Due to its fragmentary and partial nature, what remains of George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1588-9) had often been avoided (or ignored) by critics until the pioneering scholarship of W.W. Greg in 1923 attempted a re-evaluation of the text. Recently, thanks to a new edition of the play by John Yoklavich in 1961 incorporating and expanding Greg’s innovations, Alcazar can be studied in as complete an edition as seems possible. It is a play at the centre of a complex web of early modern English anxieties, articulated through the events leading up to and including the battle of the title. Endlessly popular in numerous versions, the battle of Al-Ksar-el-Kebir was fought in 1578 between Sebastian of Portugal and Abdelmelec of Barbary. The basic facts of the conflict conceal its profound importance: Sebastian was killed, and Portugal was lost to Philip II of Spain in 1580 – the play suggests Philip’s machinations engineer the entire process – hence further isolating England from Catholic ‘Christendome’. The Ottoman Turks were also involved, fighting on the side of their tributaries, the Moors of Barbary: hence we have an extension of the Europe-wide conflict that dominated Europe throughout the sixteenth century. Of course, Alcazar is primarily concerned with English justification and triumphalism: written after the Armada, it presents an England legitimated in its Protestantism and in its colonial dominance of Ireland, just as the play demonstrates (against the grain of most recent critical work in this area) a legitimate Turkish imperialism in Barbary and North Africa. It is the threateningly acquisitive and quintessentially Catholic imperial project of the Spanish, exemplified in a devalued ideal of ‘crusade’ that is examined closely and ultimately demonized.