A Morisco Corsair in the Sixteenth-Century Western Mediterranean: The Curious Case of El Capitán Juan Martínez

An odd 1533—1538 court case preserved at the Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Granada provides remarkable insight into the dynamics of coastal raiding, religious identity, commerce and conflict in the western Mediterranean Sea in the first half of the sixteenth century.  At stake in this case was the sizeable estate of “El Capitán Juan Martínez de Briteos”—a colorful corsair of great renown in those years across the Crown of Castile’s southern Mediterranean coast from Gibraltar to Almería. Widely known among friends and enemies alike to be of Morisco descent (i.e. the son of formerly Muslim converts to Christianity), Martínez appears to have been a man whose life embodied the contradictions of “frontier” life along the coast of the only recently “reconquered” and “Christianized” kingdom of Granada.  Hated and feared among the Muslims of the North African coasts whose communities he raided on a frequent basis in the 1520s and early 1530s, he was nonetheless also a figure of constant suspicion among some sectors of the Christian maritime communities of cities and towns such as Málaga, Marbella and Gibraltar from which he sailed.  Witness testimony in this case sheds important new light on patterns of conflict and exchange across what historian Andrew Hess once called early modern Spain’s “forgotten frontier.”  Specifically, this paper argues that Juan Martínez’s case suggests that the merchant elite political classes of coastal communities such as Málaga and Marbella proved more willing than their more “working-class” sailor employees to work with, and not coincidentally to profit from, the actions of marginal men such as Martínez.  This paper is part of a larger in-progress book-length project titled Alboran Passages: Málaga, the Mediterranean, and the Emerging Atlantic World in the Age of Columbus.