Our perspective on late Tudor foreign policy has been dominated by both the story of elites

at the Elizabethan court and by Victorian ideas about the foundations of empire.

So Francis Drake and Sauter Raleigh have often featured.

But what if we were to turn our picture of the Elizabethan geopolitical world on its head?

What if it's not really about the power and nascent empire of England,

but about England as a bit player? Interacting with far more powerful empires, Spain,

Persia and the Ottomans and Islamic empire that spanned three continents and ruled and estimated

15 million people. Today's guest has taken this different perspective.

Jerry Brotton is professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London,

but probably better known to you as the author of some really wonderful books which have been

published in 20 languages worldwide. The New York Times bestseller, a history of the world in 12

maps or the Renaissance Bazaar from the Silk Road to Michelangelo among them. In 2016 he published

a fabulous book called This Orient Isle, a Elizabethan England and the Islamic world.

And that's the focus of our conversation today. His fourth coming book published by Penguin

and also to be a BBC Radio 4 time explores the history and symbolism of the four points of the

compass. But the story he tells today is of encounters and transactions between Muslims and

Elizabethan Protestants and it upends our understanding of the tutors.

Professor Brotton Jerry, it is wonderful to have you on here. I'm so excited to talk to you

about these things which I think don't yet form part of our idea of the tutors and it's so

important to kind of connect them into the wider world. And I wondered if we could start doing that

as you start in your book you talk about the visit of Abda'u A'id bin Masad bin Muhammad Al-Anuriyam,

Moroccan Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I in 2009 in the Muslim calendar or November 1600

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