Muslim sequential mobilities : Merdia Ben Hazman, an 'exceptional' case in the Early Modern Spanish Mediterranean

Abstract

In 1703 Juan de Junterones bought in Murcia a Christian slave, María de la Cruz, a single woman who had previously been enslaved to Francisco Salinas in Madrid, and who had been baptized in Jumilla. Earlier in her life, she had been a free, married, Muslim woman in Oran called Merdia ben Hazman. Hers was a life of multistage geographical mobility accompanied by radical social, legal, and religious transformations. Yet Merdia was just one of many Muslim individuals who migrated to the Iberian Peninsula in the 17th and 18th centuries. By analyzing the experiences of mobility individuals described in the sources as “Muslim,” this article recenters a heterogonous community that has often been obscured in the historiography. It also explores how processes of identification and self-identification played out in different ways, partly depending on the geographical-historical experiences of different towns and cities and the motivations and expectations of migrants.