Western Europeans were generally Christian but recognised the existence of at least two other religions: Judaism and Islam. The followers of both faiths are conventionally stigmatised in the period’s literature. Jews are associated with avarice and usury, while Islamic figures are stereotyped as barbaric, untrustworthy, lustful pagans. Yet most English people would have had little knowledge of either religion. This was especially true of Islam. Although Christians were accustomed to regard Islam as a false faith, most had to rely on second-hand accounts for their knowledge of it because the only Europeans who had much contact with the Islamic East were traders and diplomats. Opposition to Islam and the countries associated with it was deep-rooted, finding its origins in the Medieval Crusades to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims, but Western antipathy was fuelled in the sixteenth century by the growing power of the Ottoman (or Turkish) Empire and its extension westwards with the Turks laying ‘claim to pivotal territory in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, including Cyprus in 1571 and Tunis in 1574’.3 Such was the perceived threat that the Spanish, the Venetians and the Pope formed a league to fight
(against the Turks, famously defeating them in the Battle of Lepanto (1571