Beyond the Armada: Ahmad al-Mansur, Elizabeth I, and the Forgotten Plan to Colonize the New World Together

Morocco World

14 hours ago

In the spring of 1600, the streets of London witnessed an arrival without precedent in the city's long history of embassies. Abd el-Wahid ben Messaoud, ambassador of Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco, landed at the head of a sixteen-strong delegation. Their mission was at once pragmatic and grandiose: to propose an alliance between Protestant England and Muslim Morocco against their common nemesis — Habsburg Spain — and to imagine the re-ordering of Atlantic geopolitics. As Jerry Brotton recounts in This Orient Isle, and as the Guardian's review summarises, the proposals placed before Queen Elizabeth I were without precedent: first, a joint reconquest of Iberia; second, an even more audacious suggestion that the two realms could 'wrest the East and West Indies from the Spanish.'¹
The image is almost cinematic — a richly robed Muslim ambassador in the court of the Virgin Queen, speaking of fleets that would cross oceans together, of the fall of Spain's American empire, of a Protestant–Muslim condominium over the New World. Yet, for all its colour, this episode demands to be treated not as an exotic curiosity but as a key point of entry into the historiography of early modern diplomacy, global trade, and the unfulfilled contingencies of the Atlantic world.
Historiographic Grounding: Sources, Silences, and Contexts
The principal sources for this encounter are the surviving letters between al-Mansur and Elizabeth, now held in the British Library, and the ambassadorial records in Moroccan repositories. Brotton weaves these into the fabric of Elizabethan foreign policy, highlighting the intense pragmatism that overrode confessional boundaries when the geopolitical calculus demanded it.² The Guardian distils one of Brotton's most striking revelations: that al-Mansur's proposals went beyond the reconquest of Iberia to envision a transoceanic offensive aimed at the Spanish Americas.³
Historiographically, the temptation is to read this through a 19th- or 20th-century lens, seeing in it a precursor to modern 'South–South' alliances or multipolar Atlantic visions. Yet, in the late 16th century, such a proposal was rooted in the logic of Habsburg geopolitics: Spain's control of Portugal after 1580 had fused the Iberian crowns into a single global empire, encircling the Atlantic from Seville to Mexico to Manila. To attack Spain anywhere was, in effect, to attack it everywhere.
Elizabeth's England, still a middling power by continental standards but increasingly daring at sea, had already probed the edges of this empire through the semi-piratical ventures of Francis Drake and others. Morocco, flush with prestige after the victory at the Battle of the Three Kings (1578)⁴ and enriched by the gold of the Songhai campaign, was equally aware of its Atlantic potential.
What Brotton emphasized is the ideological permeability of this moment: Protestant and Muslim could talk openly of cooperation not in spite of their confessional differences, but because both had pragmatic reasons to confront a Catholic superpower.⁵
The Proposal in its Own Time
The proposition to 'wrest the East and West Indies' is remarkable for several reasons. First, it suggests that al-Mansur did not view Morocco's strategic horizon as confined to the Maghreb or even to Mediterranean commerce; he was thinking in Atlantic terms, aware of the wealth flowing from the Americas into Seville's treasure fleets.⁶ Second, it presupposes that England and Morocco could project force across the ocean, coordinate supply chains, and — most ambitiously — hold and administer conquered territory in a hemisphere dominated by Spain and Portugal for nearly a century.
The geopolitical logic of al-Mansur's overture becomes even clearer when viewed against the backdrop of the Iberian Union. Morocco had already eliminated Portugal as an independent threat in the wake of the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578, a crushing victory that killed King Sebastian and shattered Portuguese military capacity.⁷ The ensuing succession crisis led, in 1580, to Philip II of Spain seizing the Portuguese crown, bringing Brazil, the African forts, and the Asian spice ports under Habsburg control.⁸ For the first time, one monarch ruled an integrated Spanish–Portuguese empire that spanned both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. This consolidation magnified Spain's power but also simplified the strategic picture for England and Morocco: there was now a single Iberian adversary whose defeat — whether in Europe, the Caribbean, or the Americas — could reverberate across half the globe. Al-Mansur's suggestion of joint action in the New World was therefore not a flight of fancy, but a calculated response to a rare historical moment when Spain's overextended imperial structure presented both a threat and an opportunity.
From a strictly operational standpoint, the proposal bordered on the fantastical. England in 1600 lacked secure Atlantic bases and was stretched by the Irish wars; Morocco had no tradition of transoceanic navigation on that scale. But in the imaginative space of diplomacy, such impracticalities could be suspended. What mattered was the signalling: Morocco was a sovereign actor, not a peripheral player, and was willing to think on a planetary scale. For Elizabeth, listening to such overtures reinforced the image of England as a node in a global network of anti-Spanish alliances, from the Dutch rebels to the Muslim courts of the Maghreb.⁹
Historiographic Themes: Beyond Exoticism
Historians have long been prone to treating such episodes as colourful footnotes — a Moorish envoy in Whitehall, a momentary flirtation with cross-cultural alliance. Brotton pushes against this by embedding it in the longer story of Anglo–Islamic diplomacy, showing that these exchanges were neither one-off nor merely symbolic.¹⁰ The embassy of 1600 was the high-water mark of a twenty-year relationship.
From a historiographic perspective, this also forces us to revisit the Eurocentric narrative of Atlantic expansion. The standard story pivots from Iberian pioneers to Northern European challengers, with little space for African or Muslim agency except as obstacles or intermediaries. Al-Mansur's proposal disrupts that: here is an African monarch not only participating in, but actively shaping, a conversation about the redistribution of the Americas.
The 'What If' Lens
Counterfactuals are perilous in historical writing, but they can illuminate the structural constraints and opportunities of a moment. So, what if Elizabeth had embraced al-Mansur's proposal wholeheartedly?
In one scenario, an Anglo–Moroccan fleet might have targeted the Caribbean, striking at lightly defended islands or intercepting treasure convoys. If successful, this could have opened enclaves jointly administered or exploited — introducing an early precedent for cross-confessional colonial governance. This, in turn, might have reconfigured racial and religious hierarchies in the Atlantic, complicating the binary of Christian Europe versus the non-Christian 'other.'
Yet the practicalities loom large. Morocco's maritime infrastructure was oriented toward the Mediterranean and short-haul Atlantic trade; England's navy was still evolving its logistical capacity for sustained overseas warfare. The Spanish response would have been formidable. Moreover, the death of both monarchs in 1603 eliminated the personal rapport that had sustained the relationship. James I's peace with Spain in 1604 ended the prospect.¹¹
Symbolism and Political Theatre
Even stripped of feasibility, the proposal retains significance as political theatre. In Elizabeth's court, receiving such an offer from a Muslim sovereign was a statement to domestic and foreign audiences: England was not isolated, and its alliances could cross religious boundaries. For al-Mansur, sending his ambassador to make such a proposal in person was a performance of parity with Christian Europe's greatest monarchs. The articulation of joint colonization placed Morocco within the same strategic frame as England, France, and the Netherlands — not as an object of European expansion, but as a co-architect of imperial ambition.¹²
Orientalism Before Orientalism
In Edward Said's formulation, 'Orientalism' describes a later, more codified mode of European representation of the East.¹³ The early modern encounter between Morocco and England resists that schema. Al-Mansur was not being studied, classified, and subordinated; he was negotiating from a position of strength, in a relationship that — for a moment — inverted later colonial hierarchies. Still, the seeds of later asymmetries are present: the English imagination of the 'Moor' was shaped by both diplomatic reality and literary representation — Shakespeare's Othello among them — oscillating between fascination and suspicion.¹⁴
The Road Not Taken
The embassy of Abd el-Wahid and the proposal to 'wrest the East and West Indies' remain a tantalising fragment of early modern diplomatic history. Historiographically, it invites us to place Morocco not at the periphery but at the centre of Atlantic strategic thinking at the turn of the 17th century. It challenges the neat periodisation that sees the Muslim world as locked in Mediterranean confines while the Atlantic became a purely European space.
From the 'what if' perspective, the episode underscores the contingency of global history. A handful of different decisions — an earlier English embrace of Atlantic strategy, a longer reign for al-Mansur, a delay in Anglo–Spanish rapprochement — could have produced a very different colonial map. Brotton's achievement is to recover the plausibility, if not the practicality, of that moment, and to remind us that the early modern world was more connected, and more imaginatively porous, than later histories have often allowed. The Moroccan dream of an Anglo–Muslim Atlantic empire died in the antechambers of mortality and diplomacy, but in the realm of historical analysis, it continues to illuminate the alternative pathways that history might have taken — and the actors who, however briefly, saw them as open.¹⁵
Notes Jerry Brotton, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 214–218; 'The Moroccan Ambassador in London in 1600,' The Guardian, March 19, 2016. Brotton, This Orient Isle, 198–201. 'The Moroccan Ambassador in London in 1600,' The Guardian. Brotton, This Orient Isle, 105–110. Ibid., 200–203. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 105–110. Ibid., 111–114. Ibid., 215–218. Ibid., 180–185. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 223–225. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Brotton, This Orient Isle, 230; Michael Neill, Othello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Brotton, This Orient Isle, 227–230.
Sources Brotton, Jerry. This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. London: Allen Lane, 2016.
Neill, Michael. Othello. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
'The Moroccan Ambassador in London in 1600.' The Guardian, March 19, 2016. Tags: Ahmad al MansurcolonialismElizabeth Ihistory