BRITONS, MUSLIMS, AND AMERICAN INDIANS: GENDER AND

POWER, Nabil Matar

Contents
Endnotes

In recent studies on gender relations and postcolonialism, critics have maintained that Renaissance
Britons and other Europeans perceived “the possession” of America, to use the words of Gesa
Mackenthun, “in terms of the possession of a woman.”[1] As a result, accounts of interracial romances,
whether real or fictitious, came to be associated with the beginnings of European domination and
empire.[2]

A similar association has been assumed in the context of English-Muslim relations. Critics who have
examined Renaissance plays with Turkish or Moorish settings and protagonists have superimposed
the colonial template of America on Islam: they have assumed that since there was a Renaissance
English enterprise on America, there was also an enterprise on Islam and that the enterprise was
mirrored in the male-female relationships which were depicted on the London stage. Jean Howard
argued that in a play such as Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, Part I (1600-1604), the
unsuccessful attempt on the part of the Muslim ruler to seduce English Bess transforms the Moroccan
into “an effeminate otherness that finally renders [him and other Muslims] safely inferior to their
European visitors”[3]: the failure of the interracial seduction proved the strength of English national and
cultural identity. Virginia Mason Vaughan argued that the tension in Othello between North African
male and European female could only be understood in the context of England's and Europe's
emergent colonial discourse.[4] Barbara Fuchs stated that Shakespeare's Othello highlighted “the
dangers that Europe imagined for a woman married into the empire of Islam,” but in The Tempest, she
continued, the marriage of Claribel to the King of Tunis neutralized “the threat of Islam.”[5]

For all these critics, the intercultural and interracial romances between Muslims and Christians dealt
directly with the “beginning … of a colonial narrative.”[6] But the power associated in English
imagination with the Muslim empire produced a totally opposite gender relationship to that of the
American Indians. To speak of the “effeminization” of the Moroccan King, or the “neutralization” of
Islam in Elizabethan and Jacobean thought is to miss an important point: while English Bess managed
to escape with her chastity, English Clem lost his manhood through castration; that Christian Claribel
was to marry the Muslim King shows the price which Christendom was paying to a threatening and un-
neutralized Islam, that same Islam which had changed Carthage into Tunis, and could well change
Milan into a Muslim metropolis. Numerous plays and historical events from the early modern period
confirm not an English “colonial narrative” about Islam, but Muslim dominance through the possession
of Christian and English women—with all the imperial anxiety that such possession generated in
readers and audience alike.

From the Elizabethan period on, when Englishmen sailed to America to pillage and kidnap, they also
sailed to the Ottoman Mediterranean to trade or to turn Turks and the Mugal Empire into commercial
outposts. Whether in gold-rich Morocco, or in Istanbul, the biggest city in seventeenth century Europe,
or in the fabulous palaces of Aghra, Britons developed close commercial and social relations with
Muslims that led to marriages, or plans for marriages. In 1614, for instance, negotiations were
conducted for the marriage of the Sultan of Sumatra and the daughter of an English “gentleman of
honorable parentage” because it was felt that such a marriage would be “beneficial to the [East India]
Company.” Although some London divines objected to the marriage on the ground that the husband-
to-be was a Muslim, the Company marshaled its own theologians to prove “the lawfulness of the
enterprise … by scripture.” The marriage never took place, but it is important that an English woman
was to be married off to the Muslim in order to secure his commercial good will—and merchants,
theologians, and presumably the girl's parents found the prospect lawful.[7]

A little over twenty years later, in 1636, as the number of British captives rose in Algiers, and as funds
dried up to ransom them, an anonymous suggestion was made to King Charles I that he send English
prostitutes to ransom the captured seamen: six women for every one seaman.[8] Although the King
did not act upon this joke/advice, the idea that English (and other British) women would practice the
oldest profession with “Turks” suggests that interracial sexuality was not viewed as totally
objectionable. Actually, interracial sexuality was already taking place between Muslim men and
women from the British Isles: there were numerous women captives who were seized in the first half of
the seventeenth century by North African privateers and hauled to the slave markets of Salee, Algiers,
or Tunis. A brief description of one such abduction was written by Nehemiah Wallington:

August 14, 1645. — Letters from Plymouth certify that

the Turkish pirates, men of war, landed in Cornwall, about
Foy, and that they have taken away two hundred and forty (of
English Christians) of the Cornish men, women, and children,
amongst which Mr. John Carew his daughter, that was cousin
to Sir Alexander Carew that was beheaded, and some
gentlewomen and others of note, and have carried them away;
a very sad thing.[9]
While rich women were sometimes protected by the privateers who recognized their high ransom
value, the poorer women were sold into slavery where they ended up as maids, concubines, members
of the harem, and sometimes wives. These women were forced to integrate quickly and to adjust to a
society where their sexual and domestic roles were quite different from that in London, Plymouth or
Edinburgh. If they returned to their homes, they carried with them stories, memories and experiences
which they shared (or may not have wanted to share) with their families and parishes about the
strange new world of the Muslims. If they never returned, their relatives remembered them, reflecting
about their kin who had turned Muslim and settled among the “infidels.”
The captivity of British (and other European) women precipitated anxiety among their countrymen and
focused public attention on the issue of miscegenation and inter-religious sexuality. Writers expressed
concern for their women compatriots and for the possibility of dishonor and “defilement.” Playwrights
from England (and the continent) such as Cervantes, de Vega, Massinger, Heywood, and Elkanah
Settle, felt the need to present not necessarily an accurate picture of the women's plight, but a
message to audiences about the tenacity of religious belief and the importance of national
commitment. Many of Cervantes’ and De Vega's plays which are set in North Africa included captured
Spanish women who were made to assume heroic roles: Silvia in El Trato de Argel; Marcella in Los
Cautivos de Argel; Lucinda in Los Esclavos Libres; Camila in El Esclave de Venecia and others. The
dramatic formula which underpinned these Spanish works included a captured Christian woman, a
Muslim (either Turkish or Moorish) ruler who falls in love with her, the woman's rejection of his
advances because of her love to a Christian—who is also a captive, the ruler's wife (or close relative)
who falls in love with the male Christian captive, and then, in the nick of time, the escape of the
captives to Christendom and matrimony. Thomas Heywood's English Bess, the only English woman to
be depicted in Renaissance drama among the Muslims, was modeled on these Spanish women.
European dramatists did not seem to have much of a clue as to what was really happening to women
in captivity: their fiction was quite different from Mediterranean reality. For while they were fantasizing,
captured women from Britain and the rest of Christendom were confined in the boudoirs of Muslim
rulers, husbands and masters. Such a stark reality may explain why, in the whole corpus of English
dramatic literature of the early modern period, there is not a single play about an English woman
captive in North Africa, suggesting perhaps that no English writer could address a situation where the
compatriots he described would not be “possessors” but “possessed.” To add insult to injury, some of
these “possessed” English women converted to Islam and rose to power and international
prominence. In the second half of the seventeenth century, one of the wives of the Dey of Algiers was
English and so too was one of the favorite wives of the Moroccan sultan, Mulay Ismail; she was known
as “Lala Balqees,” the Arabic name for the Queen of Sheba.[10] In 1682, a Christian convert to Islam
by the name of Lucas Hamet accompanied the Moroccan Ambassador Mohammad bin Hadou to
London. During his stay, he married an English servant girl,[11] an episode which Thomas Rymer, a
decade later, recalled, “With us [in England] a Moor might marry some little drab, or Small-coal
Wench.” Rymer concluded from this match that the English people were unlike the Venetians in that
they did not feel “hatred and aversion to the Moors” —and therefore were willing to marry them.[12]
In the actual interaction, therefore, between Muslims and Christians in seventeenth century England,
there was no structural separation between the Muslim man and the Christian woman nor was there a
law that expressly prohibited sexuality and intermarriage —as Edward Coke found out, for instance,
between the English and the Jews:
I find that by the ancient Law of England, that if any
Christian man did marry with a woman that was a Jew, or a
Christian woman that married with a Jew, it was felony, and
 the party so offending should be burnt alive.[13]
Such absence of restriction may explain the surprisingly high number of plays from the Elizabethan
period that depicted the possible or actual marriage between Muslim (both Turkish and Moorish) men
and Christian (continental, specifically Catholic Italian and Spanish but also English) women. In
Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (c. 1590), Ithamore the Turk talked of marrying Christian Bellamira, while
in Thomas Dekker's (?) Lusts Dominion, or The Lascivious Queen (c. 1590s), Eleazar the Moor was
married to the Christian Maria. In The Merchant of Venice (1597), Portia might have married
“Morocco,” and in Othello (c. 1604), the Moor was a “Turk” (Muslim), according to Thomas Rymer in
1693.[14] In John Mason's The Turke (1607), the Governor of Florence eagerly offered his daughter
Amada in marriage to Mulleasses the Turk, and in The Tempest (1611), Alonso's daughter, Claribel,
was married to the King of Tunis (2.1.67-125). In A Tragedy called Alls Lost by Lvst (1619), William
Rowley depicted the abortive possibility of Christian Jacinta marrying Mully Mumen, a prospect which
her father encouraged. In the 1664 play, Knavery in all Trades. Or, the Coffee-House. A Comedy, and
for the very first time in English drama, a Muslim merchant was portrayed as being married to an
English woman and living in London. Mahoone is, as he proudly declares, of “de Country of de Turk”:
he owns a coffee shop and is prospering as a result of the popularity of coffee in Restoration England.
He is the first London Muslim ever to be depicted in English drama.[15] What is important about these
references is that there is never any problematization of the Muslim male taking possession of the
Christian female: Britons, after all, could not but concede the power of Islam, which had pushed the
Ottomans into Central Europe and had brought Barbary privateers and pirates to the coast line
extending from the Isle of Wight all the way to St. Ives and the southeastern coast of Ireland.
There were, of course, writers who depicted the opposition of Christian heroines to such intermarriage.
In Soliman and Perseda, Thomas Kyd showed the unsuccessful attempt on the part of the Turkish
Sultan to seduce chaste Perseda; Thomas Heywood's English Bess rejected the advances of the King
of Morocco, and Paulina rejected Asambeg in Philip Massinger's The Renegado (1624). Other writers
conceded such marriages only after the Muslim converted to Christianity, such as Othello (although
Thomas Rymer did not think that he had) and Donusa (in The Renegado). Such opposition echoed
that in Spanish plays and novels, which showed resistance and the conversion of the Muslim woman
to Christianity in order to marry the Christian lover (“The Captive's Tale” in Cervantes’ Don Quixote is
a case in point). That there were continental and English writers who opposed inter-religious sexuality
and marriage, however, shows that inter-religious sexuality was on the table as a new matter to be
negotiated in that Age of Discovery.
Nearly all the Muslim-Christian marriages, potential marriages, and sexual affairs in English historical
and dramatic sources described Muslim men and Christian women, where the Muslim/male asserts
his dominance over the Christian/female. These descriptions are in contrast to marriages and sexual
affairs between Britons and American Indians—the other “Other” in the English experience during the
Age of Discovery. There is not a single play in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods which depicts the
marriage of an unanglicized or unchristianized Indian man to an English/Christian woman. In Eastward
Ho (1605), the English remnants of Roanoke were supposed to have “married with the Indians, and
make 'em bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England” (3.3.19-21); but then nothing was
really known about that remnant.[16] Caliban (if he is an American “salvage”) lusted for Miranda, but
was promptly punished by her father. In the Indian-English experience, there was strong resistance
not only to the prospect of miscegenation, but of intermarriage, too.
A case in point is the marriage of Thomas Rolfe to the Indian daughter of Powhatan, Pocahontas,
which took place, coincidentally, in the year in which the marriage between the English woman and the
Sultan of Sumatra was to take place. The prospect of the English-Indian marriage was described in a
letter which Rolfe sent to Sir Thomas Dale, the Governor of Virginia. In his letter, Rolfe had to justify
his desire to marry Pocahontas: he was deeply aware, he wrote, of “the heauie displeasure which
almighty God conceiued against the sonnes of Leuie and Israel for marrying strange wiues;” he was
also aware that his bride's “education hath been rude, her manners barbarous, her generation
accursed,” and he wondered in his private devotions about the true motives for marrying her: “surely
these are wicked instigations hatched by him who seeketh and delighteth in mans destruction; and so
with feruent praiers to be euer preserued from such diabolical assaults.” But Rolfe finally felt assured
that in his marriage to Pocahontas, whom he openly confessed to love, he would serve the “good of
this plantation for the honour of our countrie, for the glory of God for my owne saluation and for the
converting to the true knowledge of God and Iesus Christ an unbeleeuing creature, namely
Pokahuntas.”[17] Rolfe was doing Pocahontas a favor by converting her, in the way that she was
doing him a favor by protecting his colonists: interracial marriage was an exchange of favors. Still, it
left Rolfe with serious theological anxieties.[18]
In June 1621, the Virginia Company members deliberated over the fate of two “Indian maydes” who
had accompanied Pocahontas to London and had remained there: the Company decided to help them
get married by providing them with “one servante apeec [apiece] towards their preferm[en]t in
marriage w[i]th such as shall accept them w[i]th that means.” Concerned as the members were about
the two maids, it is important to note that the husbands whom these Indian women were to marry were
not to be found in London but in the Summer Islands.[19] As far as the Virginia Company merchants
were concerned, interracial marriage belonged to the world beyond the English borders. Meanwhile, in
New England, colonists condemned Anglo-Indian marriages by invoking the Biblical injunctions to the
Israelites not to marry nor to have sexual relations with the heathens (Exodus 23:23; Leviticus 20:23;
Joshua 23:12- 13); the “Westonians” were denounced because some of them kept “Indean women”;
George Morton was vilified by William Bradford for “inviting the Indean women, for their consorts”; and
William Baker was denounced by Roger Williams for committing “uncleanenes with an Indian Squaw”
although he had actually married her under tribal law.[20]
In these references to miscegenation and intermarriage between the English and the Indians, the
relationships were between English men and Indian women. The reason was not only that there were
more English men than there were English women in America, but the fact that the marriage of an
English man to an Indian woman entailed the domination of the Christian husband over the converted
Indian wife. Such intermarriage preserved English identity and served English goals. As Nathaniel
Powell observed in 1616, Pocahontas had become “very formall and ciuill after our English manner”:
[21] she personified, as David D. Smits observed, “English civilization's capacity to transform and
elevate the American 'savages'.”[22] The English male overpowered his Indian wife in the sense that
English religion and civilization overpowered and replaced Indian religion and civilization. That is why
no reference has survived to an English woman submitting in marriage to a non-Christian “Salvage”
from among the Americans —except in the case of little girls who were kidnapped, acculturated and
then married to Indians. Indeed, even the vagrant and unwanted women who were transported from
England to the plantations married only from among their compatriots. For most heinous to the
overseers of British morality and purity was the miscegenation between a male Indian and a female
Briton: “a woman suffering an Indian to have carnal knowledge of her,” wrote John Josselyn, “had an
Indian cut out exactly in red cloth sewed upon her right Arm, and injoyned to wear it twelve
moneths.”[23] There was to be no mixing of blood between pure English women and male Indian
heathens. Later in the century, legislation was passed prohibiting interracial marriages and sexual
relations with the Indians: in 1691, Virginia passed a law prohibiting intermarriage with Indians — less
than a decade after Lucas Hamed had married the English “maid.”
The English-Indian marriages or sexual liaisons were between English men and Indian women where
the Indian adopted her husband's language, religion and nomenclature. Meanwhile, the Muslim who
married, or took possession of, the Christian woman did not convert and did not become “European”;
rather, he remained a Muslim. In the 1614 negotiations, it was clear that the English lady was not
going to Sumatra to anglicize or convert the Sultan: notwithstanding the fact that she was excellent at
music and needlework, she was going to have to join the ruler's harem, “the rest of the women
appertaining to the king.” When opponents of the marriage warned that the other wives might poison
her, her greedy father retorted that if the king of Sumatra “consent it was thought it would prove a very
honourable action.”[24] The English woman was going to submit to the Muslim man and his world.
No English man could take possession of a (free) Muslim woman unless he became a Muslim first and
thereby lost his Christianity and ‘Englishness.’ Actually, it was not easy for an Englishman to get his
hands on a Muslim woman anyway: there were no Muslim women captives who were brought to
England, and who could have been sexually abused as English women were in North Africa.
Englishmen had no opportunity to possess a Muslim woman—unless it was clandestinely and
dangerously, as was the case of T.S. (Thomas Smith?). In his memoir of captivity in Algiers between
1639 and 1644, T. S. described an amazing range of sexual affairs which he had with Muslim women:
because he was handsome, women, both married and widowed, were attracted to him. One in
particular was so courageous in pursuing him that he finally fell in love with her and offered to marry
her if she would be willing to escape with him back to England. Unfortunately, “She had two Children,
a Boy and a Girl, that kept her in that place otherwise I think I had then got my Freedom and carryed
her away.” Later, she gave birth to “a pretty little Girl, somewhat whiter than ordinary; the old Fool [her
husband] thought himself to be the Father of it.”[25] When other women made themselves available to
T. S., he did not decline, despite being exhausted.
If T. S. was telling the truth, his case is unique. All other Britons found that they could not break
through the barrier of Islamic sexual/marriage codes and possess Muslim women. The prohibition in
the Qur’an of marriage between Muslim women and non-Muslim men (but not between Muslim men
and Christian or Jewish women) was firmly implemented in the Islamic dominions (and continues
today). When the Great Mogul told Captain William Hawkins in 1608 to marry one of his palace maids,
his harem, Hawkins obeyed but could marry only a Christian, the daughter of an Armenian merchant.
Although the Muhgal ruler Jahangin was religiously tolerant, Hawkins still had to submit to Muslim
codes.[26] Similarly, Sir Robert Shirley, Ambassador to Shah Abbas of Persia, married a Circassian
Christian (who, rather curiously, was described on her tombstone in Rome, as an Amazon, “Theressia
Samposonia Amazonites”); he also had to dress in Muslim clothes, much to the displeasure of King
James I.[27] Englishmen in the Islamic world lived by Muslim rules, especially with regard to rules
about women.
Thus, if the Christian-Islamic confrontation of the Mediterranean Renaissance is to be “gendered,” it
will show that male domination was associated with the Muslims and female subordination with the
Christians. There was no “effeminization” or “neutralization“ of Islam in the way there was of America,
since nearly all the actual or fictional cases in English literary sources and documents showed
Christian women submitting to Muslim men. Englishmen felt they could marry (or have sexual
intercourse with) American women because they had already possessed and dominated America (or
at least a very small part of it): as the land had been possessed, so too could the women of the land
be possessed. Not so with the Muslims where Englishmen had not dominated the land, and, therefore,
by the same token, not only could not presume to dominate and possess the women of the land, but
had to submit to their own women being possessed by the “Turks” and “Moors.” That is why there is
no equivalent to Claribel, to the daughter of the English East India merchant, to the wife of Mahoone,
or to the wife of Lucas Hamet in the actual or literary experience of the English colonizers of North
America. While in America, Englishmen seized the sexual initiative, in the encounter with Islam, it was
the Muslim who seized that initiative.

Endnotes
1. Gesa Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of
Empire, 1492-1637 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 213.
2. See the extensive discussion of gender and colonization in Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives,
Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), chapter 2; Kim Hall,
Things of Darkness: Economics of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1995), chapter 3; Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in
the Discourse of Discovery,” in New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 177-217; and Peter Hulme and Helen Carr, eds., in
Europe and its Others (Colchester: University of Essex, 198), 2:17-33, 46-61.
3. Jean E. Howard, “An English Lass amid the Moors: Gender, race, sexuality, and national
identity in Heywood's 'The Fair Maid of the West,'” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early
Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London and New York: Routledge,
1994), 113.
4. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 14.
5. Barbara Fuchs, “Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly,
48 (1997): 59.
6. Mackenthun, Metaphors, 211.
7. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Japan, 1513-1616 (London,
1862), 335 and 347.
8. State Papers: Public Record Office, London, 16/311/f. 9.
9. Nehemiah Wallington, Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles I
(London, 1869), 2:266. See my “British Women in the Barbary Coast: Captives and
Sultanesses,” forthcoming at the Ninth International Conference, Durham Centre for
Seventeenth-Century Studies, 16-19 July, 2001.
10. Francis Brooks, Barbarian Cruelty (London, 1692), 27-34.
11. E. M. G. Routh, Tangier: England's lost Atlantic Outpost, 1661-1684 (London: John Murray,
1912), 22.
12. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1974-
1981), 2:29.
13. Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws (London, 1648), 89.
14. Shakespeare, ed. Vickers, 2:29.
15. Knavery in all Trades: or, The Coffee-House (London, 1664), no pagination
 16. Ed. R. W. Van Fossen, ed., George Chapman, Eastward Ho (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1979).
17. Ralph Hamor, A True Discovrse of the Present Estate of Virginia(1615), 63-64. 18. For an
analysis of this marriage, see Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 128-131; Paul Brown, “&lsquoThis thing of darkness I
acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism,” Political Shakespeare,
eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 48-51.
18. The Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. Susan Myra Kingsbury (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1906), 1: 496.
19. John Canup, Out of the Wilderness. The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New
England (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 97, 107, 109, 126; see
the excellent study of this topic in Smits, “'We are not to Grow Wild': Seventeenth-Century
New England's Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage,” American Indian Culture and
Research Journal, 11 (1987):1-32; James Axtell has also noted that “Intermarriage in the
English colonies was nearly nonexistent, due largely to racial prejudice,” The Invasion Within
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 304; see also Alfred A. Cave, “Caananites in a
Promised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire,” American Indian
Quarterly 12 (1988): 283 esp. The English clergy and investors often expressed anxiety about
the settlers who had sexual relations with American Indians, especially after colonists
deserted their responsibilities and communities and went native: David D. Smits, “'We are not
to Grow Wild,'” 9.
20. Smith, Travels and Works, 2:529.
21. David D. Smits, “‘Abominable Mixture’: Toward the Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage
in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 95 (1987):
174.
22. Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of “Two Voyages to
New England” (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), 124.
23. C.S.P. Colonial Series, 1513-1616, 812.
24. T.S., TheAdventures of(Mr. 77. S). An English Merchant, Taken Prisoner by the Turks of
Argiers(1670), 56, 57.
25. The Hawkins’ Voyages During the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I, ed.
Clements R. Markham (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 404.
26. D. W. Davies, Elizabethan Errants (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967),
opposite 175.

~~~~~~~~
By Nabil Matar, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida

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