Mythologizing the Ottoman: The Jew of Malta and The Battle of Alcazar

Abstract

At the close of the fifteenth century, just as Christopher Columbus was initiating European colonization into a new world, the Muslim presence remained a significant factor in the old. Indeed, we know that a new wave of Islamic expansion was then rising in Anatolia, the southwestern and anciently civilized section of Turkey where, from 1300 on, the beginnings of an Ottoman empire had gradually been coming into play. Progressing from the status of a local Anatolian grouping to a state comprising a number of Anatolian cities, the Ottoman surge had grown to a cosmopolitan power.¹ Significantly, its polity did not embrace that three hundred-year-old pax Islamica that had governed the Mediterranean since the twelfth century. Instead, the new Ottoman entity has been described by historians as dynamic and aggressive, penetrated from its very origins with a sense of what warlike jihad that had characterized the Islamic outreach of the eight century, seven hundred years previously.² The purpose of this essay is to deepen our understanding of how the development of Ottoman influence in the Mediterranean helped to configure the cultural history of early modern England as manifested in several “alien” plays (my term) of the 1590s. Because there is no simple cause / effect relationship that yokes English affairs with those of the Mediterranean, I wish to approach this issue by isolating several events that may provide a suitable framework for analysis.