Abstract
In the “Epistle Dedicatory” for A notable historie of the Saracens, Thomas Newton articulates a commonly expressed early modern English anxiety: that Islamic peoples might conquer European Christians.1 Although Newton and others represented Turks and Moors as tyrannical rulers needing to be feared, recent scholarship continues to uncover the complexity of early modern European views of Muslims.2 Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Life and Death of Mahomet, The Conquest of Spaine Together with the Rysing and Ruine of the Sarazen Empire (published posthumously in 1637) illustrates the complexity of English engagements with Muslims within a single text. Although vilified at times, Moors prove to be more legitimate rulers of Spain than Spaniards. Moreover, while there are both virtuous and villainous Moors in this history, no Spaniard is portrayed in a favorable light: the text represents all Spaniards as traitors to both Christianity and Spain. Although Ralegh’s long-standing hatred of Spain—one that seems out of place in Jacobean England—is seen in The Life’s representation of Spaniards, what is more surprising is the history’s simultaneous condemnation of Islam and validation of the Moorish occupation of Spain.3
They were (indeede) at the first very far off from our Clyme & Region, and therefore the lesse to be feared, but now they are even at our doores and ready to come into our Houses.
—Thomas Newton, A notable historie of the Saracens (1575)
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Notes
George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, in The Dramatic Works of George Peele, 2 vols., ed. Charles Tyler Prouty (New Haven, Connecticut.: Yale University Press, 1961), 1.7 and 16.
Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10–11. The episodes of Mosaic history to which Kidd refers most specifically are the stories of the flood and the fall of the Tower of Babel, but surely stories of Abraham and his sons would fit into this scheme.
George Best, The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher: In Search of a Passage to Cathay and India by the North-West Passage (London: The Argonaut Press, 1938), 34–5.
On Best’s relation to geohumoral theories of race, see Mary Floyd-Wilson’s English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 8–9.
William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Son, 1997), 1.2.99.
Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
John Mandeville, The voyages and trauailes of Sir John Mandeuile knight Wherein is set downe the way to the holy Land, and to Hierusalem: as also to the lands of the great Caane, and of Prester Iohn; to Inde, and diuers other countries: together with the many and strange meruailes therein (London, 1618).
Robert Linche, An historical treatise of the travels of Noah into Europe containing the first inhabitation and peopling thereof. As also a breefe recapitulation of the kings, governors, and rulers commanding in the same, even untill the first building of Troy by Dardanus. Done into English by Richard Lynche, Gent (London, 1601), sig. C2v.
On the relation between Luna’s Morisco identity and Historia verdadera, see Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, the New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 111–13.
Another example of this racial/genealogical politics can be seen in George Owen Harry’s The genealogy of the high and mighty monarch, Iames, by the grace of God, king of great Brittayne (London, 1604), which traces Charles I back to Noah.
All citations for The Life will appear parenthetically. There are many unconventional spellings and numerous errors in pagination and punctuation in the text. I have occasionally placed corrections in brackets, in places where the meaning might otherwise be obscured. For the most part, however, I have quoted the text as is. Walter Ralegh, The Life and Death of Mohamet, The Conquest of Spaine Together with the Rysing and Ruine of the Sarazen Empire (London, 1637).
On the intersections of racial/genealogical and religious categories of identity, see, for example, Ania Loomba, “‘Delicious traffick’: Racial and Religious Difference on the Early Modern Stages” in Shakespeare and Race, eds. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 203–24; Loomba Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). On the connections between race and genealogy in particular, see Loomba and Burton’s introduction to Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, eds. Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–36.
Miguel de Luna, Historia Verdadera Del Rey Don Roderigo, ed. Luis F. Bernabé Pons (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada), 2001, 15. Translation mine.
On the myriad—usually nonreligious—reasons that Christians “turned turk,” see Nabil Matar, “The Renegade in English Seventeenth Century Imagination,” Studies in English Literature 33 (1993): 489–505; and Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 102–6.
Deborah Root, “Speaking Christian: Orthodoxy and Difference in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Representations 23 (1988): 132.
The complete title of Taubman’s 1687 translation is The history of the conquest of Spain by the Moors together with the life of the most illustrious monarch Almanzor: and of the several revolutions of the mighty empire of the Caliphs, and of the African kingdoms/composed in Arabick by Abulcacim Tariff Abentariq, one of the generals in that Spanish expedition; and translated into Spanish by Michael de Luna, interpreter to Philip the Second; now made English. The first part of the title bears a closer resemblance to Ralegh’s title than to Ashley’s. Taubman’s text also contains a more detailed history of the saga between Don Sancho and Don Roderigo and between Don Roderigo and Don Julian. In addition, since Ralegh’s and Ashley’s texts each contain information not contained in the other, and since there is no earlier English translation of Luna’s history, it appears that both authors consulted the 1606 Spanish edition. Ashley, in fact, says so explicitly in his preface, as he writes of his encounters with works written in “strange Characters,” including Indian, Malayan and “Mexican” (sig. Av). Yet, “Amongst the rest I happen on an Arabian Historie concerning the losse of Spaine by Roderigo, King of the Goths, which by the commandment of King Phillip the Second, was translated into Spanish out of the Arabian Copie remayning in the Escurial”; see Robert Ashley, Almansor the learned and victorious king that conquered Spaine. His life and death published by Robert Ashley, out of the librarie of the Uniuersitie of Oxford (London, 1627), sig. Ar.
Ashley, Almansor, sig. §2r-3v.
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© 2011 Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet
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Britton, D.A. (2011). Islam, Race, and Political Legitimacy in Ralegh’s The Life and Death of Mahomet . In: Andrea, B., McJannet, L. (eds) Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119826_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119826_3
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