This article analyses the influence of confessional divides in the construction of a Mediterranean frontier between the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb at the very beginning of the early modern period. Questioning the influence that religious difference had on the geopolitics of the early modern Mediterranean could seem superfluous since historians have traditionally depicted the Mediterranean world as a space of confrontation between two confessional empires, the Ottoman and the Habsburg. Nevertheless, by focusing on a selection of diplomatic negotiations from the Western Mediterranean it appears that several actors envisioned a scenario where religious and political frontiers were far from coincide. This article will analyse the diplomatic negotiations promoted by different Muslim communities from the Maghreb to voluntarily enter under the rule of the Catholic Monarchs in the framework of the Spanish imperial expansion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In studying these negotiations from an actor-based approach my aim is not to deny the religious or the political divide existing between the Christian and the Islamic shores. I will argue, however, that this frontier was constructed through the interaction of a wide array of agents such as local elites, royal officers, military men, religious actors, and rulers, with changing agendas towards religious difference.

The aim of this article is to throw the worldwide mission efforts of the old Society of Jesus—the order from its implementation in 1540 to its dissolution in 1773—into sharper relief by applying a new analytical frame to it. The approach taken will be to view the Society as trying to establish a form of dominion over its extra-European converts that may be described as spiritual empire-building.1 To this purpose it will first sketch the theoretical framework of a spiritual empire, and then evaluate whether the old Society of Jesus may be taken to fit it either on an organizational level or in its treatment of its converts.

This article proposes to study the role of Franciscan missionaries in the establishment of economic and diplomatic relations between the Spanish Philippines and Japan. More specifically, it argues that the missionaries played an active part in the construction of a trans-pacific commercial and religious network connecting the Spanish Americas with Asia. In so doing, the article aims at correcting the commonplace historiographical assumption that the Franciscan presence in Japan was negligible and of little interest compared to the Jesuits’. Indeed, the diplomatic relations between Japan and the Philippines were set against a general context of Iberian expansion in Asia. The Spanish conquered Manila in 1571 for chiefly commercial reasons. However, the spreading of the faith provided a justification for Spanish territorial ambitions in Asia. In this process, the Franciscans played a prominent role, as they were picked as ambassadors to Japan by the governor of Manila. The Franciscans did not have mere regional ambitions for Japan: they intended the country to become a hub for the whole Pacific region.

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

This paper explores the multi-faceted nature of the spiritual geopolitics that shaped Cromwellian foreign policy in relation to the Western Design of 1654-5. It stresses the central importance of Protestant religion as a motivating force and argues that the failure of the Design was interpreted in religious terms just as much as its original aims had been. A number of motives combined to drive Cromwell into launching the Western Design. These included: the ‘Elizabethan’ tradition of English anti-Spanish policy; the pursuit of England’s imperial/colonial interests in the Caribbean; an attempt to strengthen England financially by weakening the Spanish economy; the search for security within Europe by allying with France against Spain; and, underpinning all these, the launching of a Protestant crusade against a power that Cromwell regarded as England’s ‘providential enemy’. The failure of the Design in the summer of 1655 was perceived in similarly religious terms. Just as recent scholarship on Britain’s internal conflicts of the 1640s has emphasised the central role of religion and its inseparability from other issues, so the same phenomenon is evident not only in the motives for the Western Design but also in how its defeat was perceived and interpreted.

The Dutch and English offered Spanish and Portuguese Jews inducements such as liberties unheard of in Europe until the mid-nineteenth century in order to lure them to their New World colonies. As compelling as the economic and military rationales for Jewish settlement were, there were also “spiritual” reasons to encourage Jewish settlement – and for Jews, themselves, to venture to the colonies. The mid-seventeenth century was a time of eschatological fervor in both Christian and the Jewish communities and millenarianism and messianism formed the backdrops against which Jewish colonization in the New World occurred. The seventeenth century saw an increasingly acute expectation of apocalyptic events by Christians and Jews, and was marked by an outpouring of messianic prophecy all over Europe and the Mediterranean. This article will discuss whether the English and/or the Dutch encouraged Jewish settlement in the New World with the idea that it could help in ushering in the much yearned for second coming. It will also discuss whether Jews may have been tempted to go to the colonies with the idea that they were helping to bring about the dispersion described in Daniel 12:7 – a scattering that was necessary before the prophesized “Second Coming”.