Turks,Moors,& Moriscos in Early America

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Good relations with Morocco were critical for English shipping to the
Americas during the early colonial period. A “Renaissance triangle” ran between
England, Morocco, and the Americas. Preservation of the so-called triangle was
crucial to English-Muslim relations in the days of Queen Elizabeth, because the
success of British navigation of the western Atlantic depended upon it. Under other
circumstances, the British would have used the Canary and Cape Verde Islands
to cross the Atlantic, but those islands were inhospitable because they were under
Spanish and Portuguese control respectively. In place of these islands, the British
forged the Renaissance triangle with Morocco, which remained in use during the
reigns of Queen Elizabeth and subsequent English monarchs. During the time of
Roanoke’s founding and for years afterward, the triangle continued to be the most
attractive and lucrative sea-lane available for British traders, travelers, emigrants,
adventurers, privateers, and pirates. Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh knew
the Renaissance triangle well and made use of it. 57
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The Roanoke colony belongs, of course, to the time of the Renaissance triangle,
the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), and the age of the great English poet
and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Shakespeare’s masterpiece
The Tempest, although written several years after Roanoke’s failure, reflected the
contemporary English fascination with the New World across the Atlantic, which
had made the idea of the Roanoke colony appealing to the English and continued to
lure them to new explorations and discoveries.
Queen Elizabeth commissioned Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), the English
courtier, soldier, and explorer, to found the colony, giving the project her full
support. For the Queen, Roanoke constituted a bold and carefully determined
political move. By establishing an English foothold on America’s Atlantic coast, she
intended to assert England’s growing power as an emerging nation and its will to
directly challenge Spain’s claim to exclusive rights to colonize the New World. 58
In 1580, five years before the first settlement in Roanoke, Philip II, emperor
of Spain, took power over the Portuguese throne, uniting Spain and Portugal as
a single kingdom. Spain would continue to rule Portugal for the next sixty years.
Thus, during the period of the Roanoke colony and for a long time afterward,
Portugal belonged to the kingdom of Spain, giving Spain the claim to unique and
exclusive rights to colonize all parts of the Americas, including Portuguese Brazil.
Spain employed its extensive naval and military might to ensure that no European
rivals established competing colonies in the New World. The “Invincible” Spanish
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