape like a wilde Cat, and are of the height of a great mastie Dog.”¹⁶¹ Webbe stated that after his capture his “skil in Artillery” led him to be pressed into the Turkish army as it went on the offensive through Persia, “Damasco,” and then “the great Caer . . . the greatest Cittie in the world.”¹⁶² He had served as “chiefe maister Gunner in these Turkish warres,” and participated in numerous battles not only against Muslim enemies of the Turks, but against the Catholics of Calabria. Although he had fought with the Muslims, Webbe intimated, he had been able to put that service to good English use since he had been able to acquire a lot of information about lands and territories that were unfamiliar to his compatriots.

The texts by Fox and Webbe are short and crude, written as they were by men who had been totally unprepared for the world of Islam. Neither knew anything about the culture or the religion of the Muslims—except that Islam was opposed to Christianity—and neither was able to enter into the lives of Muslims. Or if they did they did not bother to write about them. But both seemed to have been aware that their compatriots were going to meet with a new kind of experience in the Mediterranean, and both wanted to confirm a national commitment that was being challenged both by Catholicism and Islam. The Elizabethan English viewed the peoples of both these religions as enemies but they did not fear them equally; in a period when the Spanish, not the Turkish, armada threatened England, the Papist emerged as the more dangerous foe of the two. It is no wonder, then, that the English and other Britons felt safer among the Moors than the Spaniards, and soldiers were more willing to serve—or even be captured—by the former than by the latter. Richard Hasleton is a case in point: he was taken captive by Spaniards and tortured in order to convert him to Catholicism. In 1588 he managed to escape from Majorca and sailed in a self-made raft to the “Coast of Barbary.” Hasleton knew how dangerous it was for a Christian to be there, since the only Christians who landed on the coast were Spaniards who abducted Muslims to sell as slaves. Hasleton, however, was fortunate in meeting an old farmer who took pity on him and offered him food and drink. Although Hasleton was later captured and imprisoned in Algiers, he was not tortured by rack and solitary confinement as he had been among the Spaniards.¹⁶³

About half a century later, the attitude toward Islam and Muslims in captivity accounts had not changed much. In his account—published in 1670 but describing events in 1648 and after—a “Mr. T. S.” told how he was enslaved after a sea battle and taken to Algiers, where he was forced into the army. T. S. confirmed what many of his readers knew—that English and continental soldiers who had converted to Islam constituted the main strength of the Algerian army, and that the “Infantry was made up of Renegado-Christians, whereof there are such number in that place, that they bear all the sway and command both by Sea and Land.”¹⁶⁴ While Hasleton had preferred Muslims to Catholics, but still retained his allegiance to English Protestantism, others were choosing Islam over Christianity. The allure of the Muslim world and the challenge it posed to Christian identity and British nationalism had grown more powerful and more successful over the years.

T. S. assured his readers that he had not renounced his god or monarch, and that because of his military skills, he had fought in the battles of the Muslims, which took him over the vast and hitherto unknown expanse of the North African kingdoms. That is why his friends had urged him to write his account, as his editor stated; T. S. had information nobody else possessed. In his memoir, which was deemed so valuable that it was published posthumously, T. S. described the various campaigns in which he participated, the locations he visited, and the political rivalry of the numerous Muslim leaders. From the very start, T. S. emphasized his commitment to England by providing intelligence about Algerian military preparedness. He warned how the harbor in Algiers was very well protected against the “Attempts of any Christian Enemy” and reported on the weak places in the fortifications. He also told of the conflict between the Arabs and the Turks, and how much the former sought to remove the yoke of the “heretical” Turks.¹⁶⁵ Since the campaigns in which he was involved were directed against the Arabs and Moors, he provided an extensive portrait of the ideological and cultural differences between them and the Turks. His account was to be the document of a soldier who never reneged on his English values, never doubted his faith in the Christian God, and who presented a description of North Africa that no other Briton before him had offered to his country. It is interesting that T. S. became so involved in the battles and ambushes and fighting, and so committed to the cause his Turkish master was pursuing, that he started to refer to the Turkish authority as “Our Government.”

Although many captives served as soldiers and seamen, others served inside their captors’ household, where they entered into the intimacy of Muslim life. In this respect, their knowledge of the world of Islam was unparalleled in the early modern period of European geographical expansion. They were able to provide a view of the Muslims that no Muslim could provide of the Christians—no Muslim captive among the Christians left behind him an account of his enslavement as detailed and curious as those left by Europeans. Furthermore, and intentionally or not, the captives’ accounts showed the Muslims as “round” characters, for some of the captives who stayed for long periods among the Muslims entered into interesting relationships with their captors. Although they were captives, they grew to like their captors and were not unwilling to recall the humor in cross-cultural misunderstanding between themselves and the Muslims. After his capture, T. S. reported, he was put to work as a cook for the ruler. Although he could cook well, when it came to preparing “other Meats less usual than in our Country,” he ended up making such “mad Sauces, and such strange Ragoux, that every one took me for a Cook of the Antipodes.” Soon after, the ruler was lamenting the death of his previous cook, whom T. S. had replaced. And when at a great feast T. S. mistakenly included a liver of a fish that “hath a most loathsom tast” but that he had never seen before, the result was a culinary disaster that so angered the ruler he had T. S. given “ten Bastonadoes” and then sold him out of the kitchen.¹⁶⁶ Later on, T. S. had many offers to stay among the Muslims. What made the Muslim allure powerful was the fact that T. S. had grown to admire the Muslims, having seen nothing “of that rudeness, which our People imagine to be in all Parts of Africa.” “The Arabs,” he continued, “all about Africa are People very polite, and well bred …they are affable, hospitable, courteous, kind, and very liberal.”¹⁶⁷ The allure was difficult to reject, especially after a woman fell in love with him and offered him wealth and opportunities if he would convert to Islam and marry her.

While the years of captivity were difficult, they allowed Britons to enter into unprecedented relationships with Muslims. No traveler or ambassador had as curious an experience as that of Adam Elliot, who was taken captive in the early 1670s. Elliot became so free with his master, Hamed Lucas, that he joked with him about “serious” topics, telling him that French wine was so good that Lucas might want to “renounce Mahumetism to drink of it.” Later Elliot reported that he sang to his master’s company “the Mock-Astrologer, which was new when I left England; they [the company] were wonderfully affected with it, and were very desirous to have me translate ha ha ha, & c. into Spanish, which made me laugh more heartily than I sung.”¹⁶⁸ That trendy London songs were being enjoyed by Muslim captor and Christian captive shows how familiarity could develop even under such hard conditions. Pitts remembered that his last master often called him “Ben ebn … My Son” and never suspected that Pitts would think of escaping; he had given the Exeter convert to Islam everything that a young man could want.¹⁶⁹

Another area of engagement between English captives and their Muslim captors was religion. Very few traders or travelers entered into religious debates with Muslims–Thomas Coryat, Henry Marsh, and Sir Thomas Baines are among the few in the seventeenth century who did.¹⁷⁰ Captives, however, who lived inside Muslim homes could not help but find themselves discussing religion at some point in their cohabitation, especially since they would have grown to know and understand Islam better (without necessarily accepting it) than any other European Christian could. Many captives described Muslims as pious, obedient to their Qur’anic faith, and submitting in all tribulations to the unquestioned will of God. The world of Islam was not always portrayed as a place of infidelity and false “Mahometanism,” and the Muslims were not always derided and denounced. Actually, Christians were shown by English writers of drama to pray for them: In Soliman and Perseda by Thomas Kyd (1588), the hero Erastus flees from Christendom and enters the service of the Turkish emperor “Soliman.”¹⁷¹ His beloved Perseda implores God for the Sultan: I will, she declares, “still solicite God for Soliman, / Whose minde hath proued so good and gratious” (4.1.201–202). Similarly, Sir Anthony Shirley assures the Persian “Sophie” in The Travailes of the Three Brothers Shirley, that during battle, Christians will pray for him: “Religious men shall weare their bended knees/ Even to the bone in ceaslesse prayers for you.”¹⁷² The Christian God could be invoked by Christians, both continentals and Britons, for the Muslim cause.

Some captives were challenged by the religious ethos of Islam and admitted that they had found themselves in the awkward position of having to demonstrate to their Muslim counterparts their commitment to their own Christian faith. In the early 1640s, the English cleric Devereux Spratt was captured and enslaved in Algiers. Finding there a group of Britons who were persevering in their faith, he was pleased that God had made him “an instrument” to preach to them. After a few weeks the reverend was about to be ransomed when “on a sudden I was sould and delivered to a Mussleman dwelling with his family in ye towne, upon which change and sudden disappointment I was very sad; my patron asked me to the reason, and withall uttered these comfortable words, ‘God is great!’ which took such impression as strengthened my faith in God, considering thus with myself, Shall this Turkish Mahumitan teach me, who ame a Christian, my duty of faith and dependence upon God.”¹⁷³ For Spratt, the words of the “Mussleman” not only strengthened him but also humbled him. Spratt recognized in his master’s words the vision of God that he himself sought to embody to the English captives: God as supreme over human life and ordering it in accordance with His mysterious will. What was humbling to Spratt was that he, as a Christian, was preaching this theology to his fellow nationals but was obviously not recognizing its application to his own life. The “Turk” so showed him the simplicity and effectiveness of this doctrine that Spratt was touched by the Turk’s words. After all, as a Christian clergyman Spratt could well have denounced the statement as an utterance of an infidel; rather, he treated it as a statement by a Muslim who recognized the power of God both in adversity as well as in prosperity. It is significant that in his whole autobiography Spratt mentioned very little about his two years of captivity, and what he chose to include—about preaching to other captives and being humbled by his master—highlights his response to Muslim captivity. Among the Muslims he had had to come to brutal terms with his faith.

Captives related to Muslims in a unique manner because they met them in different contexts—at prayer and at mealtime, in battle and in the hammam, in the country and in the city, in happiness and in sorrow. The captives learned that among the Muslims there was brutality as well as compassion, that some Muslims were kind while others were vicious, that some captors were men to be hated and despised while others, such as T. S.’s master, were to be admired and served with devotion. The captives provided the English reading public with precise, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes not so sympathetic, but most importantly, empirically derived information about the Muslims. As a result of the popularity and wide circulation of the captivity accounts a large sector of English society became familiar with the Muslims and their world.

Englishmen and other Britons who went or were taken to the dominions of Islam numbered in the thousands. Of those only a few wrote about their experiences. Others were written about in literary and historical documents and others still left depositions and impromptu accounts of their exposure to the Muslims. How much information was transmitted orally to the local communities as sailors, traders, captives, and pirates returned to their homes with fictional and “factional” accounts of the Muslims and their world cannot be known. But there is little doubt that the information about Muslims that was available to Britons in the Age of Discovery provided them with a window on an un-Christian but powerful empire with an unchallenged but challenging religion that was both unthreatened and threatening. It was not an empire England could possess, but one it had to watch and guard against. While Britons traveled and traded between London and Salee, or Plymouth and New England, or Bristol and Guinea, and as they expanded their “discovery” of the world, they were constantly aware of the Muslim Other, as buyer and seller, partner and pirate, captive and captor.