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This book explores an anonymous sixteenth-century portrait of Muley al-Hassan, the Hafsid king of Tunis (ca. 1528-1550), that bears witness to relations between North Africa, the Habsburgs, and the Ottomans. While Muley al-Hassan appears frequently in the vast literature on Charles V Habsburg, he is overshadowed by the emperor. Here he emerges as a protagonist, a figure whose shifting reputation can be traced well into the seventeenth century. Images of the King of Tunis circulated in broadsheets, ephemeral images made for triumphal entries, manuscripts, tapestry designs, engravings, and books. The ceaseless production of Tunisian imagery allowed Europeans to face their North African counterparts through scenes of battle but also through imaginary encounters and festive cross-dressing. This book shows how portraits of Hafsid rulers challenge assumptions about the absolute divide between Christian and Muslim, sovereign and subject, the familiar and the foreign, and they put a face onthe entangled histories of the early modern Mediterranean.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Hafsids and Habsburgs.- 3. Sovereign Display.- 4. Italian Sojourn.- 5. Vanishing Acts.- 6. Pious Fictions.- 7. Conclusion.
About the author
Cristelle L. Baskins is Associate Professor Emeritus, Tufts University, USA.
Report
Baskin s masterful work has found a fitting home in the Palgrave Macmillan series New Transculturalisms, 1400-1800. Baskin s prose is very readable and her narrative genuinely gripping. Altogether, these attributes will make Baskins s new monograph at home in early modern history and art history graduate seminars. I also foresee recommending this book to especially curious and intrepid undergraduates interested in the multicultural early modern world. Baskins s contribution will enrich education on the Mediterranean for years to come. (Frank Lacopo, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 47 (4), 2024)
The book can open the doors of unexplored research topics, as the author has raised many issues and often answered them. In other cases, her questions about those issues seem like a generous invitation to add directly to the work of research and the analysis of the topic. (Hespéris-Tamuda, Vol. 58 (2), 2023)
