This went against long-standing papal edicts forbidding Christians from trading with Muslims on pain of excommunication. Privately, English merchants had been quietly trading with the Muslim rulers of the Barbary states in modern-day Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors (1533) depicts the French ambassadors who came to London that year to broker the alliance.īut Henry’s alliance with the Ottomans did not come to fruition, primarily because of his domestic problems, and because for the Turks, the English were peripheral players in the larger geopolitical world picture of the 1530s. Henry VIII was known to dress in fashionable Ottoman attire, appearing at courtly events dressed in Turkish silken and velvet robes, and in 1533 as he broke from Rome he entertained plans to join a Franco-Ottoman alliance to combat the Habsburg-Papal axis that united the two great European Catholic powers of Pope Clement VII and the emperor Charles V. With the rise of the Ottoman Empire as a global force following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the early Tudors became aware that Islam was both a threat to Christianity but also a potential ally in the shifting sands of European politics and diplomacy.

Ottoman empire alternate history