In 1600 the noted English navigational author, mathematical practitioner and sometime Cambridge fellow Edward Wright received a letter from Morocco. Sent by his brother-in-law Thomas Bernhere, it provided detailed suggestions for mathematical instruments that Wright might profitably send to the court of the Sa’ad ruler Ahmad al-Mansur. The letter provides a remarkable window onto the rich relationships between trade and gift-giving across late Renaissance cultures. Clearly well-informed on the range of Wright’s instrumental innovations, Bernhere not only recommended specific devices for the Sultan and others at court but even gave instructions on how and where they might most effectively be made. The letter travelled with an embassy sent from the Moroccan court to negotiate a military alliance with England against Spain. Although unsuccessful in its mission, this immediate context indicates that Wright’s mathematical instruments were envisaged as playing a larger role within diplomatic relations. The letter not only illuminates English ambitions but raises questions about the interest of Ahmad al-Mansur in European astronomy and instruments. He spent much of his youth in exile within the sphere of the Ottoman empire and would have been familiar not only with the construction of Taqi al-Din’s observatory in Istanbul during the 1570s, but also with the lavish instruments now attributed to Gerard Mercator which were made for Sultan Murad III. The Moroccan-English connection should be interpreted against this larger network of European-Islamic exchange.