Early Modern Spain and the Creation of the Mediterranean: Captivity, Commerce, and Knowledge.

Abstract

Scholars have claimed that the commercial waning of the Mediterranean at the turn of the seventeenth century and the increasing volume of captives reflected how the sea had lost its earlier unity, and subsequently began a decline. This project argues that the rumors about the sea’s death may be premature. It examines how the “Mediterranean” was created and recreated throughout the seventeenth century through the interaction between cross-boundary practices, on the one hand, and Spanish, Algerian, and Moroccan region-making projects, on the other. The project’s point of departure is the 1581 Ottoman-Habsburg peace agreement, which transformed the nature of Mediterranean warfare, effectively making piracy more important than ever. It increased the number of captives, leading to a more balanced and extended circulation of captives over time and across space. As a result, captives became instrumental in the production and circulation of knowledge across the sea. The dissertation explores how captives engaged with social practices, which included the spread of rumors and news, the writing of letters of recommendation, the compiling of intelligence reports, and the sending of requests to their respective sovereigns. The circulation of captives, the information captives distributed, and captives’ interactions with institutions such as the family, the Inquisition, and Maghribi and Spanish political bureaucracies made the Mediterranean a space in which such institutions had a foothold in both sides of the sea. The increase in the number of captives also enhanced the importance of the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians, religious Orders charged with liberating Christian captives, and of small-scale networks of ransom, credit and trust constituted by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim intermediaries. The Spanish Monarch, the Moroccan Sultan and Algerian Pashas tried to shape Mediterranean structures of mobility and forms of exchange according to their own political agendas, especially by regulating these ransom networks and institutions. The projects these sovereigns sought to impose, however, differed from how ransom go-betweens perceived Mediterranean mobility and exchange, and the sovereigns were forced to negotiate their plans with these intermediaries.