In the early modern Mediterranean, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived as neighbors, traded in the same ports, shared languages and marketplaces, and sometimes changed faiths to survive. Yet the empires that ruled them asked a harder question: could conversion make someone fully belong, or did ancestry, lineage, and origin continue to matter? This course sets two great powers side by side - the Ottoman Empire, the largest multireligious state of the age, and Habsburg Spain - to explore how religion and race became entangled, and how each empire decided who belonged, who could be trusted, and who had to be converted, expelled, protected, or enslaved. We follow this question from Istanbul and Salonica to Granada, North Africa, and the Spanish Americas, tracing the lives of converts, captives, refugees, Moriscos, conversos, and enslaved people whose fates turned on faith, lineage, and descent. In Spain, "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre) made religion hereditary, so that even baptized Christians could be marked by a Jewish or Muslim ancestor. In the Ottoman world, conversion, slavery, genealogy, and communal status sorted people in different ways, tying belonging to lineage as well as belief. By reading these worlds together, we move beyond the familiar contrast between Ottoman "tolerance" and Iberian "intolerance." One empire built an order in which religious communities endured for centuries; the other pursued unity through conversion, Inquisition, and expulsion. But in both worlds, religious difference was never simply tolerated or crushed. It was ruled: produced, policed, protected, and remade wherever faith, race, and empire met.
5 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
In the early modern Mediterranean, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived as neighbors, traded in the same ports, shared languages and marketplaces, and sometimes changed faiths to survive. Yet the empires that ruled them asked a harder question: could conversion make someone fully belong, or did ancestry, lineage, and origin continue to matter? This course sets two great powers side by side - the Ottoman Empire, the largest multireligious state of the age, and Habsburg Spain - to explore how religion and race became entangled, and how each empire decided who belonged, who could be trusted, and who had to be converted, expelled, protected, or enslaved. We follow this question from Istanbul and Salonica to Granada, North Africa, and the Spanish Americas, tracing the lives of converts, captives, refugees, Moriscos, conversos, and enslaved people whose fates turned on faith, lineage, and descent. In Spain, "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre) made religion hereditary, so that even baptized Christians could be marked by a Jewish or Muslim ancestor. In the Ottoman world, conversion, slavery, genealogy, and communal status sorted people in different ways, tying belonging to lineage as well as belief. By reading these worlds together, we move beyond the familiar contrast between Ottoman "tolerance" and Iberian "intolerance." One empire built an order in which religious communities endured for centuries; the other pursued unity through conversion, Inquisition, and expulsion. But in both worlds, religious difference was never simply tolerated or crushed. It was ruled: produced, policed, protected, and remade wherever faith, race, and empire met.
Offered in Spring 2027 at Stanford University.