In Selected Accounts of Travellers and Ambassadors In the Elizabethan and Jacobean Eras The Representation of Muslim Rulers

Abstract

This thesis is an attempt to shed more lights on the images of Muslim rulers depicted by selected travellers and ambassadors who sailed to Muslim lands in late Tudor and early Stuart England. The scope of this study is to find a nexus between such representations of Muslim potentates and the ideological motifs of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. Such delineations were out-and-out controlled by some political, diplomatic, commercial and cultural correspondences between English sovereigns and Muslim monarchs. The course of the study of this thesis primarily depends on three main inventories from which early modern travellers and diplomats under study drew their perceptions about Muslim potentates: the English textual heritage, the experiential inventory, and the dramatic production of Muslim rulers in selected Lord Mayor’s Day pageants. The textual legacy incorporates selected high medieval to early seventeenth century songs, anonymous poems, travelogues, ecclesiastical, and historical books. The English textual legacy was formed in some prominent Christian-Muslim armed conflicts like the Crusades (1095-1291) and the fall of Constantinople (1453). The experiential inventory embodies the cross-cultural interaction between English travellers and diplomats, and Muslim sovereigns. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, accounts were penned by English travellers and ambassadors about the Muslim potentates they saw. The dramatic production of Muslim rulers renders the images depicted by Thomas Middleton in his Lord Mayor’s Day pageants. The thesis attempts to explore how the Jacobean playwright under study offers a different image of the Muslim ruler that suits early modern English imperial aspirations in the first two decades of the seventeenth century.