Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

with the aim of imposing vassalage on the defeated Muslims through the
payment of tribute—called parias. Later, the church legitimated those attacks
as a ‘holy religious war of independence.’ The Papacy encouraged warfare
against Muslim ‘infidels’ and even issued bulls offering heavenly pardon for
those who took part in it. 21
Ultimately, once military ‘reconquest’ of ‘Christian lands’ was
completed, the Reconquista acquired an ideological dimension and became
synonymous of ‘providential destiny,’ or something equivalent to American
Manifest Destiny. Implicitly, with this interpretation, the Spaniards invested
themselves with a mystical divine Christianizing mission whereby they
bestowed on themselves the right to carry warfare beyond the Iberian Peninsula
into other non-Christian regions with the aim of transforming those regions into
a Catholic land regardless of the claim of ‘prior possession of the land.’ 22 The
Spaniards used this argument to legitimate subsequent conquest of the
Americas and North Africa and Christianization, or attempts at
Christianization, of the native populations. Applied to the New World, this
ideological argument gave them legitimacy as rationally they could not claim
‘prior possession of land.’ In the context of the North African conquest,
however, the Spanish conquistadors exploited both the religious and
ideological arguments of Reconquista.
21 Pope Urban II issued similar bulls for those who headed for Jerusalem in 1094. Bulls, in fact, were
initiated in Spain 30 years before the First Crusade. Adam Knobler, “Holy War, Empires, and the
Portability of the Past: The Modern Uses of Medieval Crusades,” Comparative Studies in History and
Society, 48: 2 (Apr., 2006), p. 307.
22 Ibid., pp. 301-2.
25