Interactions between North Africa and Spain: Medieval and Early Modern

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilo Gómez-Rivas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
Arabic Speaking

Arabic-speaking Muslim polities existed in medieval Spain and Portugal where they were superseded by Christian empires that gradually disavowed cultural connections to this past. Hebrew and Arabic were largely expurgated from homes and libraries. Jews and Muslims who refused to convert were expelled. And while an incipient study of that past existed, echoed even in popular literary forms, the need to disavow kinship prevailed, at least publicly and officially. The Maghrib, for its part, separated by a mere fourteen kilometers of sea from the southern tip of Spain, experienced Portuguese and Spanish imperial expansion firsthand, receiving the bulk of the displaced and interacting with fortified settlements and encroachments along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Later European colonization of North Africa completed the galvanization of a Maghribi culture of resistance to and disavowal of European, Latin, and Christian cultural forms and connections. Spain and North Africa came to be conceived as separate worlds; domains of inimical faiths; divided by culture, language, religion, and a history of mutual hostility. This sense of separateness is deceptive, however, as the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa are bound by deep and extensive commercial, material, and cultural contacts. They share inextricable histories in which alternating movements of commerce, conflict, and migration have played fundamental roles in shaping recognizably Western Mediterranean societies. They should be thought of as areas of a unified region with a common culture, or at the very least, as areas sharing a common region, in which they interact regularly, creating extensive ties and parallel forms of cultural and social organization.

Philip ii of Spain and His Italian Jewish Spy

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 318-342
Author(s):  
Flora Cassen
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Information Networks ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Secret Information ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Families

A bitter conflict between the Spanish and Ottoman empires dominated the second half of the sixteenth century. In this early modern “global” conflict, intelligence played a key role. The Duchy of Milan, home to Simon Sacerdoti (c.1540-1600), a Jew, had fallen to Spain. The fate that usually awaited Jews living on Spanish lands was expulsion—and there were signs to suggest that King Philip ii (1527-1598) might travel down that road. Sacerdoti, the scion of one of Milan’s wealthiest and best-connected Jewish families had access to secret information through various contacts in Italy and North-Africa. Such intelligence was highly valuable to Spanish forces, and Philip ii was personally interested in it. However, this required Sacerdoti to serve an empire—Spain—with a long history of harming the Jews, and to spy on the Ottomans, widely considered as the Jews’ supporters at the time. This article offers a reflection on Simon Sacerdoti’s story. Examining how a Jew became part of the Spanish intelligence agency helps us understand how early modern secret information networks functioned and sheds new light on questions of Jewish identity in a time of uprootedness and competing loyalties.

Halil İnalcık 1916? - 2016

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-165
Author(s):  
Linda T. Darling
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World History ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crucial Part

Halil İnalcık was born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, into a refugee family, probably in 1916 (he did not know his birthday; in Turkey he adopted 29 May, in the US 4 July). He died at age 100 in Ankara on 25 July 2016, as the premier Ottoman historian in the world. To quote one of his students, “Professor İnalcık transformed the field of Ottoman studies from an obscure and exotic subfield into one of the leading historical disciplines that covers the history of the greater Middle East and North Africa as well as the Balkans from the late medieval to the modern period. He set the tone of debate and critical inquiry from the early modern to the modern period.” Born an Ottoman, he made Ottoman studies a crucial part of world history.

A Vertical Sea: North Africa and the Medieval Mediterranean

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-71
Author(s):  
Allen Fromherz
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Call To Prayer ◽  
Pope Innocent Iv ◽  
North And South

An extraordinary letter was discovered in a neglected pile of medieval diplomatic correspondence in the Vatican Libraries: a letter from Al-Murtada the Almohad, Muslim Caliph in Marrakech to Pope Innocent IV (1243–1254). The letter, written in finest official calligraphy, proposes an alliance between the Caliph and the Vicar of Christ, the leader of an institution that had called for organized crusades against the Islamic world. While the history of Pope Innocent IV’s contacts with the Muslim rulers of Marrakech remains obscure, the sources indicate that Pope Innocent IV sent envoys south to Marrakech. One of these envoys was Lope d’Ayn. Lope became Bishop of Marrakech, shepherd of a flock of paid Christian mercenaries who were sent to Marrakech by that sometime leader of the reconquista, Ferdinand III of Castile, in a deal he had struck with the Almohads. Although they now had Christians fighting for them and cathedral bells competing with the call to prayer, the Almohads were powerful agitators of jihad against the Christians only decades before. Scholars know only a little about Lope d’Ayn’s story or the historical context of this letter between Caliph Murtada and the Pope. Although very recent research is encouraging, there is a great deal to know about the history of the mercenaries of Marrakech or the interactions between Jews, Muslims and Christians that occurred in early thirteenth century Marrakech. The neglect of Lope d’Ayn and the contacts between the Papacy and the Almohads is only one example of a much wider neglect of North Africa contacts with Europe in the secondary literature in English. While scholarship in English has focused on correspondence, commerce and travel from West to East, between Europe, the Levant and Egypt, there were also important cultural bridges being crossed between North and South, between North Africa and Europe in the Medieval Western Mediterranean.

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

Itinerario ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Miguel Escribano Páez
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Political Divide ◽  
Religious Actors ◽  
Selection Of

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.

Problems in the Interpretation of the History of the Maghrib in the Light of some Recent Publications

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Brett
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Central Government ◽  
General Rule ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
First Century ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Necessary Evil ◽  
Exclusive Group ◽  
Secular Power

Caught between schools of sociogy, historians of North Africa over the past twenty years have concetrated on the first century of European colonization, 1830–1930. The previous thousand years of the Muslim period remain enigmatic, their interpretation still heavily dependent upon the work of Ibn Khhaldūn. In conclusion to his volume of the 1952 edition of Ch.-A. Julien's Histoire de l'Afrique du Nord, R. Ie Tourneau characterized this ‘medieval’ period as one of political failure. With particular reference to Morocco, Gellner and more recently Abun-Nasr have, in their various ways, sought to explain an absence of effective government in terms of Ibn Khhaldūn's cyclical theory of the rise and fall of dynasties, taking the traditional Moroccan distinction between a Bilād al Makhzan and a Bilād al-Sība to represent the antithesis between the civilized and the primitive on which that theory rests. Islam is seen as a positive influence on behalf of central government. Neither scheme is satisfactory, perhaps because like Ibn Khhaldūn they are both too concerned with the central power. Taking North Africa as a whole, it seems better to begin with a division of authority in the pre-colonial period into the secular and the religious, the first represented by tribes and local lordships (as well as cities) and by the central government itself, the second by the men of religion, ‘ulamā’ and murābiṭūn. From a position protected by reverence and sustained by endowments, the latter operated as consultants rather than commanders, with the proviso that it was always open to the man of religion to use his prestige and wealth to step across into the realm of secular power. Progress from there to the top, on the other hand, was exceptional. The control of the central government was a great prize, and for that reason the system normally restricted competition by reserving it to the members of an exclusive group, whether a royal family as in Morocco and Tunisia or a regiment of soldiers as in Algiers. The overthrow of that ruling group was difficult, achieved in any given instance only after years of preparation. It is hard to infer a general rule. Islam was employed to justify the claimant as occasion offered, the justification(s) advanced becoming in the event an historical myth on behalf of the successful candidate and – his dawla, his dynasty or state. Any residual Islamic content inherent in the throne as distinct from its occupant can scarcely be isolated as an independent factor. In practice it may have amounted to little more than acceptance of government, whether Muslim or Christian, as a necessary evil.

The Functions of Legal Literature and Case Reporting Before and After Stare Decisis

2019 ◽  
pp. 617-638
Author(s):  
Andrew Benjamin Bricker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Reports ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Stare Decisis ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Legal Literature ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Legal Subjects

This chapter documents some of the diverse functions of legal literature and case reporting prior to the emergence of the modern doctrine of stare decisis in the mid-nineteenth century. In examining the historical variability of legal literature, this chapter attempts to open up new avenues of research for scholars working between law and the humanities. By acknowledging and trying to make sense of that diversity, scholars might find in legal literature useful archival objects that could serve as evidence for phenomena beyond the recording of decisions and the transmission of precedents. This chapter briefly tracks the shifting functions of legal literature in late-medieval and early modern England to suggest how scholars might use such sources. The remainder of the chapter focuses on a transitional period in the history of stare decisis: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when legal practitioners began fully to grapple with a much more modern notion of precedent as fully binding. Even during this period, however, case reporting served a variety of ends beyond the transmission of precedent, and social historians and literary scholars in particular have used legal literature in creative ways to track both societal shifts and literary forms. The goal here is to expand how scholars working at the intersections of law and the humanities might use legal literature and to suggest new ways to think about case reports: not solely as narrow objects for the transmission of precedent but as archival resources for a variety of superficially non-legal subjects.

1. The man made of words

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Sean Teuton
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Native People ◽  
Indigenous Worldviews ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Strong Focus ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonization Period ◽  
American Authors

‘The man made of words’ describes the history of Native Americans, with a strong focus on the 16th-century European colonization period. To recover from nearly 500 years of conquest and disease that devastated indigenous peoples in North America, Native people had to revisit their history and reimagine themselves through literature. As Native American authors learned to write in English, they also mastered literary forms like the novel, adapting these genres to serve indigenous worldviews, and incorporating oral literatures. Despite numerous challenges and a Native American population decreasing rapidly during colonization, many Native American communities are growing their populations and economies, and are reinvesting in cultural and language revitalization.

Religion and Migration in Rakhine

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Charney
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Court Culture ◽  
Theravada Buddhism ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Political Center ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Indian Ocean World

The historical migration and religious development in Rakhine (Arakan) up to the end of the second decade of the 21st century is complicated. This region was a crossroads for South and Southeast Asian civilizations and existed at the overlap of the frontiers of Islam and Theravada Buddhism. Existing in an ecological niche with a difficult topography and climate and a low population base, Rakhine social and state formation was built around inclusivity and tolerance. Although for much of its history the dominant religions of the population of the region were animism and then Brahmanism, successive waves of immigrants from both Bengal and Myanmar meant that Islamic and Theravada Buddhist influence was very strong. The early modern kingdom that emerged at Mrauk-U, its main political center, was built on maritime connectivity with the Indian Ocean world and developed a court culture that was both Muslim and Buddhist and ruled over a population that was religiously heterogeneous. Toleration was challenged, however, by the conquest of Rakhine by Myanmar in 1785 and efforts to eradicate local religious autonomy. Things did not improve under British rule after the British annexation of 1826. The Myanmar and British rulers of Rakhine politicized the region’s history and tried to retell the history of the region in ways that excluded some populations and included others, leading to efforts to force the Rohingya out of Rakhine from August 2017.

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