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As Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State, John Milton was deeply familiar with the workings of England's foreign policy and conduct of international relations. Did Milton's knowledge of international affairs inform and shape the thematic, political, and ideological concerns of his epic poem, Paradise Lost; if so, in what directions? Critics discussing Milton's "internationalism" usually take as the focus of their consideration the general ambit of the European world. When Thomas Corns recently described Milton's Protestantism as possessing a "pronounced internationalism," he read Milton with reference to continental European thought, art, and consciousness. 1 Likewise, when John Kerrigan identified the Netherlands as the controlling center of gravity for Milton's involvement with foreign affairs, his focus on the deeply tangled politics of "the Anglo-Scoto-Dutch triangle" continued to limit the reach of Milton's "internationalism" to the European world. 2 This essay proposes to widen the definition of Miltonic "internationalism" to encompass a much larger world that includes the Far East and South Asia. These distant lands register their presence in Milton's oeuvre often through metaphorical significations that help to communicate the poet-polemicist's republican convictions. In Paradise Lost, Milton might have focused his attention on the current state of England's political and theological health but that did not

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