The other side of empire: just war and the rise of early modern Spain

Abstract

appropriating this prerogative, rulers endowed their “secular regimes with a sacred aura” (268). Davide Scotto’s chapter, which opens the last part of the book, sets out to debunk what he calls “the myth of Talavera”, namely the idea that Hernando de Talavera, archbishop of Granada, believed in peaceful measures for converting the city’s Muslims, in contrast with his successor, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. Scotto complicates our understanding of Talavera’s position on conversion by exploring his polemical and theological writings, and by putting his work in a dialogue with such thinkers as Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. Giuseppe Marcocci offers a rich century-long history of the reception of the 1497 forced conversion of Portugal’s Jews. He reconstructs links between Jewish and Christian textual appropriations of the events, suggesting that it was traumatic – albeit in different ways – for both its victims and the perpetrators, who for three decades kept silent on the episode. The final chapter, authored by Mercedes García-Arenal, examines sixteenthcentury transformations in the perception of the relationship between baptism and blood and their associated implications. She demonstrates how the growing scepticism around the power of the sacrament, a result of the failure to evangelize and assimilate the Moriscos, made blood “the only possible marker of the community of true believers” (356). This transformation reflected the increasing significance of ethnicity and racial thinking in the period. This volume is an extremely important contribution to the history of religion, violence, sovereignty, interfaith relationships, reception history, and Spanish and Mediterranean premodern history. The volume as a whole, or any one of its sections taken independently, would be a helpful addition to graduate seminar syllabi, and the articles could be used in undergraduate courses on religion and conversion.