Francis Walsingham

Thomas Dallam 3: England’s First Ambassador

Last full-length episode, we talked about England’s developing friendship with Saadian Morocco under al-Malik and al-Mansur, and I mentioned at the end that there was at the same time an association building between England and the Ottoman Empire. When we last looked in on the state of Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy in the episode about Jenkinson’s visit to Safavid Persia, we saw Ottoman Sultan Suleyman interceding against English traders. Things had to change quite significantly for that relationship to reach the exchanging of gifts stage, and it’s the later developments of that change that we’ll be talking about here, largely through a look at the efforts of a single English representative in Constantinople, a man named William Harborne.