Imperial Ambition in the Early Modern Mediterranean

The important role played by Genoese financiers in the Habsburg Empire is not in doubt, as excellent research by Ramón Carande and Ruth Pike in the Spanish and Genoese archives has demonstrated. Yet what has been lacking is a study of the role of the Genoese in southern Italy, looked at not simply from the perspective of finance or commerce but in the wider context of Mediterranean power relationships and of the Habsburg Empire as a whole. Céline Dauverd has written an ambitious book (after all, the title is Imperial Ambition) that very successfully fills this gap, and that should be welcomed as a very significant contribution to the history of the Spanish Empire, and equally to the much-discussed issue of the economy of the Italian Mezzogiorno in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Dauverd endorses the more than sensible opinion of Anthony Pagden and Henry Kamen that the Spanish Empire needs to be considered as a whole, with its Italian possessions as well as its transatlantic ones. But she also engages ably with the argument that the south of Italy was no economic backwater in the early modern period, but a major source of raw silk which was distributed in the western Mediterranean and beyond, as far as the ports of northern Europe. She also emphasises the importance of the kingdom of Naples within the commercial strategy of the Genoese, as trading opportunities in the eastern Mediterranean were eroded following the rise of the Turks. Here she emphasises the political factors that bound Naples into a Habsburg commercial network, in which, for instance, Apulian grain had particular value, not just for domestic consumption but as a source of supply for the Habsburg navies. In fact, there had already been signs of a westward shift in Genoese trade, noticeable in the exploitation of new sources of sugar since the early fifteenth century—a shift that took some Genoese right out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic islands acquired by Portugal and Castile

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