Muslims in Spain, 1492-1814

Front matter

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Contents

Acknowledgments vit List of Illustrations and Tables = vir Abbreviations IX

Introduction 1 1 Historiography and the Muslim Presence in Spain in the Early Modern Age 3

1 Muslims in Europe, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries 31 11 Muslims, a Minority among Slaves 33 12 Hundreds of Muslim Embassies 41 13 Merchants in Ports and Cities 49 14 Muslim Converts to Christianity 54 1.5 Exiles, Travelers, Soldiers, and Adventurers 57

Introduction

The aims of this book are threefold.! First, to show that the presence and activity of Muslims in general, and Moroccans in particular, in Spain throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was more significant than has heretofore been thought.” Second, to demonstrate that Spaniards and Muslims were able to negotiate with each other — in spite of tensions and periodic confrontations — continuously during those centuries, which can be made to extend from 1492 to 1859, date of the outbreak of the African War (Guerra de Africa, 1859-1860) between Spain and Morocco. And third, to stress that in spite of prevailing opinion, Spanish policy toward Muslim countries was based as much on politics (the search for alliances and treaties against common enemies) and economics (securing indispensable imports of cereals from North Africa and the Levant) as on ideology (a spirit of crusade and an expectation of confrontation).

To make this case I will document the presence — permanent or temporary, frequently forced but often voluntary — of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Spain in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. I will reconstruct the traces of slaves, Moriscos (meaning only those who, after accepting baptism, continued their Islamic rites and practices), ambassadors and envoys, exiles, merchants, sailors, travelers, adventurers, and the thousands who fled from famine or punishment by the authorities in North Africa.

The situation changed considerably after Spain signed the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Trade with Morocco in 1767, and later pacts with the Ottoman Empire (1782), Tripoli (1784), Algiers (1786), and Tunis (1791). Once peaceful relations were established with these states the number of Muslim slaves in Spain declined until none were left by 1791; only a few prisoners remained. But at the same time the number of those who arrived freely on Spanish soil increased significantly.

In earlier years, however, Spanish monarchs had signed dozens of peace treaties with the rulers of North African dynasties, and many ambassadors and

1 This book was researched and written within the project Mediterranean Reconfigurations. Commercial Litigation, Cross-Cultural Trade and Legal Pluralism in the Mediterranean, 16th- 19th c. (Advanced Grant ERC no. 295868). Also the project “Dentro y fuera: Cambio institucional e integración social y cultural en el Imperio Español contemporáneo, 1550-1950)”: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ref. HAR2015-6183-P.

2 We do not include the negotiations, treaties, and conflicts that arose between Spanish subjects and Muslims on the North African coast and in Levantine ports.

© CORRALES, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443761_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc BY-NC 4.0 license.

envoys from each side, merchants, adventurers, and persons fleeing danger had crossed the Mediterranean in both directions. Authorities of the Ottoman Empire and the North African countries, who protected Christian and Jewish communities in their lands, welcomed many Spanish men of religion who, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, oversaw the living conditions and religious faith of captives in the bagnios of Algiers and Tunis, where most of them were held. The Franciscans were likewise allowed to establish missions in Morocco. In the period under study channels were kept open for ransoming captives, protecting commerce through safe-conducts and under the white flag of truce (or, failing that, in ports of third parties), and allowing other exchanges between the two sides — into which we will not enter here. The same occurred, though to a lesser degree, with Muslims whose presence in Spanish ports as merchants and/or ransoming agents (alfaqueques) is already attested, particularly in the sixteenth century but also later. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries almost all Moroccan envoys to Spain played a direct role in ransoming the largest possible number of Muslim slaves.

In the presidios, fortified ports on the North African coast occupied by Spain in the sixteenth century, intense negotiations took place with local rulers and residents of the hinterland, punctuated by frequent open confrontations. But we will be concerned here only with Spanish-Muslim negotiations carried out on Spanish soil, and with the conflict resolution that resulted.

Though we place priority on such negotiations we do not mean to minimize the high level of hostility between the two sides. The long, chronic struggle of the medieval “Reconquest” — or the feudal expansion of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain — lasted for eight centuries.* It was followed by the Spanish-Ottoman fight for the North African coast in the sixteenth century, then by the repression of Morisco rebellions that culminated in the expulsion of that population in 1609-1614 — perhaps the cruelest episode in the construction of the unitary, confessional state.5 These events helped to consolidate the mutual hostility of corsair warfare up to the end of the eighteenth century, and finally the constant disputes over Spain’s North African presidios.® All these

3 I will not be concerned in this study with Jewish and Christian ambassadors and commissioners who were sent to the Spanish court from Muslim countries, especially Morocco. They were one more indication that the lines of communication between the two sides were never shut down completely.

4 Torró Abad, El naixement d'una colonia.

Bernal Rodríguez, Monarquía e imperio; Elliott, Spain and its World.

6 For Spanish-Maghrebi relations in the Early Modern age see Alonso Acero, España y el Norte de África; Vilar and Lourido Díaz, Relaciones; and García-Arenal and Bunes Ibarra, Los españoles y el Norte de África. For Algiers, Terki-Hassaine, Relaciones políticas; for Morocco, ot factors meant that both sides of the conflict saw the Muslim or Christian enemy through a strongly negative imaginary.”

In spite of this chronic hostility and its consequences, however, there was always a space for negotiation and understanding, and the various parties never ceased to act pragmatically. This was especially true of Spain’s relations with Morocco, since those two countries, while they had opposed each other for centuries, often needed to tamp down their differences in order to face threats from a common enemy: the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, the Algerian Regency in the seventeenth and eighteenth, and finally European pressure, first by France and later by England, from the end of the 1500s to the early nineteenth century.

We can say the same about Spain's complex relations with the other North African nations, especially the Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli and the so-called Kingdom of Kuku. There were also significant approaches to the Ottoman Empire that resulted in truces in the mid-1500s and the 1580s, and the dispatch of an Ottoman ambassador to the Spanish court in the mid-seventeenth century. In the eighteenth, after a series of fruitless negotiations, a peace treaty was signed in 1782.

As I was preparing the present study, many colleagues read the text in whole or in part or discussed specific aspects of my argument with me. I gratefully acknowledge the help of Alfonso Carlos Bolado Nieto, Miguel Angel Bunes Ibarra, Lizbeth Chaviano Pérez, Josep Maria Delgado Ribas, Maria Fusaro, Gema Garcia Fuentes, Helena de Jesús de Felipe Rodríguez, Manuela Marin, Eva Martín Corrales, Josep María Perlasia Botey, and Andreu Seguí Beltrán.

1 Historiography and the Muslim Presence in Spain in the Early Modern Age

In recent years, historians of Christian-Muslim relations in the Mediterranean in the Early Modern period have been observing that, irrespective of the degree of conflict between the two sides, they shared political, military, strategic,

Abitbol, Histoire; for Tunis, Guellouz et al., Histoire Génerale, vol. 3; for Tripoli, Vilar Ramirez, Mapas ... de Libia. For relations with the Ottoman Empire see Braudel, La Méditerranée; Kumrular, El duelo; and Martín Asuero, España-Turquía. For the Maghrebi countries in the same period see Mantran, Histoire.

7 For the image of Muslims in Spain in the period under study see Martin Corrales, La imagen del magrebí; Bunes Ibarra, La imagen de los musulmanes; and Mas, Les Turcs dans la littérature espagnole. There do not seem to be any studies of the image of Spaniards formed by Muslims.

economic, and cultural motivations that carried much more weight than the ideological ones that favored a climate of hostility. It is noted that the many calls for a crusade against the Muslim “infidels” by Popes, monarchs, and European republics were more rhetorical than real, and that Christian and Muslim states were actually forging many political alliances and trade relationships, signing surrenders and peace treaties, and establishing important commercial ties. This reality caused G. Poumaréde, in Pour finir avec la Croisade, to give the religious factor its proper weight in the relations between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean during this period.®

Pragmatism in Christian-Muslim relations, however, has been considered the property, or “virtue,” of certain Western European states such as France, England, and the Low Countries.? Portugal, Spain, Malta, and the Italian states, dominions, and republics have not been included; these countries have entered the context of Muslim relations only in discussions of corsairs, or of surrenders and ransoms of captives and slaves. Likewise the Islamic lands are treated as passive elements, subordinate to European politics and economics. The sole exception is the Ottoman Empire, recognized as holding the initiative in the sixteenth century, though even in that context it is stressed that the Empire signed its first capitulations with France and later with Great Britain and the Low Countries.1 It is generally believed that the French, English, and Dutch maintained policies toward Muslims that were essentially peaceful, diplomatic, and mercantile, with the objective of improving the political and commercial role of their respective countries, while religious considerations were secondary and/or nonexistent. It is often forgotten that, at least during

8 Poumarède, Pour en finir, criticizes harshly the weight assigned to religious considerations in cross-Mediterranean relations. Greene, A Shared World, shows that hostility between Christians and Muslims in Crete was far from being the norm, and her article “Beyond the Northern Invasion,” on a slightly different subject, makes an important contribution in stressing the importance of political-strategic and economic factors in the relations between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

9 It would be impossible to cite everything published on political and commercial relations between these countries and the Muslims, so I mention only a few monographs: Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World; de Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic; Davis, Aleppo and Devonshire Square; Paris, Histoire du commerce, vol. 3; Vaughan, Europe and the Turk; Wood, A History of the Levant Company; Charles-Roux, France et Afrique du Nord; Masson, Histoire du commerce francais; Epstein, The English Levant Company.

10 Talbot, British-Ottoman Relations; Veinstein, “Les capitulations franco-ottomanes” and “Les ambiguïtés”; Boogert, Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System and “Consular Jurisdiction”; Boogert and Fleet, The Ottoman Capitulations; Vatin, Les Ottomans et l'occident; Goffman, “The Capitulations”; Ménage, “The English Capitulations”; and Zeller, “Une légende.”

our period, economic policies and all kinds of interchanges were established and consolidated only through domination of one party by the other. The Capitulations that the Ottoman Empire signed with the French and the English were concessions that the caliph made to powers he considered inferior, but their later revisions show a crescendo of European demands that the Grand Turk was unable to resist.

In their dealings with the Maghrebi and Moroccan Regencies the French and English navies practiced genuine gunboat diplomacy: they used force of arms to make Muslim states sign most of their many capitulations and peace treaties. That explains why North African rulers systematically violated those pacts, either wholly or in part, as soon as the European fleets sailed out of port in the southern Mediterranean. We must not forget that many of those agreements concerned the ransom or exchange of captives or slaves, a sign of widespread violence at sea. Even so, some insist that the French, English, and Dutch (the bulk of the “Northern invasion”) negotiated skilfully with Muslim states.

It has been assumed that on the contrary, the Mediterranean countries — particularly Spain and its Italian possessions, Portugal, the Papal States, Genoa, and Malta — elevated the crusading ideal above any political, strategic, economic, or cultural considerations. Historians claim that the notions of crusade and jihad remained alive in the attitudes of those states toward Muslims, making any relations other than bellicose ones impossible.

Venice, baptized the “Gateway to the East,” supposedly occupied a middle ground in view of its excellent relations with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century (though even these were not free of armed conflicts). But its loss of importance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has led to less scrutiny in this regard."

Charles Windler, in his otherwise admirable monograph on French-Tunisian relations, expressed clearly these two modes of dealing with Muslims:

For Spanish diplomacy, the res publica christiana remained the goal of a legal system that excluded any possibility of stable, peaceful relations with infidels, who not only resisted every attempt at conversion but were also considered the worst enemies of Christians. The Catholic character of the monarchy defined a vocation of service to the Church that transcended the geographical limits of the territories under its rule. The first peace treaty between a king of Spain and a Muslim prince, in this case the

11 Although recently there has been greater interest in studying these two centuries: Rothman, Brokering Empires; Pedani, “Beyond the Frontier”; Greene, A Shared World.

sultan of Morocco, was not signed until 1767. ... Until Spain negotiated the first peace treaties under Charles III the court of Versailles, allied to Madrid by family ties, followed a policy toward the Ottoman Empire, the regencies, and Morocco that was radically opposed to the Spanish one.”

In the course of the next chapters we shall see how this notion must be, at the very least, restated in a more nuanced way.

Historians admit that the Southern European countries had commercial ties with Muslim Mediterranean states, for which they have coined the term “permanent exception” to emphasize their precarious and intermittent nature." But if we consider the many interruptions in trade between France, Great Britain, and the Low Countries and Mediterranean Muslim states, especially the North African powers, we should be speaking rather of an “exceptional normality.”

In speaking of peaceful and/or commercial relations between Western European countries and those of the Muslim Mediterranean, scholars have normally ignored the Iberians, Italians (except for the free port of Livorno), and Maltese. Total silence about them reigns in most monographs on political, diplomatic, and mercantile relations, whose protagonists are exclusively the French, English, Dutch, and others, operating from Marseille and ports in Northern Europe. Even Maghrebi historiography has followed this trend, fixing almost all its attention on the relations of its respective countries with France and England — a choice that may be justified in part but not altogether, since North Africans’ trade relations with their closest neighbors across the Mediterranean were always essential to them. Among European Christian states, with the exception of France, only the port of Livorno receives consideration.!* Few

12 “Pour la diplomatie espagnole, la Res publica christiana demeura l'horizon d'un droit de gens qui excluait la possibilité de maintenir des relations pacifiques durables avec des infidèles qui, non seulement, résistaient à toute velléité de conversion, mais étaient considerés comme les pires ennemis des chrétiens. La catholicité de la monarchie définissait une vocation de service à l’Église qui transcendait les limites géographiques des territoires soumis á son autorité. Le premier Accord de paix entre un roi d'Espagne et un prince musulman, dans ce cas le sultan du Maroc, ne fut conclu qu’en 1767. ... Jusqu’a la négotiation d'accords de paix par Espagne sous le règne de Charles III, la cour de Versailles, alliée à celle de Madrid dans le pacte de famille, suivit à l'endroit de l'Empire Ottoman, des régences et du Maroc une politique diamétralment opposée”: Windler, La diplomatie comme expérience, 316. See also his “De l’idée de croisade” Along these same lines see Calafat, “Ottoman North Africa,” and Hess, The Forgotten Frontier.

13 Kaiser, “La excepción permanente.”

14 There has been some progress in recent years in studying commercial relations with Spain: Terki-Hassaine, Relaciones políticas; Farouk, “Aperçu du trafic”, Boubaker, “Les majorquins à Tunis” and La Régence de Tunis au XIIe siècle.

scholars of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Malta know Arabic, while few historians from the Maghreb, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey are fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. This barrier interferes enormously with contact between their respective historiographies and researchers from both traditions must rely on French and English, in which the historiography leans in the direction we have described above. A similar situation obtains in the area of relations with other Maghrebi countries and the Ottoman Empire. An example of the deficit: there have been several monographs on the ransom efforts of the Moroccan Emperor Sidi Muhammad Ben Abdallah," carried out by several of his ministers, but it is clear that their authors have taken no account of different viewpoints by Europeans and North Africans.!* The same could be said of a great many topics discussed by historians from the countries in question.

We should neither simplify nor exaggerate the fact that hostility and open conflict between the Iberians, Italians, and Maltese on the one hand and the Maghrebis and Ottomans on the other were significant. But that assertion requires nuance: as we have noted, historians do not realize — or forget, or fail to consider — that it was not only ideology that guided these nations’ reciprocal relations. A few examples will suffice. Venice's position as Gateway to the East explains its many treaties with the Ottoman Empire and the existence of its “Turks’ Guesthouses,” Fondachi dei Turchi, although its commitment lessened perceptibly with the decline of the Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.!’ The Republic of Genoa pioneered peaceful relations with the Ottomans and later, through treaties with North African rulers, held on to solid bases on their coasts.!® They controlled the bastion of Tabarka from 1542 to 1741, motivated purely by the defense of their economic interests.!9 Portugal’s control over its conquered presidios along the North African coast was based on alliances with different pretenders to the Moroccan throne; that often involved

15 For the transliteration of Muslim personal names in this volume 1 have chosen the form most commonly accepted by Spanish and foreign historians. When such names appear in documents of the time such as reports, petitions, and statements, I transcribe them just as they appear.

16 See works on this subject by Arribas Palau, Lourido Diaz, Penna, Ben Driss, Loukili, and Mouline in our Bibliography.

17 Pedani, “Oltri la retorica”; Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople; Viallon, Venise et la Porte Ottomane; Beck et al., Venezia, centro di mediazione; Pertusi, Venezia e "Oriente.

18 Insufficient account has been taken of Genoa's important role in commercial negotiations and exchanges in the period immediately preceding the Early Modern, as demonstrated by Fleet, European and Islamic Trade. For the Early Modern period see Boubaker, “Les relations économiques” and “Les Génois de Tabarka”; Urbani, “Genova e il Magrib.”

19 Piccinno, Un'impresa fra terra e mare; Gourdin, Tabarka; Zaki, “Le Maroc et Génes”; Luxoro, Tabarka e i tabarchini.

supporting one “infidel” aspirant against another. The best-known instance is the Portuguese king’s support of Muley Muhammad al-Mutawakkil in his fight to regain his throne, which ended with the so-called Battle of the Three Kings in 1578.2° The same can be said of the Spanish case, which we will take up in Chapter 2.

In recent years important publications have shown that, above and beyond Christian-Muslim conflicts in the Mediterranean, strong and fluid networks connected the two sides. Those networks were essential for rescuing persons unlucky enough to have been captured and enslaved by either adversary. Most important, an atmosphere of trust had to be maintained if those relationships were to be secure and functioning — both for the capturers (who hoped to profit from selling their captives) and for the ransomers, religious or lay (who sought to free the enslaved). What has been called “the ransom economy” depended on such an understanding. That sense of trust extended to those who approached North African ports to buy back ships that had been seized, or to claim a portion of corsair booty that was often difficult to extract from Maghrebi authorities. A similar atmosphere had to prevail in Spanish and Italian ports where the ransom or exchange of Muslim slaves might take place.?! All the individuals and institutions that participated in ransoms and exchanges on both sides — among whom merchants dominated — needed these shared networks to continue.?2

To the relationships established by slaves, ransomers and their agents, and tradesmen we must add those of ambassadors and special envoys, exiles, renegades,?3 converts, spies,?* adventurers, and all those who fled famine and other dangers in their homelands to cross to the territory of the other faith. Recent research by D. Hershenzon and C. Tarruell, focused on Muslim and Christian captives, coincides in the conclusion that corsair warfare, captivity, and ransoming all resulted in greater integration of the Mediterranean area on the

20 Muley (from Arabic mawlaya) was the title given to a sovereign, most often to the Sultan of Morocco. Valensi, Fables de la mémoire and “Silence, dénegation”; Berthier, La Bataille de l'Oued el Makhazen; Nekrouf, La Bataille des Trois Rois; Bovill, The Battle of Alcazar; Magalháes Godinho, “Les guerres du blé.”

21 Kaiser, Le commerce des captifs and “L'économie de la rançon”

22 Beside Kaiser’s works see Hershenzon, “Las redes de confianza”; Tarruell, “Circulations.”

23 García-Arenal, Conversions islamiques; Scaraffia, Rinnegati; Bennassar, Los cristianos de Alá; Rostagno, Mi faccio turco.

24 Varriale, “Líricas secretas”; Sola and Varriale, Detrás de las apariencias; Sastre i Portella, Espies menorquins; Carnicer García and Marcos Rivas, Espionaje y traición; Sola and Peña, Cervantes y Berbería; Canosa and Colonello, Spionaggio a Palermo; Ruano Prieto, Don Martín de Acuña.

economic, political, and social levels. The practice of ransom created channels of communication among Ottoman, Maghrebi, and Spanish rulers that were also exploited by the ransoming religious orders, many Christian and Muslim intermediaries, and slaves and captives themselves together with their families. Therefore intermittent hostility between Christians and Muslims, one of whose results was slavery, favored both direct and indirect communication between Spaniards and Muslims.?*

A great, churning circulation between the two shores of the Mediterranean included hundreds of thousands of men and women. Across that porous and much-navigated frontier the most active travelers were Spaniards, Italians, Maltese, Portuguese, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Tripolitans, and Turks. They were certainly much more numerous than natives of Northern Europe, including the French, who crossed the same sea.?6

This continuous flux of individuals who crossed the boundary between Christendom and Islam suggests that not everything involved confrontation between members of the two religions. There were many reasons for mutual attraction and convenience. Historians have written of Christian renegades who embraced Islam, European traders who settled in Maghrebi and Levantine ports, and travelers, scientists, and adventurers who visited them. But they have scarcely extended their studies to Muslim exiles, converts, merchants, and adventurers who made the reverse journey to the northern shore of the Mediterranean.?”

In Western historiography the almost exclusive leitmotif for Spanish relations with the Muslim world has been ideological or religious confrontation. The notion of a crusade against the “infidels” would explain the hostile posture that the Spanish monarchy maintained for centuries vis-a-vis the rulers of Istanbul, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco -in short, a climate of generalized hostility almost wholly lacking in political pragmatism or defense of commercial interests.28 Most scholars conclude that Spain and the Muslim countries existed in a state of continual and chronic opposition — from the centurieslong struggle of the Reconquest from the eighth century to 1492, followed by

25 Hershenzon, The Captive Sea; Tarruell, “Circulations.”

26 In Moatti and Kaiser, Gens de passage, see esp. Kaiser, “Vérifier les histoires,” 369-86, and Dakhlia, “Ligne de fuite,” 427-58.

27 Dakhlia and Kaiser, Les musulmans dans [histoire de l'Europe, II. Passages et contacts; Dakhlia and Vincent, Les musulmans dans l'histoire de l'Europe, I. Une intégration invisible. See also Valensi, Ces étrangers familiers, and Alonso Acero, Sultanes de Berberia.

28 See an extended critique of this thesis in Martín Corrales, “Descolonizar y desnacionalizar la historiografia.”

the limited Spanish occupation of North Africa, confrontation with the Ottoman Empire at the battles of Preveza, Algiers, Djerba, Lepanto, and Tunis, the corsair wars and unending captures of prisoners and slaves on both sides, up to the establishment of peaceful Hispano-Muslim relations in the second half of the eighteenth century. These events have convinced many historians that little space was left for negotiation with Muslim countries. We find the proof in the indexes of recent (and excellent) monographs on Muslims in Europe: attention in Spain has focused almost exclusively on the Moriscos (up to their expulsion in 1609-1614), and somewhat less on Muslim slaves (until their disappearance between 1767 and 1791).2°

Perhaps the most characteristic analysis for the seventeenth century is that of A.C. Hess: in his view, Spaniards converted their Mediterranean boundary with North Africa into a “forgotten frontier” with only the most minimal degree of porosity.30 If that frontier was in fact forgotten and impenetrable there would be no reason to study the presence of Muslims in Spain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Although our criticism in these last pages is still pertinent, we must also acknowledge that in recent years new studies have emphasized the networks that Spain and the Muslim countries constructed to further their shared political and economic interests. The best example is the work of the French Hispanist B. Vincent, who on many occasions has called attention to the large number of Muslims present in Spain between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.ÿl

Up to now most Spanish historiography has coincided with what we have described above. It is no surprise, therefore, that monographs and collected volumes dealing with Spain in the Early Modern age contain almost no reference to its relations with Muslim countries, except for scattered and poorly contextualized mentions of corsairs and captives, Lepanto, the events at Larache, the bombardments of Algiers, and little else. Interest has focused chiefly on the fortunes of a minority, the Moriscos: officially Christian but in fact largely crypto-Muslim, almost all were eventually expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1609-1614. In recent decades there has been much research on slaves, but the fact that most of them came from sub-Saharan Africa has almost eclipsed the attention paid to Muslims. Analysis of the enormous bibliography

29 Dakhlia and Kaiser, Les musulmans dans [histoire II; Dakhlia and Vincent, Les musulmans dans l'histoire I; Valensi, Ces étrangers.

30 Hess, The Forgotten Frontier.

31 Vincent, “Exilio interior,’ “Les musulmans dans l'Espagne Moderne,” and “L'Islam en Espagne á lépoque moderne”

on Moriscos and slaves shows that attention to the negotiating potential of each group has been very unevenly distributed: exhaustively in the Morisco case, while in the matter of slaves much remains to be explored in spite of numerous recent publications.

In the end, however, both European historiography in general and Spanish in particular share the same vision, though with some nuances. There was virtually no space for a Muslim presence in Spain except for that of Moriscos and slaves. The negative and hegemonic view of the Muslim Other, generated during the long centuries of the Reconquest, the sixteenth-century war against the Ottomans, and the threat of North African corsairs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, could explain everything.3? As a result, the existence of Muslims in Spain in Early Modern times has been thought so insignificant and occasional that it was not worthy of study.

Further, there is the belief that Catholic intransigence did not allow, at least in theory, another religion to exist in its domains or those of its faithful;$3 this intolerance would be directed particularly toward Muslims and Jews, who were expelled from Spain. The truth was always more subtle and shaded than that: the signing of peace treaties and the maintenance of peaceful relations with Protestant and Muslim countries required that Muslims be present in Spain and able to negotiate with their Spanish interlocutors in Early Modern times. The case can be extended to Jews, who lived in Early Modern Spain as travelers, merchants, and slaves or prisoners to a much greater degree than is generally admitted.** The figure of the “permitted Jew” (judío de permiso), so present in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, still existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth even though the term was no longer used. One example among many is that of Zacharias Levi: after he arrived in Barcelona aboard a French settee in 1611, the admiral of the Catalan galley squadron, Ramon d'Oms, ordered him jailed and his merchandise seized. D'Oms and the Viceroy of Catalonia disputed their jurisdiction over his case, but the latter won out and freed him — we do not know, however, what happened to his confiscated cargo.35

32 See Windler, “La diplomacia y el ‘Otro’ musulman.”

33 Boeglin, “Luteranos franceses”, Thomas, La represión del protestantismo; Dominguez Ortiz, “El primer esbozo de tolerancia”; Loomie, “Toleration and Diplomacy.”

34 Within the extensive bibliography on the subject see Amelang, Historias paralelas; Schaub, Les juifs du roi d'Espagne; Garcia-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds/Un hombre en tres mundos and Entre el Islam y Occidente: Vida de Samuel Pallache; García- Arenal, Entre Islam y Occidente. Los judíos magrebíes.

35 Gilabert Tomás, “La defensa contra el cors,” 241-48.

INTRODUCTION

In 1804 the brothers José and Salomon Cabezas, Jewish subjects of Morocco, were in Cartagena to sell wheat that they had warehoused there. After an incident with a Muslim merchant the local governor ordered them to leave at once, but they petitioned the king to remain in the city long enough to sell all of their grain.