ABSTRACT
It is clear this embassy had a significant place in Caroline foreign policy. The activities of ‘Barbary’ or ‘Turkish’ pirates operating out of Algiers, Tangiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Salé and other pirate citadels caused extensive disruption to international trade in both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean throughout the Early Modern Period. Of course, English shipping was not immune to these depredations, and particular anxiety was caused by the capture and forced conversion of English mariners by such ‘Barbary corsairs’. Whilst the King of England increasingly viewed North African pirate citadels as an impediment to commercial expansion and an insult to national pride, the Sultan of Morocco considered them a threat to his assumed pre-eminence in the region, classifying them either as treacherous rebels against his suzerainty or forward operating bases of the hostile Ottomans. Thus, it became progressively more desirable in the early decades of the seventeenth century to institute some form of Anglo-Moroccan alliance in order to rout mutual and troubling enemies. Undeniably, there were considerable impediments to this union. To the alarm of the English, some of their sailors languished as captives
were more than willing to deal pragmatically with those ‘subjects’ of the Moroccan Emperor who rebelled against his authority. However, nostalgia could be allied to realpolitik, and both parties often invoked the collaboration between Elizabeth I and Ahmad Al-Mansur, as confirmed by the visit of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud to London in 1600, as a glorious precedent for such collaboration.1
