The Other Side of Empire: Just War in the Mediterranean and the Rise of Early Modern Spain

Via rigorous study of the legal arguments Spain developed to justify its acts of war and conquest, The Other Side of Empire illuminates Spain's expansionary ventures in the Mediterranean in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Andrew Devereux proposes and explores an important yet hitherto unstudied connection between the different rationales that Spanish jurists and theologians developed in the Mediterranean and in the Americas. Devereux describes the ways in which Spaniards conceived of these two theatres of imperial ambition as complementary parts of a whole. At precisely the moment that Spain was establishing its first colonies in the Caribbean, the Crown directed a series of Old World conquests that encompassed the Kingdom of Naples, Navarre, and a string of presidios along the coast of North Africa. Projected conquests in the eastern Mediterranean never took place, but the Crown seriously contemplated assaults on Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine. The Other Side of Empire elucidates the relationship between the legal doctrines on which Spain based its expansionary claims in the Old World and the New. The Other Side of Empire vastly expands our understanding of the ways in which Spaniards, at the dawn of the early modern era, thought about religious and ethnic difference, and how this informed political thought on just war and empire. While focusing on imperial projects in the Mediterranean, it simultaneously presents a novel contextual background for understanding the origins of European colonialism in the Americas.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part 1 1. The Mediterranean in the Spanish Imaginary During the Age of Exploration 2. The Christian Commonwealth Besieged Part 2 3. The Turk Within 4. The African Horizon 5. The Eastern Chimera 6. One Shepherd, One Flock Conclusion

About the Author :
Andrew W. Devereux is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and has published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Medieval Encounters, and Republics of Letters.

Review :
An outstanding book that marks a major step forward in our understanding of the politics of the early sixteenth-century Mediterranean, and will be required reading for anyone looking at Spanish relations with north Africa, Naples and the Ottoman Empire. (Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean) Overall, the work represents an outstanding analysis of Ferdinand's policy of expansion in the Mediterranean and enriches the history of European law and rule in the early early modern period... Devereux's analyzes are essential and make an important contribution to seeing the European perspective on expansion in America, the debates about cultural contact and the emergence of the Spanish colonies in a new light. (Francia-Recensio) [E]ssential reading for scholars of early modern Europe, and should generate fruitful discussion among those interested in broader questions of Christian empires and their legal, moral, and intellectual foundations. (Church History)