Hidden subjectivities in objective measures: Spanish perceptions of geographic space in North Africa

Abstract

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Spanish forces invaded a number of coastal towns in North Africa. Historians often consider this en-counter as a continuation of a familiar context of Christian-Muslim relations in the western Mediterranean. As such, Spaniards are presumed to have al-most had a pre-knowledge of topography that resembled Iberian landscapes and of climates, flora, and fauna that nestle comfortingly within a Braudelian belt of olive trees. How well does this characterization indicate Spanish sen-sory perceptions of the geographic world of North Africa? Geographic knowl-edge was critical for the military campaigns that sought to capture overseas territories and the gathering and representing of information overlapped with developing sciences, including engineering. Representations of such data fix-ated on precise measurements. At the same time, human experience of meas-urable quantities such as distance were conditioned by subjectivities. Human agency, sensory perception, and even imaginaries of the unknown all altered how the Spaniards encountered the geographic world of North Africa. By juxtaposing geographic perception in measurable and subjective terms, this article presents another side of Spaniards’ encounters with North Africa.