Page 187 - sfogliabile 49

Infidel friends: Charles V, Mulay Hassan and the theatre of majesty 453

in failure when he was captured by Barbarossa in Tunis. After a
thorough interrogation, he was executed .
21
Granada’s noble families constituted the second group of go-
betweens, with a rather different profile. They had a direct experience
in dealing with Muslim conquered people and played a major role in
Castilian expansion in the Maghreb, apart from having an easier
access to the imperial court as elite actors. A group of noble families
based in Granada like the Orozco (Lords of Pioz), Mendoza (marquises
of Mondéjar) and Fernández de Córdoba (marquises of Alcaudete and
Comares), dominated the government of the Castilian strongholds in
Northern Africa, and they also took part in the Tunis campaign, where
they intermediated with local authorities .
22
Despite their preliminary contacts, when Charles V’s armada
anchored in Carthage, the dethroned king Mulay Hassan remained
hidden in the outskirts of the Bay of Tunis and sought confirmation
that he would be accepted in the imperial camp . According to the
23
detailed chronicle of events by the imperial secretary Antoine Perrenin,
one of the main worries of Charles V’s ministers was how to ascertain
the Muslim monarch’s true intentions and to establish how to overcome
the differences in their political cultures, so that they could exchange
emissaries and letters. By emphasizing these questions, Perrenin
showed the prevalence and centrality of what linguistic anthropology
calls «metapragmatic discourse» in diplomatic writings, a «discourse
that explicitly characterizes practices, without necessarily determining
their social meaning», obsessed to evaluate such artefacts’ authenticity
based on their conformity to certain evolving standards .
24

Madrid, 14 November 1534, in Memorial Histórico Español, vol. VI, Academia de la
Historia, Madrid, 1853, pp. 516-517; Resumen de la conferencia con el rey de Túnez, 23
July 1535, Ags, E, 462, in É. De La Primaudaie, Documents inédits cit., pp. 120-122.
21 P. Giovio, Segunda parte de la historia general de todas las cosas succedidas en el
mundo en estos 50 anos de nuestro tiempo…, Andrea de Portonarijs, Salamanca, 1562-
1563, ff. 194v-195r; E. Sola, Corsarios o reyes. De la saga de los Barbarroja a Miguel de
Cervantes, Archivo de la Frontera, Alcalá de Henares, 1998, pp. 51-53.
22 L. Salazar y Castro, Historia genealogica de la casa de Haro, Real Academia de la
Historia, Madrid, 1959, pp. 113-114; A. Gómez de Castro, De las hazañas de Francisco
Jiménez de Cisneros, Fundación Universitaria Española, Madrid, 1984, p. 257; Y.-G.
Liang, Family and Empire: The Fernández de Córdoba and the Spanish Realm, Pen-
nsylvania University Press, Philadelphia, 2011, pp. 2-3, 149-169.
23 Gómez Suárez de Figueroa to Charles V, Genoa, 22 October 1534, Ags, E, 1367,
n. 120; A. de Santa Cruz, Crónica del Emperador Carlos V, Imp. del Patronato de
Huérfanos de Intendencia e Intervención Militares, Madrid, 1922, t. 3, p. 203.
24 E.N. Rothman, Afterword cit., p. 251; M. Silverstein, Metapragmatic Discourse and
Metapragmatic Function, in J.A. Lucy (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and
Metapragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 33-58.

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