Could anything be worse than being captured by Turks, stripped, beaten, and mercilessly killed? In the minds of early modern English people, there was one thing even worse than dying at the hands of Turks: conversion. Whereas a death by martyrdom offered the chance for salvation, converting to Islam set one on a path of irredeemable damnation. In addition, “turning Turk” implied not just a religious conversion, but also the complete undoing of all things constitutive of an English Christian identity.

It was a threat that was oddly familiar to those living in and around London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Ottoman empire may have been halfway across the globe, but its influence was increasingly present in the daily lives of English Christians – in the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the sermons they heard at church, the stories they read in the news, and the fears and fantasies that filled their imaginations. In particular, English awareness of the Ottoman empire heightened as the result of England's growing participation in Mediterranean trade. Commerce brought eastern imports into English spaces and drew increasing numbers of English citizens to the waters and ports of the eastern Mediterranean. But commerce depended upon certain risks, which included not only the dangers of seafaring and the economic risks of piracy and foreign investment, but also the personal risk of losing English bodies and souls to Islamic conversion.