Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean: Urban Culture in the Late Ottoman Empire Malte Fuhrmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. 477. $103.00 hardback, $44.99 paper. ISBN: 9781108477376

Abstract

inquisitorial record, the author also reveals the fabulators’ deep familiarity with very real prophecy-driven plans for Morisco action which were intelligible to diplomats and Inquisitors also deeply conversant in the apocalyptic cultures of the Mediterranean. Like other stories of Iberian fabulators at the close of the sixteenth century – including the authors of the plomos of Granada or the Baker who Pretended to be King of Portugal studied by Ruth MacKay – the Pérez-Cornejo affair was emblematic of the range of ideas and expertise (legal, scribal, political) that circulated at all levels of society. By reading such diverse sources together in these and the other cases she studies, Green-Mercado brings to the fore vital details about Morisco mobility and the effect of the circulation of individuals and ideas on a broader political identity amongst Moriscos and Muslims in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Through such cases, the book gives us a much richer sense of the lives and movements of the men and women who kept, adapted, and circulated Islamic idea(l)s in Morisco societies. It also gives us a more sophisticated sense of the shared apocalyptic cultures among Moriscos and Inquisitors. Along with the extensive appendices providing English translations of all the major Morisco prophecies that Green-Mercado worked with – many translated for the first time – the texture she draws out of her sources will make the book as useful for introducing students to this complex topic as it is for scholars. Visions of Deliverance offers valuable new perspectives on questions of Morisco identity and experiences. Firstly, this history of the Moriscos between periods of conversion and expulsion is told on a Mediterranean scale, within which Moriscos are mobile agents whose transregional links had an enormous effect on local lived experiences. With such a scale in mind, Green-Mercado demonstrates, we can understand how the same politics of prophecy which cohered diverse Morisco communities around hope for their future over the course of the sixteenth century was converted in a short span into a justification for their suffering in the seventeenth century and after. In her telling, the history of Spain’s Moriscos recovers the agency of this community and their role across Mediterranean politics long before the expulsion. By so doing, she re-inscribes Moriscos in both broader European history and broader Islamic history for the early modern period, and in so doing offers a uniquely Mediterranean viewpoint on this diverse community. As L.P. Harvey remarked in his 2005 survey of Morisco history, Spain’s Moriscos were “also indeed Europeans of their Age” (Harvey’s emphasis, 135) as much as they were (or were thought to be) members of the broader Islamic community. This challenge was taken up with great aplomb by scholars like Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano (2010), Lucette Valensi (2012), and the team of experts coordinated by Jocelyn Dakhlia, Bernard Vincent, and Wolfgang Kaiser in their multi-volume Les musulmanes dans l’histoire de l’Europe (2011–2013). With Green-Mercado’s study of prophecy as politics, we have a welcome additional opportunity to understand the complex position of this community in a broader Mediterranean and cross-confessional context.