Table Of ContentBritain and Barbary,
1589–1689
Nabil Matar
Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689
Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
Britain and Barbary,
1589–1689
o
Nabil Matar
University Press of Florida
Gainesville ·Tallahassee ·Tampa ·Boca Raton · Pensacola
Orlando ·Miami ·Jacksonville ·Ft. Myers · Sarasota
Copyright 2005 by Nabil Matar
All rights reserved
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the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8130-2871-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8130-3784-4 (e-book)
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University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University,
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For Rudy,
friend and colleague
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Moor on the Elizabethan Stage 12
2. “Imperialism,” Captivity and the Civil Wars 38
3. Barbary and British Women 76
4. Moors in British Captivity 111
5. From Tangier to Algiers 133
Conclusion 167
Appendix 1. “AN ACT for the releife of the Captives taken
by Turkish Moorish and other Pirates and to prevent
the taking of others in time to come” 173
Appendix 2. The Captivity Narrative of John Whitehead 177
Appendix 3. “A Voyage into the Mediterranean Seas” 191
Notes 193
Bibliography 215
Index 233
Preface and Acknowledgments
This book is the final installment in my trilogy about Britain and the Islamic
world, and my excursion into captivity writings. In particular, I turn to the direct
impact of the Barbary region on the culture and history of Britain and focus on
specific case studies. Barbary was the region in the Muslim world that had the
widest-ranging relations with Britain—more so than the Ottoman Levant or
Central Asia. It was a region that played an important role in the nation forma-
tion (Richard Helgerson’s phrase) of early modern Britons.
The English victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 inaugurated diplomatic
and military coordination between the monarchs of England and Morocco,
Queen Elizabeth I and Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur. This cooperation brought to
London Moroccan ambassadors, who inspired the complex and disturbing fig-
ure of the Moor in Elizabethan drama, starting with George Peele’s The Battle of
Alcazar (1589) and ending with Shakespeare’s Othello (ca. 1602) and Thomas
Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I (ca. 1600–1603). From the death of
Queen Elizabeth on, relations between Britain and Barbary swung between coop-
eration and conflict, trade and piracy, and were often determined by the crisis of
captivity that dominated the policies—if there were any—of the Jacobean, Car-
oline, Interregnum, and Restoration administrations (those of James I and II, and
Charles I and II). The captivity of thousands of Britons—men, women and
children—and the inability or unwillingness of the monarchs to liberate them,
drove numerous members of Parliament to join in an opposition to King Charles
I that, along with other issues, finally led to the Civil Wars. Meanwhile, the crisis
of captivity was effecting an important change in the social roles of women: the
first political movement of women (mostly wives) in early modern England came
into being as a result of the Barbary captivity of male breadwinners. Women
organized themselves as petitioners and approached both king and Parliament
with their “wifely” appeals for ransoming their kinsmen. Other women were
themselves taken captive in Barbary and subjugated and enslaved. For the first
time in the history of Britain, change was forced on its political and social culture
by the world of Islam.
The evolution in British naval and commercial power in the early years of the
Interregnum enabled Britons to expand their slave trade from the Atlantic to the
Mediterranean, and to expand from capturing and selling sub-Saharan Africans
to trading in Libyans, Tunisians, Algerians and Moroccans—the “Moors” (in
Arabic, the Magharibi). Britons were not only captives, as Linda Colley has
shown in Captives (2002); they themselves were captors of North Africans.
Meanwhile, the occupation of Tangier in 1662 brought Britons their first colo-
nial challenge in the lands of Islam. Having had some experience in North Amer-
