Geography and Cartography in the Ottoman Empire
‘The Fruits of My Labour’: Juan Pacheco and the Christian Representations of Ottoman Algiers in the Sixteenth Century
Francesco CaprioliThe Spanish-Ottoman political struggle in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean was not only defined by geo-strategic aims, religious propaganda, or privateering raids. Both sides felt the need to better understand their rival in order to annihilate it. In this way, political and military information gathered by soldiers, merchants, diplomats, and former war captives was used both to understand the enemy’s weaknesses and to shape the image of the Other. By focusing on Ottoman Algiers, this chapter aims to explore not only how Western Christian authors described the Magrhebian city, but also the intriguing stories that lay behind these descriptions. Starting with sixteenth-century Christian historiographical production on North Africa, in the first section I shall trace the evolution of the image of Algiers as a labyrinth of cultures. Subsequently, as many of these works made use of newssheets sent by local spies or testimonies of soldiers and freed slaves as primary sources, I shall focus on the narratives conveyed by one of such first-hand accounts. Therefore, the case study in the second section will be the story of Juan Pacheco, a former Spanish captive in the Maghreb and author of a drawing of the Algerine port which became a model for all carthographical works on the Ottoman city printed in the final decades of the sixteenth century. The recent discovery of unpublished reports by Pacheco, dealing with a possible conquest of Algiers, which were preserved at the British Library (London) and the Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid), will cast light on his own motivations for writing reports and drawing pictures of the Ottoman city, as well as on the value of his works for subsequent protohistorians and cartographers.
