By the late 1570s, Elizabeth had developed an amicable correspondence with the Ottoman sultan Murad III, advising him that they both hated those idolatrous Catholics, and that she would be happy to act as his subject in return for a political and commercial alliance. Murad was rather perplexed—as we know from his advisers’ writings—to hear from a female ruler of a tiny country on the edge of Europe that he’d never heard of. But this was a time when Islam saw assimilation on its terms as a sign of its power rather than weakness (the empire was populated and partly run by Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Croats, and Serbs). Writing back to “Sultana Isabel,” Murad offered her English joint stock companies a commercial agreement, strictly on his terms.

Official papal policy was to excommunicate Christians trading with Muslims, but Elizabeth was now beyond such edicts. By the 1580s Elizabeth had a resident ambassador in Istanbul (then Constantinople) and consuls throughout North Africa and the Middle East, including in places like Aleppo and Raqqa. As reformed Protestants, many of them would have felt safer traveling in Muslim lands under Ottoman protection than in Catholic Europe, where arrest and the Inquisition invariably awaited them.

Elizabeth developed a pro-Ottoman policy that calls to mind Theresa May’s recent military deals with Turkey. With characteristic pragmatism as well as a keen eye for symbolic revenge, Elizabeth stripped lead and tin from deconsecrated Catholic churches to export to the Ottomans as munitions in their wars with the Shia Persian empire—“which the Turk buys of them,” wrote an outraged Spanish ambassador to England, “almost for its weight in gold, the tin being vitally necessary for the casting of guns and the lead for purposes of war.” The trade was so successful that it was replicated in the Barbary states of North Africa, where again English armaments were traded for gold and sugar (hence Elizabeth’s infamously bad teeth). English merchants also traveled as far as Persia, playing the Shah off against his Ottoman adversaries in a dangerous geopolitical game, aimed at neutralizing the Catholic threat of imminent Spanish invasion and keeping the ailing English economy afloat.

Nor was this a story limited to the realpolitik of the elite. Hundreds, possibly thousands of Elizabethans worked and lived in the Islamic world. All acknowledged Ottoman sovereignty and many converted to Islam, some under duress, others willingly, assuming that being Muslim would assure their survival more than Protestantism. One such individual was a merchant called Samson Rowlie, born in Norfolk but taken prisoner on a Turkey Company ship off Algiers in 1577. Samson was castrated and converted to Islam and became Hassan Aga the Chief Eunuch and Treasurer to the Ottoman ruler of Algiers. Conversion rarely went the other way, although various Moroccan trade delegations visited London throughout Elizabeth’s reign; they were rarely impressed, and all were happy to return to their homelands.