Las gentes de Orán y Mazalquivir (1534-1536): una historia de ruptura con los ideales de conquista y de alteridad religiosa-cultural en las sociedades de frontera de la monarquía hispánica

Rosa García, Cristina de la

Las gentes de Orán y Mazalquivir (1534-1536): una historia de ruptura con los ideales de conquista y de alteridad religiosa-cultural en las sociedades de frontera de la monarquía hispánica

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Rosa García, C. Las gentes de Orán y Mazalquivir (1534-1536): una historia de ruptura con los ideales de conquista y de alteridad religiosa-cultural en las sociedades de frontera de la monarquía hispánica. 2024. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/68214

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Abstract

During the early modern period, the Spanish empire began to be built as a global enterprise. In this context, the conquest of North African territories was promoted by the Crown and the Church as an extension of the “Reconquest” that ended in the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. On the coast of Algeria, Oran and Mers-el-Kébir were territories of the Hispanic Monarchy from 1509 to 1792, with a brief exception from 1708 to 1732. In these cities, soldiers, missionaries, diplomats, traders, slaves, prisoners and renegades, among others, built a frontier society out of the daily interaction with the “other”, who was considered not only in terms of faith, but also in terms of status, gender, age or wealth. Thus, we carry out an intersectional analysis of the construction of otherness in these everyday relationships, concluding that this breaks with the monolithic image of nationalist and sectarian discourses on the construction of the Spanish empire. To this end, we will read some letters sent to the peninsula by Francisco Ruiz Melgarejo, corregidor in Oran (1532-1535), and Martín de Córdoba y Velasco, first count of Alcaudete and governor of Oran (1535-1558), as well as the text of the treaty between the Catholic emperor Charles V and the Muslim king Muley Muhammad of Tlemcen (1536). Their description of the conditions under which the “other” was forged —during the months of 1534-1536— allows us to consider Oran and Mers-el-Kébir as a preliminary case study for understanding the broader Mediterranean and global spaces of the empire.