Thanks to Fernand Braudel’sMediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, the Mediterranean was the first region in the world to be used to model transnational analysis. Braudel used it to introduce a new unit of sociogeographic analysis – a maritime basin and the lands that border it – that was subsequently used to create analogous units such as “the worlds of the Indian Ocean,” “the Black Atlantic,” and the “trans-Atlantic”; such conceptual spaces have been crucial in allowing historians and cultural critics to question what Braudel called the “walled gardens” of a national – and...

As it expanded its territories across the eastern Mediterranean and into the Graeco-Balkan peninsula, the Ottoman Empire thrust itself into an enduring trans-imperial space.¹ There it became enmeshed in a long-term rivalry with the Venetian and Habsburg Empires. That rivalry was expressed in narrative and image in a complex set of rhetorics, including those found on maps. As the statesmen, writers, and artists of the Christian kingdoms of Europe attempted to come to terms with the Ottoman presence (its opportunities as well as its threats), they looked at an unfamiliar enemy in a set of familiar places, a known and...

Across the Christian-Muslim frontier during the sixteenth century, the threat of military attack, as well as the ideological war against the alien religion of Islam, preoccupied the consciousness and created a climate of fear in European Christian states. Nowhere was this anxiety concerning the rival superpower greater than within the loose German-speaking confederation known as the Holy Roman Empire, led by Habsburg emperor Maximilian I (r. 1493–1519).¹ Indeed the eventual frontier between Catholics and Muslims, established after the battle of Mohács in Hungary (1526), still coincides almost exactly with the modern, hostile frontier between Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia...

Throughout the sixteenth century, the houses of Habsburg and Osman asserted competing claims as the true inheritors of the Roman Empire. This imperial rivalry took military, political, and rhetorical forms: wars, political manoeuvring, and representations of imperial authority were arenas in which each dynasty sought to demonstrate its ascendancy over the other. Charles V, elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519, and Sultan Süleyman I, whose reign began in 1520, each sought to promote himself as universal monarch.¹ Military conflict between the two escalated during the first decade of their rules and was marked most sensationally in Latin...

In the final two decades of the fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Naples, comprising the southern half of the boot of Italy, became the object of the expansionist designs of three ascendant states that sought to become hegemonic powers in the Mediterranean. Between 1480 and 1495, Naples was invaded successively by the Ottoman Empire, France, and Spain, before finally being incorporated into the Spanish Crown of Aragon in 1503. The conflicts for control of Naples and, more broadly, for hegemony in the central Mediterranean basin, constitute the opening chapter of the imperial rivalries of the early modern Mediterranean. These events...

In the early months of 1571, Granada’s most theatrical public space, the Bib-Rambla plaza, witnessed a macabre drama of human misery. Between February and May, over one hundred men, women, and children were sold into slavery. Proclamations read aloud by town criers justified the sales by labelling these nativegranadinoscaptives seized in a just war. Anthropologist Aurelia Martín Casares documented these auctions through path-breaking research in notarial archives, drawing attention to how they culminated the Crown’s harsh collective punishment of the Moriscos in the aftermath of the uprising known as the Second Alpujarras Revolt.¹ On Christmas Eve, 1568, several...

In March 1696, Luis della Cedra, the duke of Medinaceli, was appointed viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples by the bewitched king of Spain, Carlos II. He was the last of a string of Spanish viceroys who had ruled in the name and place of the Spanish monarchs for almost two centuries. The grandson of the former viceroy of Naples, the duke of Santo Stefano, Medinaceli seemed born to the task. Over the five years that he ruled, he successfully faced a series of difficult challenges, including plague, revolt, and war. In the midst of all this, he introduced a...

This chapter discusses three plays performed on the English public stage around the turn of the seventeenth century that represent the dispersal and ultimate reunion of family members in the region of the eastern Mediterranean. To varying degrees each of these plays figures the culminating familial reunion as a miracle brought about through divine providence. Whereas the whims of fortune drive the characters along separate and unpredictable courses, the hand of providence reunites the far-flung travellers at the plays’ conclusions. This sense of providential intervention is underscored by the explicit religious themes and conflicts running through these plays, which are...

In England, the period following the Armada crisis of 1588 saw a marked increase in the publishing of anti-Spanish propaganda. Contrary to the lessons of Whig historiography, contemporaries realized that the defeat of Philip II’s Enterprise of England had settled nothing. Seeking to capitalize on the fear and fervour generated by a crisis that had not yet reached the mythic status accorded it by later generations,² the Elizabethan regime mobilized a network of printers, propagandists, translators, and hack writers coordinated by William Cecil.³ Their publications elevated an inflammatory rhetoric of ethnicity to a volume not previously heard in England. This...

Antonio, the luckless steward in John Webster’sThe Duchess of Malfi(1613–14; published 1623), casts a horoscope upon the birth of his first child: “The duchess was delivered of a son ‘tween the hours twelve and one in the night, anno domini 1504 – that’s this year – decimo nonno decembris – that’s this night – taken according to the meridian of Malfi.”¹ While the lines seem innocuous enough, their specificity is striking. Why might Webster take the unconventional step of informing the audience exactly when the play takes place? The language of the line itself emphasizes the date,...

Rome was both the centre of the ancient world and, with respect to the threat posed by the Ottoman Turks, the centre of the Christian world, but for English Protestants and their allies on the Continent, it was also the centre of the despised Roman Church. Educated English Protestants therefore perceived in Rome a complex locus of attraction and repulsion. The example of the young Philip Sidney, who had travelled throughout Europe extensively from 1572 to 1575, is instructive. From November 1573 to August 1574, Sidney was based in Venice and Padua, where he met and consorted with numerous Catholic...

As rain poured down from a darkening afternoon sky on 16 May 1605, an Englishman newly arrived in Spain met the greatest lords and nobles of the Spanish court just outside Valladolid, the Spanish capital. What was supposed to have been a grand entrance into the city was instead – as the result, according to the Englishman’s account, of the tardiness of several Spanish grandees – a complete disaster of rain, wind, galloping horses, and splashing mud as an afternoon storm soaked the assembled hosts. Nobles dove into carriages, turned their horses, and fled, and all the order and ceremony...