Andrew Devereux

This article, a contribution to a special forum of the journal Republics of Letters, examines the bewildering stipulations of the Requerimiento against  its author's lengthier writings and by broadening the context to include legal doctrines of just war in the setting of the Abrahamic Mediterranean.

Introduction to the special forum, Empire and Exceptionalism, published with Republics of Letters.  The forum looks at theories and practices of empire in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, with particular focus on Iberian protocols of conquest.

This chapter examines Spanish, as well as Christian and Islamic, thought on “universal empire.” It analyzes the thinking on universal empire as a form of political organization that developed as a result of the protracted dialogue of competing claims by fellow Christian and Islamic polities. It also addresses Portuguese, French, and Ottoman iterations of universalist claims as the expression of a utopian ideal of religiopolitical organization. The chapter covers the political ideology of the wide variety of literature that situated the Mediterranean at the center of a drama where a universal Christian order would be instated. It also focuses on the Castilian conquest of Granada and the acquisition of numerous presidios and cities along the coast of the Maghrib, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella deployed a variety of propaganda that successfully disseminated the image of the monarchs operating in this capacity.

<p>This chapter traces three developments that created the rhetorical strategies that fifteenth-century Catholic rulers employed in order to represent their political projects. It narrates the Papal Schism and the fifteenth-century conciliar movement that stimulated a questioning of the spiritual authority of the papacy. In response, many fifteenth-century European political theorists expressed the desirability of Christian union through the articulation of a conception of the respublica christiana that carried political and religious valences. With regard to the sense of spiritual crisis, the chapter analyzes how several Western Europeans interpreted the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 as an existential threat. It reviews how the three developments created an environment in which the religiopolitical vocabulary of Christian universalism carried tremendous weight.</p>

This chapter covers King Ferdinand's planned series of Levantine conquests stretching from Egypt through the Holy Land to Greece, Turkey, and eastward into Asia. While the planned conquests never attained fruition, the chapter provides an analysis for the legal arguments upon which they were predicated. It also describes King Ferdinand's conquest of the kingdom of Naples, where he had obtained the title to the defunct crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. The seemingly symbolic title to Jerusalem served as the foundation for the legal arguments mentioned in the chapter on how King Ferdinand crafted a just war against non-Christian people both in the Mediterranean and beyond. The chapter also talks about the religious politics of the Mediterranean basin that played a vital role in the formulation of the legal doctrines that were subsequently applied in other spheres of expansion, allowing Ferdinand to portray himself as an evangelical prince and imbuing Spanish conquests in other re...

died. Price should be congratulated for bringing this crisis to light with unprecedented rigor, but the novelty of the work also resides in the way it seeks to explain why and how this crisis came about. Two aspects of Price’s argument might be emphasized. The first is that negligence was a product of multiple forces, from the medical and political to the socio-legal and moral. That is, negligence was a complex, compound phenomenon. The second is that negligence was a product of the agency of multiple actors. Price’s account includes welcome attention to the central officials of the Local Government Board, which was established in 1871 to preside over the administration of the poor laws and public health. Still more welcome is the attention given to poor law medical officers (PLMOs), the frontline staff charged with managing medical relief at the local level. Price does not shy away from pointing to the importance of “active” neglect on the part of individuals. Evidently, some medical officers were more compassionate and competent than others; of more importance, he suggests, were the “latent” failures and organizational tensions built into the system (148). PLMOs, for instance, were often torn between private practice and their much less remunerative public duties. Poorly trained workhouse nurses and confused channels of communication further degraded the quality of care. Building on the arguments of Elizabeth Hurren’s Protesting about Pauperism (Royal Historical Society, 2007), Price also accords causal importance to the “crusade against outdoor relief” conducted during the 1870s and 1880s, which was designed to slash the costs of welfare (103–22). Of course, the cack-handed mistreatment of some of England’s most vulnerable members of society was not subject to explicit encouragement or official endorsement. The crusade, however, did create an institutional environment that rendered mistreatment more likely. “Systemic faults,” Price writes, “morphed with ease into the active neglect (and blameworthiness) of individuals” (151). This is not necessarily a book for undergraduates, though it will be essential reading for all historians and postgraduate students of Victorian welfare. It should also be of interest to contemporary health care practitioners, simply because the systemic problems Price writes about are still with us today. Current calls for bettertrained staff and more joined-up governance, not to mention the day-to-day administrative pressures created by budgetary constraints and financial cutbacks are clearly, as Price concludes, part of a bigger “historical pattern” (186).

During a few short decades, between the 1480s and 1520s, the Spanish Crowns of Aragon and Castile embarked on an expansionist course that determined the shape of early modern Spain’s global empire. Within Iberia proper, Castile conquered the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (1492) and a large portion of the Kingdom of Navarre (1512). Beyond the Peninsula, Aragon seized the Kingdom of Naples in a war with France (1503), and Castile conquered the Canary Islands (1493 1496) as well as the American islands of Hispaniola and Cuba (1492 1493), and mainland Mexico (1519 1521). Less noted is the fact that during these decades Spain launched incursions into North Africa, establishing outposts of Spanish sovereignty that played important roles in the monarchy’s imperial presence in the Mediterranean basin. Indeed, between 1476 and 1510, Castile and Aragon conquered or annexed a string of African possessions that stretched from Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña in the west, on the mainland opposite the Canary Islands, to Tripoli (Libya) in the east, rendering Spain a maritime power along a 2500-mile stretch of the African coast. Moreover, at least until 1516 the Spanish Crown harbored ambitions of extending its string of African conquests eastward as far as Alexandria, with the aim of becoming the dominant power of the Mediterranean. Some of Spain’s African possessions were relatively short-lived, such as Bougie, which remained in Spanish hands from 151

Aquest article examina diversos escenaris de trobada entre iberics i locals no abrahamics, concretament a America, les Illes Canaries i l’Africa occidental. Basat en escrits dels segles XV i XVI , aquest treball analitza les diferents visions dels iberics d’epoca moderna sobre la capacitat dels no cristians de mantenir el dominium ; sobre la comprensio dels iberics de l’abast geografic del cristianisme primerenc i les implicacions que te per a les reivindicacions politiques en epoca moderna, i sobre les lectures dels iberics relatives a genealogies bibliques i el pes que comportaven els arguments legals sobre sobirania i esclavitud.

Before international relations in the West, there were Christian-infidel relations. Infidels and Empires in a New World Order decenters the dominant story of international relations beginning with Westphalia in 1648 by looking a century earlier to the Spanish imperial debate at Valladolid addressing the conversion of native peoples of the Americas. In addition to telling this crucial yet overlooked story from the colonial margins of Western Europe, this book examines the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic to consider how the ambivalent status of the infidel other under natural law and the law of nations culminating at Valladolid shaped subsequent international relations in explicit but mostly obscure ways. From Hernán Cortés to Samuel Purchas, and Bartolomé de las Casas to New England Puritans, a host of unconventional colonial figures enter into conversation with Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius, and John Locke to reveal astonishing religious continuities and dissonances in early modern inte...