Turks, Trade, and Turning Anders Ingram The act of ‘Turning Turk’, or rather the dissembling threat of such apostasy, is central to one of the sub plots of The Three Ladies of London. However, this sub plot is itself notably short on details of either its Turkish setting or Islam in general. At this relatively early stage of the English North African and Levantine trades (the 1580s) literary portrayals of Islam were notably less detailed than they became in the following decades. This essay will contextualize the subplot involving Gerontus, Mercadorus, and the Judge, by exploring contemporary ideas of ‘Turning Turk’, and reflections of trade with Barbary and Turkey in the play. I will argue that the drive of the apostasy narrative is to demonize - by contrast with the comparatively virtuous Islamic and Jewish characters – the Italian Catholic Mercadorus as ‘worse than a Turk’, a common trope in early modern polemical writing. Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London was one of the very earliest English plays to explore Turkish characters, motifs, and settings.1 This essay explores the literary, cultural, and economic contexts for Wilson’s play, and then gives a reading of its ‘Turkish’ elements, relating them to its historical moment, central themes, and contemporary commonplace images of the Turks as well as tropes of conversion to Islam, or ‘turning Turk’. Drawing on the model of the medieval morality play the plot of Three Ladies revolves around the corruption and debasement of the allegorical characters Love and Conscience by the Lady Lucre and a rogue’s gallery of supporting characters including Dissimulation, Fraud, Simony, and Usury. Wilson’s social critique dramatizes his central themes: the influence of foreigners, the problematic morality of the practice of usury, and the material and moral dangers of foreign trade. These issues are also at the heart of the play’s subplot, which concerns Mercadorus, an Italian merchant whom Lucre dispatches to Turkey to import ‘trifles’ and ‘prety knackes’ into England (B3r, D4v).2 Upon arriving Mercadorus meets the Jewish moneylender Gerontus, who demands that he repay a loan of three thousand Ducats, which is now two years overdue, with interest. Being brought before a ‘Judge of Turkie’ to satisfy the debt, however, Mercadorus declares he will ‘forsake his faith, king, countrie, and become a Mahomet’, by converting to Islam, so that his debts will be void (F1r). Faced with Mercadorus’s cynical determination to turn Turk,