No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Negotiating with the “Infidel”: Imperial Expansion and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in the Early Modern Maghreb (1492–1516)
Abstract
This article analyses the influence of confessional divides in the construction of a Mediterranean frontier between the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb at the very beginning of the early modern period. Questioning the influence that religious difference had on the geopolitics of the early modern Mediterranean could seem superfluous since historians have traditionally depicted the Mediterranean world as a space of confrontation between two confessional empires, the Ottoman and the Habsburg. Nevertheless, by focusing on a selection of diplomatic negotiations from the Western Mediterranean it appears that several actors envisioned a scenario where religious and political frontiers were far from coincide. This article will analyse the diplomatic negotiations promoted by different Muslim communities from the Maghreb to voluntarily enter under the rule of the Catholic Monarchs in the framework of the Spanish imperial expansion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In studying these negotiations from an actor-based approach my aim is not to deny the religious or the political divide existing between the Christian and the Islamic shores. I will argue, however, that this frontier was constructed through the interaction of a wide array of agents such as local elites, royal officers, military men, religious actors, and rulers, with changing agendas towards religious difference.
... Similarly, diplomatic dealings with the gold potentates had already been established, and permanent trading posts had been set up in Ugató, Benin, and Uadan, in the Adrar of Mauritania (Thomaz 1994, pp. 161-62;Escribano Páez 2016). ...
In this study I propose rethinking the nature, purposes, and impacts of relations between the kingdoms of Portugal and Kongo in the period between 1511 and 1665. My main argument is that the Pact of Confederation formed by these two kingdoms was decisive, exceptional, and unprecedented. While covert attempts by the Portuguese to gain control of the Kingdom of Kongo were common during this period, the relations spelled out by the pact nevertheless endured for over a century and would have global repercussions. From the vantage point of historiography, the pact presents modern historians with serious difficulties, largely because it spells out modes of interaction that do not fit readily into recognized systems of European colonialism. Central to these modes of interaction is the significant role that religion played in defining Portuguese imperialist policies in Central Africa. In the end, the Pact of Confederation between the kingdoms of Portugal and Kongo forces historians to rethink Portuguese imperial dynamics and the modalities of their presence in Africa and beyond.
En el breve experimento del dominio tunecino parecen discernirse con sustancial claridad los impulsos y constantes, así como las contradicciones que caracterizaron la prolongada articulación y el fracaso del expansionismo hispano en Norte de África. Su análisis plantea cuestiones como el papel que jugó la lucha contra el islam en la definición de la vocación imperial hispana, las pautas de su crecimiento territorial y la individuación de prácticas de remodelación de las sociedades conquistadas. El estudio de este caso, un episodio sin duda notable, pero escasamente frecuentado por la investigación más reciente, ofrece así la gran oportunidad de rediscutir paradigmas historiográficos a menudo dados por asentados y de cotejarlos con las sugestiones de propuestas interpretativas avanzadas en clave global.
In line with its medieval predecessors, the Habsburg court had no particular problem in receiving representatives from outside the Christendom’s framework. Until 1580 these usually included Maghrebi envoys with an ambiguous status and without a notable diplomatic presence. Subsequently, the aggregation of the crown of Portugal to the Spanish Monarchy and the ceremonial standardization that gradually took place led, on the one hand, to the arrival of African and Asian agents of a different profile, with whom there was less familiarity, and on the other, to an attempt to assign them to the existing diplomatic categories. Among the numerous problems of Madrid as a reception centre for “exotic embassies,” we will look at the use of the city’s monasteries as accommodation for some of these agents and their entourage. Instead of being offered houses, these individuals were left in a provisional situation in accordance with their dubious diplomatic status, a policy that triggered problems of public order and decorum because of their difficult coexistence with the monastic communities. These and other monasteries played a further role as places of sociability and exchange for people who were not accustomed to such institutions. This will provide a glimpse into the complementarity between palaces and monasteries in a strongly confessionalised court and, paradoxically, into a kind of ceremonial flexibility that bordered on tolerance.
This article presents the first survey of the full range of diplomatic interactions between the Mughal Empire and the English and Dutch East India Companies (EIC and VOC) in the period 1608–1717. It proposes a typology of the six different modes of diplomacy practised by the EIC and VOC as a means to understand better the distinct nature of corporate diplomacy. Moving its focus beyond exceptional embassies, this article demonstrates that by far the most common forms of Company diplomatic activity consisted of low-profile petitioning at the imperial centre and ongoing political interactions with provincial and local power-holders. It draws on c. fifty distinct episodes to chart how Dutch and English diplomatic repertoires in South Asia took shape in response to local demands and conventions. Both Companies petitioned Mughal emperors in much the same way as Indian subjects did, and both relied on Mughal patrons to do so. Cast in the role of supplicants seeking imperial favour and protection, Company envoys presented themselves as obliging participants in the ceremonial performance of an asymmetrical relationship. By tying commercial privileges to expectations of submission and service, the imperial government proceeded to incorporate these foreign actors into a domestic political framework.
Jurisdictional frontiers were created, contested, and negotiated among a wide range of actors, including native Americans and Europeans, with reference to the cities founded in Castilla del Oro (roughly present-day Panama). This research deals, first, with the reshaping of the concept of a city in the New World, based on its inhabitants’ sense of civitas. It analyses, secondly, the creation and redefinition of jurisdiction during political conflicts and, third, the construction and maintenance of jurisdiction through local relations with indigenous populations described as ‘conversation’. The analysis of the creation and preservation of local jurisdictions allows for an interpretation of the complexities involved in the configuration of political power and political space from below in the territories claimed by the Spanish Monarchy.
For the past century, the field of Mediterranean Studies has been primarily dominated by two paradigms that appear on the surface, at least, to be mutually exclusive: the bifurcated Mediterranean of the battlefield, and the linked Mediterranean suggested by the region's many bazaars and other places of encounter and exchange. But when the dotted lines separating the color-coded civilizations inscribed on maps of the Mediterranean are erased, when we begin to question and to breach its boundaries, new patterns of interaction materialize which fundamentally call into question many cherished assumptions about the sea, and about familiar and time-worn categories such as east and west, Ottoman and European, Muslim and Christian. In their place we are able to perceive a more nuanced and complex world of contention, as well as commerce, connection and even coexistence.
This survey of North African history challenges both conventional attitudes toward North Africa and previously published histories written from the point of view of Western scholarship. The book aims, in Professor Laroui’s words, “to give from within a decolonized vision of North African history just as the present leaders of the Maghrib are trying to modernize the economic and social structure of the country." The text is divided into four parts: the origins of the Islamic conquest; the stages of Islamization; the breakdown of central authority from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; and the advent of colonial rule. Drawing on the methods of sociology and political science as well as traditional and modern historical approaches, the author stresses the evolution marked by these four stages and the internal forces that affected it. Until now, the author contends, North African history has been written either by colonial administrators and politicians concerned to defend foreign rule, or by nationalist ideologues. Both used an old-fashioned historiography, he asserts, focusing on political events, dynastic conflicts, and theological controversies. Here, Abdallah Laroui seeks to present the viewpoint of a Maghribi concerning the history of his own country, and to relate this history to the present structure of the region. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The political jurisdiction of the colonial cacique, or ethnic lord, is often understood to have been truncated or undermined by Spanish political administration. But the role of the cacique was also key to enabling Spanish administrators to extract wealth from native communities. What exactly that role was is undocumented in Spanish-language archival materials. By examining recent literature on the Iberian qadi, or judge of the Islamic community under Christian rule, this study argues that the cacique, like the qadi, maintained his or her local authority and jurisdiction. Evidence for this hidden jurisdiction is found in a sixteenth-century case that was set aside by the Real Audiencia because it fell outside that body's jurisdiction and within the dominion of the cacique.
Usually seen as actors with limited political agency, captives and slaves are, in this essay, at the core of complex diplomatic negotiations between two political authorities in a cross-confessional context. The case study presents a group of enslaved Christians in Algiers at the beginning of the seventeenth century working to restore a disrupted communication system between Spain and a rebel Muslim lord at war with the Ottomans. This lord, called Amar ben Amar bel Cadi, ruled the tiny city of Kuko and its region in the Djurdjura range (in present-day Kabylia). The goal of the Spanish military collaboration with him was to take Algiers and weaken the Ottoman Empire in North Africa. The paper argues that the captives’ initiative must be understood both as diplomacy “from below” and as a cross-confessional model of loyalty. Furthermore, it compels us to re-think the agency of actors in imperial encounters and to reject the topos—often implicit in contemporary historical essays—that religious affiliation conditioned political loyalty.
This special issue, an exercise in integrated Mediterranean history through the lens of diplomacy, demonstrates that diplomatic genres and practices associated with a European political and cultural tradition, on the one hand, or an Islamic tradition, on the other, were not produced in isolation but attained meaning through the process of mediation and negotiation among intermediaries of different confessional and social backgrounds. Building on the “new diplomatic history,” the essays focus on non-elite (e.g. Christian slaves, renegades, Jewish doctors, Moriscos) and less commonly studied (mid- and high-ranking Muslim officials) intermediaries in Mediterranean cross-confessional diplomacy. The issue argues that the early modern period witnessed a relative balance of power among Muslim- and Christian-ruled polities: negotiations entailed not only principles of reciprocity, parity, and commensurability, but these were actually enforceable in practice. This challenges the notion of European diplomatic supremacy, prompting scholars to fundamentally rethink the narrative about the origins of early modern diplomacy.
This article examines the strained relationship between Portuguese nobles, in particular Nuno Fernandes de Ataide and D. Nuno Mascarenhas, andYahya-u-Tacfuft, a Berber alcaide in the service of the king of Portugal. Although D. Manuel, the king of Portugal, viewed all the parties as loyal servants of Portugal, they seemed incapable of coexisting for extended periods without suspicion, recrimination, and outright hatred. The notion of honor, as conceived by both the Portuguese and Yahya, was the primary cause of this problematic relationship. Furthermore, this article challenges the utility of the traditional bipartite theory of honor as articulated by Julian Pitt-Rivers and J. G. Peristiany, among others, and seeks to replace it with Frank Henderson Stewart's theory of honor as a right.
This paper examines the relationship between an English factor, John Harrison, and a Moroccan Sufi rebel, Abu Maḥilli, in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Although the two men never met, the revolt that Abu Maḥilli led against the Sa'dian rulers promoted mahdist/messianic goals which intersected with the commercial and eschatological strategies that Harrison was pursuing in Morocco.
This article is an attempt at reconceptualizing “Anglo-French relations” in seventeenth-century northeastern America by testing the concept of “spiritual geopolitics” (and its limits) in the case of the Anglo-French “interface” in northeastern America. Spiritual geopolitics is defined as the impact of confessional identities on geopolitical thinking and actions. Building on a binary religio-diplomatic context of the 16th and early 17th-century, the article first makes the case for Puritan spiritual geopolitics, consisting in a revision of familiar events through a new geopolitical lens. It then moves on to French anti-Protestant geopolitical thinking applied to North America, in particular in the second half of the century. While the first two sections argue that documentary evidence confirm “spiritual geopolitics” as a legitimate lens, the third section puts forward instances of religious border-crossing that plead in favor of a more nuanced, multilayered, concept of spiritual geopolitics in the period before the beginning of “Imperial Wars”.
This article examines various aspects of the formulation of the Dutch East India Company's treaty and alliance system, based on published and unpublished papers written by, or in the possession of, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). In particular the study draws on his commentary on the Sultan of Johor in De Jure Praedae, and his submissions to the Indies Conferences of 1613 and 1615.
In the first part of this address I shall describe the results of an investigation into a particular historical problem. In the second part I shall select from that investigation and that problem some topics of more general application and interest.
The Catholic Historical Review 89.3 (2003) 409-433
The work of the Bosnian Franciscan missionaries represents a peculiar episode in the history of Catholic renewal in Central Europe. By studying these developments, we may become acquainted with the manner in which the various denominations and nationalities coexisted in the Carpathian basin. In the following, I shall examine the work of the Bosnian missionaries on the basis of documents preserved in the Rome archives of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of Faith (de Propaganda Fide), a body of cardinals founded by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 to direct Catholic missions throughout the world. Until recently most of the documents used in this study were unknown; they are soon to be published.
After the battle of Mohács (1526) and the fall of Buda (1541), the middle third of the medieval kingdom of Hungary was occupied by the Turks. Large numbers of southern Slavs moved into the Turkish-occupied areas of Hungary. While many of these people were Catholics, overall the Catholic Church in Hungary was significantly weakened by the effects of the Reformation. The Catholic bishops were appointed by the Holy Roman Emperor acting as the king of Hungary. The Emperor was the main enemy of the Turkish Sultan, and thus the Hungarian bishops were refused access to the Turkish territories. After the Reformation and the Turkish conquest the fate of the Catholic Church became increasingly uncertain in Turkish Hungary. For this reason, the arrival of Bosnian Franciscan friars from the Balkans had a great effect upon the lives of Hungarian, Croatian, Romanian, and Bosnian Catholics living in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Compared with other Catholic priests working in the Turkish sovereign area, the Bosnian Franciscans established a far more "intimate" relationship with the Ottoman authorities. This special relationship, where it led the Bosnians to persecute their rivals within the Catholic Church using Turkish military force, rightly outraged the Ragusan, Italian, and Hungarian priests who were the potential victims. Still, it did provide the Franciscans with far greater room for manoeuvre in their missionary work.
Franciscan friars appeared in Bosnia at the end of the thirteenth century. They were given the task of challenging the Bogomil heretic church. The Pope declared the whole of Bosnian Kingdom to be a missionary territory and appointed the Franciscans as local inquisitors. Friars arrived in Bosnia from many different countries: English, German, Italian, and Aragonese Franciscans converted the Bosnian heretics, and here too the famous inquisitor, Saint Jacob of Marche, worked. During the golden age of the order in Bosnia in the middle of the fifteenth century, Franciscan friars were living in about sixty monasteries throughout the country. Owing to the popularity of the Bogomil heresy, the number of Catholic secular priests in the country was very small. Thus, contrary to the traditional ecclesiastical model, according to their papal privileges the Franciscans in Bosnia also worked as parish priests. From the sixteenth century on, they continued to occupy the parishes also in Turkish Hungary.
The end of the golden age of the Bosnian kingdom and the Franciscan order in Bosnia came with the occupation of the country by the Ottomans, which was completed by 1463. The Turkish occupation divided the Franciscan order in Bosnia into two parts. One part fell under Turkish rule (its territory grew constantly with the advance of the Turks), while the other part remained part of the Christian world.
Following the incorporation of Bosnia into the Sultan's empire, local Franciscans stayed on rather than fleeing. The Turkish administration tolerated and even assisted the Bosnian Franciscans because it needed them in order to keep the peace and to control the tax-paying Catholic populations and prevent their emigration. At the same time, the Turks also had an interest in provoking differences between Christians of the various denominations, especially the Catholics and the Orthodox. For this reason, they made no attempt to establish a lasting peace between the various churches and were also quite willing to adjudicate in church affairs. Bitter rancor among the non-Muslim populations reduced the likelihood of a united Christian...
This essay examines the juristic discourse on Muslim minorities from the second/eighth century to the eleventh/seventeenth century with regard to (1) whether or not Muslims may reside in non-Muslim territory and under what circumstances; (2) the relationship of these Muslims to dār al-Islām; and (3) the ethical and legal duties that these Muslims owe to the Sharī'a and to their host non-Muslim polity. The juristic discussions on legality of residence in non-Muslim territory in the first Islamic centuries were cryptic and ambiguous. Systematic juristic positions developed only after the sixth/twelfth century as a response to historical challenges. The various positions adopted by the jurists were a function of historical specificity and reflected a dynamic process of legal development. In theory, the position of Muslim minorities residing in non-Muslim territory is problematic because of the traditional dichotomy between dār al-Islām and dār al-harb. In practice, the persistent existence of Muslim minorities residing outside dār al-Islām challenged this dichotomous view. The linguistic dichotomy between dār al-Islām and dār al-harb obscures a much more complex historical reality. The juristic discourse on the issue was not dogmatic and does not lend itself to essentialist positions.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of History, August 2005. Includes bibliographical references.
North African Jewry and the Jews expelled from Spain after 1492 This study analyses the hispanisation of North African Jewry following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. After describing the arrival of thousands of Spanish Jews in Morocco and Algeria, this paper highlights the main factors which facilitated the integration as well as the cultural symbiosis which took place between local communities and the newcomers. Together with their wide-spread geographical dispersion and an exceptional social mobility, the Spanish Jews succeeded in creating an outstanding social elite who enjoyed much prestige due to their political influence, religious charisma and financial status and through which they gained control of local communities even before the mid-sixteenth century.
The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective; citation_author=Pepper, S; citation_publication_date=2000
- Walls
Dos Tratados como Fundamento do Império dos Portugueses no Oriente; citation_author=Saldanha
- Imperium
On the Threshold of Spain’s Golden Age
- Cisneros De
judeu de sinal, sem sinal, entre o norte de África e o reino de Portugal; citation_author=Tavim
- Benzamerro
Documentos de Marruecos en archivos españoles (siglos XVI-XVII); citation_author=García Arenal, M.; citation_author=Rodríguez Mediano, F.; citation_author=El Hour
- Marruecas
The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter; citation_author=Tolan
- The Francis
- Sultan
Los judíos de Orán en la Monarquía Católica durante los siglos XVI-XVII.” In Entre el Islam y Occidente. Los judíos magrebíes en la edad moderna
- Pulido Serrano
Os judeus na expansão portuguesa em Marrocos durante o século XVI. Origen e actividades duma comunidade
- J A R S Tavim
Repobladores y mudéjares. Granada: diputación provincial
- Ladero Quesada