Persia and the Politics of Muslim Identity from Medieval to Early Modern Romance

Abstract

This article delineates a continuity between the medieval representation of anti- Christian Persia in Crusade narratives and romances and the anti-Christian identity of Persia in early modern English romances from the 1580s. It links three major ways of perceiving Persia in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the predominant identity of Persia was anti-Ottoman and thus pro-Christian. This was due to the rise of the Safavid dynasty under Shah Ismail in 1501 and the subsequent wars between the Turks and Persians throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second and equally important identity of Persia was classical. This had its origin in the Greek and Roman histories translated by the Renaissance humanists into English and other vernaculars. Cyrus, Darius and other Achaemenid Persian kings were well known in Renaissance England. The third set of ideas about Persia in early modern England conflated Safavid Persians and Ottoman Turks as a force united against Christendom. These three identities, in most cases, operated alone, but in some cases, two of these trajectories overlapped with each other. This article discusses the third trajectory of Persia that developed in the latter half of the sixteenth century in proto-crusading romance texts displaying strong medieval underpinnings. These proto-crusading romances include Munday’s Zelauto, Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom and Tasso’s Gerusalem Liberata.