ABSTRACT

The status of North Africa within Iberian imperial expansion is, thus, ambiguous: on the one hand, it represents the first stage in that expansion; on the other, in terms of territory, North Africa made up only a very small part of the Iberian empires at the middle of the sixteenth century. One of the earliest circumstances that favoured Iberian expansion was the weakening of the Muslim political formations in North Africa, from the Merinids in Morocco to the Hafsids in Tunis. This process can largely be explained with reference to the evolution of the trade routes for sub-Saharan gold. North African cities under Iberian rule had legally established Jewish communities that in many cases were quite numerous. The conception of the Mediterranean defined basically as a communications network has generated notable historiographical interest in the figure of the intermediary: a person who is capable of moving among different settings, wielding many languages, buying and selling, translating.