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Juan De Rena and the financing of the Tunis campaign 405

documentation is undoubtedly economic, its limitations highlight an
interesting fact: the different paymasters were more interested in
giving details of the contracts they had drawn up with providers, and
with the provenance of the goods they had purchased than with giving
precise details of the money they had paid to secure these products
and services.
Juan de Rena was appointed as the Comisario, the official in charge
of the construction and provisioning of the fleet destined for the Tunis
campaign during 1534 and 1535 in the dockyards of Barcelona . It is
25
evident both from manuscripts found in the ARGN and from the
information in the correspondence with Genoa during 1533 found
elsewhere, that he was a specialist in galley construction and the
fitting out of fleets, which accounts for the fact that he was assigned
to both these tasks. He was born in Venice in 1480 and had risen to
prominence in the years when Ferdinand the Catholic governed
Aragon and Castile. He was already one of the king’s counsellors when
he arrived in Navarre in 1512 and played a key role in consolidating
Castilian power over the newly-conquered kingdom . The recent
26
completion of cataloguing his entire archive has provided the
information we needed to build up a picture of this complex and
decisive individual who served both Ferdinand and Charles V until his
death in 1539 . Besides being a royal counsellor, he was a merchant
27
and a clergyman. No fewer than sixty-two different offices or functions
have been attributed to him during his lifetime by taking into account
his various public and religious offices and his private activities.
Before taking up his new post in Pamplona he had acted as a royal
official in the campaigns led by Pedro Navarro and financed by
cardinal Cisneros that led to the conquest of Mazalquivir (Mers-el-

25 M. Chocarro, F. Segura, Inventario de la documentación de Juan de Rena. Archivo
Real y General de Navarra, Gobierno de Navarra, Pamplona, 2013. References to the
different expeditions which both he and Charles V were involved with can be found in
pp. 38-40, 43 and 47-54.
26 J.M. Escribano Páez offered a general study of the manuscript collection in Juan
de Rena and the construction of the Hispanic monarchy (1500-1540), PhD thesis,
European University Institute, 2016. His articles Negotiating with the “Infiel”: Imperial
Expansion and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in the Early Modern Maghreb (1492-1516),
«Itinerario» 40:2 (2016), pp. 189-214; and War, conquest and local merchants: the role of
credit in the peripheral military administration of the Hispanic Monarchy during the first
half of the sixteenth century, «Economic History, Early Modern economic and social
history and Early modern Spain», 14 (2013), pp. 1-19 are based on the information
contained in the Rena papers of the ARGN.
27 M. Chocarro, F. Segura, Inventario cit., and also the article by M. Chocarro, F.
Segura, El reino de Navarra en la Monarquía Hispánica: nuevos enfoques desde la
documentación de Juan de Rena, «Príncipe de Viana», 261 (2015), pp. 109-136 which is
particularly relevant here.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVII - Agosto 2020
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)