This Orient Isle by Jerry Brotton review – spies, merchants and chancers

This sparkling book sets out Elizabethan England’s complex and extensive relationship with the Islamic world

Towards the end of the 16th century, an Arab chronicler wrote of exotic Sultana Isabel, the ruler of a small kingdom under attack by the infidel Spaniard, Philip II. He described how she was delivered from invasion by reehan sarsaran, a “sharp wind”, just like that sent against the people of Aad in the Qur’an. This was a sure sign that Allah was on her side. When news of her good fortune broke, there was rejoicing at the chronicler’s court in Marrakech – fireworks, too.

This Sultana Isabel, queen of a foreign land, is none other than Elizabeth I. The sharp winds that saved her were the storms that broke up the Spanish Armada, a fleet of 130 ships containing 19,000 soldiers, in 1588. That she was known in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and Iran, that her merchants and spies were active from Essaouira in the west to Isfahan in the east is a little disorientating (pun intended) to those of us who know English history from the inside. But Jerry Brotton’s sparkling new book sets out just how extensive and complex England’s relationship with the Arab and Muslim world once was, and tentatively connects the threads of that engagement to our own times.

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