The Tartar King’s Masque and Performances of Imperial Desire in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania

Abstract

As Wroth scholars have increasingly recognized,1 the overarching narrative of her prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, in both its published first part of 1621 and the equally substantial unpublished second part, is driven by the desire of the dynasty at its core to establish a “universal Christian empire” covering Eurasia.2 This end is accomplished through the premodern mode of European expansionism: marital alliances combined with military interventions. The marriage of the Tartar king Rodomandro and the Greek princess Pamphilia, who becomes queen of her eponymous realm in Asia Minor, unites “East” and “West” under Western Christian hegemony without demanding the exclusion of racialized “others,” as would subsequent anglocentric models of empire. The Tartar king’s leadership is crucial to the military campaigns in Central Asia and Persia that propel the narrative. They are meant to secure both regions, only implicitly Islamized in the romance, for Western Christian and Christian(ized) Eastern rulers. This imaginary resolution of the real conditions of imperialist expansion within Eurasia during the early decades of the seventeenth century, with the Safavid Persians dominating Central Asia and the Ottomans a significant force in central Europe and the Mediterranean, draws attention to discourses of difference related to English colonial efforts in the Americas that targeted Native Americans and Africans.3