Andalusian Families and the Renewal of Ties to the Islamic World in the Late Middle Ages

The Christians of Castile-Leon expelled Muslim inhabitants quickly after their conquest of Andalusia in the thirteenth-century.  To repopulate the vacant lands, families such as the aristocratic Fernández de Córdoba clan organized new communities by deploying multipronged strategies of reproduction policies, land acquisition, frontier defense, municipal office-holding, and patronage relations to spin a tight web of vital social ties.  These ties, however, were among homogenously Christian settlers.  The family history of the Fernández de Córdoba, so parochial in the Middle Ages, would nonetheless take a dramatic turn in the imperial age of the sixteenth century.  The clan uprooted itself from Andalusia to lead campaigns in North Africa.  It served with distinction in the conquest of Oran (Algeria), where seven members in four generations nearly monopolized the position of governor for a century.  On this new borderland with the Islamic world, the Fernández de Córdoba both negotiated diplomatic ties with local Muslim communities like the city-state of Tlemcen, and it waged battles against Ottoman enemies.  The clan’s mental world kept track of North African affairs geostrategically, in relation to Spain, Italy, and France.  The clan bequeathed knowledge, skill, and experience of the frontier to its offspring.  All of this was done through the mechanisms of family that transmitted knowledge and facilitated contacts across distances and down through the generations.  Spain’s North Africa realm was largely created, and to an important degree managed, by Andalusian families.  The history of the Fernández de Córdoba clan opens a fascinating window onto how social networks reengaged the Islamic world, supplanting the role of the Spanish state as it closed off such contacts at home and abroad.