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Negotiating with the “Infidel”: Imperial Expansion and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in the Early Modern Maghreb (1492–1516)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2016

José Miguel Escribano Páez
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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.

Keywords

Iberian ExpansionismCross-Confessional DiplomacyDiplomacy from belowHispanic MonarchyMaghreb
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 40 , Special Issue 2: Spiritual Geopolitics in the Early Modern World , August 2016 , pp. 189 - 214
Copyright
© 2016 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

*

José Miguel Escribano Páez (History, Ph.D., European University Institute) specialises in the construction of the Spanish Empire in Europe and beyond. He is currently doing research on Cross-Confessional diplomacy in the different frontiers resulting from the Iberian expansionism during the sixteenth century.

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