The Other Side of Empire

Just War in the Mediterranean and the Rise of Early Modern Spain

Andrew W. Devereux

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501740138
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

Via rigorous study of the legal arguments Spain developed to justify its acts of war and conquest, The Other Side of Empire illuminates Spain's expansionary ventures in the Mediterranean in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Andrew Devereux proposes and explores an important yet hitherto unstudied connection between the different rationales that Spanish jurists and theologians developed in the Mediterranean and in the Americas.

Devereux describes the ways in which Spaniards conceived of these two theatres of imperial ambition as complementary parts of a whole. At precisely the moment that Spain was establishing its first colonies in the Caribbean, the Crown directed a series of Old World conquests that encompassed the Kingdom of Naples, Navarre, and a string of presidios along the coast of North Africa. Projected conquests in the eastern Mediterranean never took place, but the Crown seriously contemplated assaults on Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine. The Other Side of Empire elucidates the relationship between the legal doctrines on which Spain based its expansionary claims in the Old World and the New.

The Other Side of Empire vastly expands our understanding of the ways in which Spaniards, at the dawn of the early modern era, thought about religious and ethnic difference, and how this informed political thought on just war and empire. While focusing on imperial projects in the Mediterranean, it simultaneously presents a novel contextual background for understanding the origins of European colonialism in the Americas.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

The Mediterranean in the Spanish Imaginary During the Age of Exploration

Crossroads of the World

In November 1503, at the height of the Franco-Spanish war for control of the southern Italian kingdom of Naples, the Castilian courtier Cristóbal de Santesteban published a juridical tract in support of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s claims not only to Naples but also to the kingdoms of Sicily and Jerusalem.¹ In his text, Santesteban included a panegyric to Sicily, extolling the virtues of the island kingdom. Its superiority to other lands, asserted Santesteban, derived in part from its status as the crossroads of the world. “Sicily is located between the three parts of the world, Asia, Africa, and Europe, and it has been the breadbasket and provisioner for all three.” From this, Santesteban concluded that “no one might call himself lord of the world, nor even think of doing so, without first controlling Sicily.”²

Coming eleven years after Columbus’s first trans-Atlantic crossing, it might surprise that Santesteban should depict the island of Sicily as located at the center of the world, in both geographical and geopolitical terms. Santesteban’s text, however, was not heterodox. On the contrary, it reflected widely held European notions about geography and political power in the early sixteenth century. The courtier’s depiction of the central Mediterranean (in particular the kingdom of Sicily) as being a keystone of geographical and strategic interests is a pithy encapsulation of the geopolitical importance Ferdinand and Isabella ascribed to the Mediterranean throughout their reigns. Indeed, Santesteban’s juridical tract appears to have met with royal approval, and it was likely in remuneration for this composition that he was appointed to the post of alderman in the city of Valladolid and to a commandership in the military order of Santiago.

The pursuit of Mediterranean interests brought the crowns of Aragon and Castile into military conflict or political disputes with France, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mamluk Egypt, as well as numerous polities of the Maghrib. An important element of these disputes, at least those in which Spain’s opponent was a fellow Christian power, such as Portugal or France, was the legal basis on which representatives of the Spanish Crown asserted that it was their sovereign, rather than that of Portugal or France, who held the strongest claim. When Spanish jurists, theologians, chroniclers, or ambassadors argued in defense of Spanish claims to a variety of these Old World lands, they did so within an epistemological framework in which the Mediterranean zone carried a whole set of meanings, resonances, and significances. This chapter elucidates the Mediterranean as a conceptual space in what I term “the Spanish imaginary” during the Age of Exploration. What follows is an exposition of the Mediterranean region as a known geographical unit that constituted a cohesive geographical-religious-cultural-historical entity in the minds of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberians. The elucidation of the ways these people thought about the Mediterranean region, in geographical, religious, historical, ethnographic, and political terms, serves as a framework against which to analyze Spanish political and legal thought on expansion and empire.

Significant scholarly contributions in recent years have noted the ways early modern Europeans approached the lands and peoples of the tropics with certain preconceptions.³ In The Tropics of Empire, Nicolás Wey Gómez elucidates the political geography that underlay Christopher Columbus’s (and sixteenth-century Europeans’ in general) interest in the tropical zones of the earth and how this thinking underwent a shift, from viewing the lower latitudes as a region where nature produced zoological and human monstrosities toward an understanding of the tropics as a region of super-abundance, one ripe for an extractive economy.

During the same decades that Portugal and Castile were establishing the earliest European colonial outposts in the tropics, the crowns of Aragon and Castile were engaged in expansionary ventures in a variety of Mediterranean settings. Unlike the tropics, the Mediterranean lands were known, insofar as they constituted part of the historical frame of reference for early modern Europeans. This fact determined the line of argumentation that Spanish proponents of Mediterranean empire pursued. These Old World ventures entailed very little in the way of a “shock of discovery.”⁴ Rather, Spanish Mediterranean expansionary designs, whether in the Maghrib, Italy, Egypt, or Greece, all occurred in territories in which the Spanish realms of Aragon or Castile had long held interests, lands well known to fifteenth-century Spaniards, both through autopsy and through the writings preserved from the Middle Ages and classical antiquity. This differentiated European political thought about just war, conquest, and empire in the Mediterranean from that pertaining to the more recently encountered tropics. Of particular import was the fact that the entirety of the Mediterranean Sea basin lay within what was understood to constitute the temperate band of the earth’s latitudinal zones. At a time when latitude was believed to play a significant role in shaping the sorts of people and civilizations that developed in different regions, the fact that Ferdinand’s Mediterranean imperial project was directed against peoples inhabiting approximately the same latitudinal zones as the Iberian Peninsula meant that the questions this project engendered differed in significant ways from those that arose as a result of European conquests in the tropics. The inhabitants of the Mediterranean lands were familiar, and they fit into European understandings of the history and genealogies of the peoples of the world. To be sure, constructions of human difference were enormously important in sixteenth-century Spanish justifications for Mediterranean empire, but these differences, rather than being based on notions of human monstrosities or racial difference, were rooted more in differences stemming from confessional identity or the political offenses of usurpation and tyranny.

MAP 1. Map of the Mediterranean, ca. 1510

As later chapters in this book bear out, Spanish understanding of the geographical, religious, and historical dimensions of the Mediterranean basin informed the rhetorical strategies and legal arguments Spanish jurists and theologians developed to justify acts of war and conquest in a variety of Mediterranean locales. In spite of the discrepancy in the way Spaniards and other Europeans viewed the Mediterranean as compared to the tropical Atlantic, nevertheless the rationales for empire that developed in the context of the Mediterranean clearly played a part in the elaboration of related, yet distinct, rationales that apologists for empire developed to justify Spanish conquests in other regions of the globe. This chapter’s examination of the Mediterranean as conceptual space serves to note the ways in which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spaniards’ thinking about this zone differed from that on the tropical Atlantic. Simultaneously, it points to ways that doctrines that originated in the Mediterranean context (debates over the capacity of non-Christians to possess sovereignty, or the importance ascribed to prior Christian rule, to give two examples) were subsequently applied in sometimes incoherent ways to the quite different circumstances presented by the Americas.

Continental Drift

Late medieval European geographic conceptions of a tripartite earth owed a great deal to the Old and New Testaments and to the history of primitive Christianity. In the book of Genesis (chapters 6 through 9) in the wake of the flood, Noah divides the lands of the earth among his sons. Shem is given Asia, Ham is given Africa, and Japheth is given Europe. For medieval Europeans, the biblical account of the distribution of lands among brothers served to reinforce the notion of the earth as a coherent whole comprised of the three constituent and inseparable parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. This endowed them with a natural (and biblically sanctioned) unity as constitutive elements of a whole. One can detect in this tripartite understanding of the lands of the earth a trinitarian cosmographical conception: while the regions of the earth are three, yet they constitute a single entity. Illustrative of the longevity and influence of this understanding of the parts of the earth is the fact that this tripartite geographical conception served as the organizing structure for most European universal histories of the later Middle Ages.⁵

As the locus at which the three regions intersected, the Mediterranean occupied a privileged position at the center of this cosmography. Within this schema, however, the boundaries of Asia, Africa, and Europe were malleable. As Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen have argued, before the development of plate tectonics as a field of study, continents were socially constructed entities.⁶ Consequently, it should come as little surprise that the precise boundaries between the three continents were not stable and varied according to the writer and the date of composition.

Traditional medieval geography held that riverine systems formed the boundaries between Asia and the lands lying to the west. In the south, the Nile formed the border between Asia and Africa. To give but one example, the fifteenth-century French polymath Pierre d’Ailly described the place where the Nile debouches into the Mediterranean as marking the transition from Africa to Asia.⁷ Peter Martyr of Anghiera, the Italian humanist long in the employ of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, writing during his 1502 embassy to Egypt and following established geographical convention, used the Nile to demarcate Africa from Asia, placing Cairo in Asia and Alexandria in Africa, due to the respective banks of the Nile on which those two cities were situated.⁸ Meanwhile, in the north most geographers agreed that the Don separated Asia from Europe. Europeans conceived of the boundary between Africa and Europe as roughly bisecting the Mediterranean Sea, following a line approximating the parallel of 36 degrees north, from the Strait of Gibraltar in the west through the island of Rhodes in the east.⁹ According to most geographers, Jerusalem lay at the intersection of Asia, Africa, and Europe, a fact reflected in the T-O maps that were relatively common in medieval Europe.¹⁰ Even into the sixteenth century some writers continued to locate Jerusalem at the center of the earth’s landmass.¹¹ Of course, the geographical conceptions conveyed by the schema locating Jerusalem at the juncture of the three continents were as much symbolic as they were representative. Ascribing such a position to Jerusalem emphasized the importance of the Holy Land as the locus where Christ had redeemed humans’ sins as much as or more than it stood as a precise claim about Jerusalem’s geographic centrality.

As noted earlier, however, these constructs were far from stable, and European geographical boundaries displayed a remarkable dynamism. As an illustration of this, let us examine the work of the fifteenth-century polymath and Castilian royal councilor Diego de Valera (1412–1488). In 1482, Valera published his Crónica de España, sometimes referred to as the Crónica Abreviada, a universal history dedicated to Queen Isabella. Valera opened with a history of the three portions of the known world, beginning with their settlement and population by Noah’s sons in the wake of the flood. In the section on Asia, Valera lists twenty-five provinces that constitute Asia, among them Macedonia, Albania, Crete, Egypt, and Ethiopia (along with the terrestrial paradise).¹² Egypt and Ethiopia do not surprise here, if one takes the Nile as the boundary between Africa and Asia. But Albania, Macedonia, and Crete clearly lie well to the west of the Don, demonstrating that for Valera the boundary between Europe and Asia was constructed around some other criterion.

Valera’s section on Africa includes the provinces of Cyprus, Corsica, and Sicily, the last of which he describes as “located in the African Sea.”¹³ For Valera, the boundary between Europe and Africa lay well to the north of the thirty-sixth parallel (the northern tip of Corsica reaches the forty-third parallel) and it followed a rather meandering line across the Mediterranean. Significantly, Valera included in Africa two islands to which King Ferdinand held claim: Ferdinand had been king of Sicily since 1468, and he held a dynastic claim to Corsica, even if that island was under the de facto rule of the Republic of Genoa at the time Valera composed his chronicle.¹⁴ Valera’s geographical itemization results in a nebulous space that cuts across the central portion of the Sea, a space in which Asia, Africa, and Europe very nearly mingle or, in some cases, could almost be viewed as overlapping. In Valera’s geography, the “African” island of Corsica, for instance, lies to the north of the “European” islands of Majorca, Menorca, and Ibiza, as well as the “European” lands of southern Italy—Calabria and Apulia. In spite of this rather porous conception of continental borders, Valera nevertheless places Jerusalem at the center of the lands of the earth, demonstrating a conventional Christian geographical trope.¹⁵

It is clear that these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers did not view continental boundaries as aligning with political borders or dynastic claims. As we will see in chapter 4, countless Spanish writers saw no dissonance in arguing for the existence of an ancient kingdom of Visigothic Hispania that included lands on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, encompassing what modern thinkers wou...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index