Research, links and academic information on Islam and Muslims in Britain. Part of virtuallyislamic.com
Saturday, 19 March 2016
This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World
Independent, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World by Jerry Brotton, book review "With Henry VIII's break with Rome and then (in 1570) Elizabeth's excommunication as a "heretic" by Pope Pius V, England found itself shunned as a rogue state by Catholic Europe. It needed friends with clout in strategic locations. Around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, only the lands of Islam could supply them. Thus the stage was set for an extraordinary half-century of adventures, deals, conspiracies and misunderstandings: a little-known story that Brotton chronicles with scholarship, assurance, and not a little charm."