In Cristelle Baskins’s recent monograph, Muley al-Hassan, the Hafsid king of Tunis (r. 1526–43) and vassal to Charles V (r. 1516–66), finally gets his due. Long eclipsed by hegemonic histories of his Habsburg contemporaries, Muley al-Hassan commands the center of Baskins’s narrative of cultural entanglement and territorial contestation in the early modern Mediterranean.

But as Baskins signals in the text, the book aims to do more than recalibrate our understanding of the relationship between its titular protagonists, the Hafsids and the Habsburgs. As she traces Muley al-Hassan’s displacement, itineracy, and mythologization across the long sixteenth century, Baskins draws on transdisciplinary frameworks now reshaping scholarship on the early modern period, from revisionist accounts of race and empire to reconsiderations of connected history as both theory and praxis. Unbound by a traditional historiography of the Muslim “other,” which framed figures like Muley al-Hassan as unknowable, Baskins familiarizes the Hafsid ruler, presenting him as an embodied––and resolutely human––subject. Rather than a simple fact of the early modern world, foreignness, the book suggests, was instead one of its underlying fictions.

The introductory chapter offers a close reading of the book’s primary visual anchor: an elusive, unattributed oil on panel portrait of Muley al-Hassan at Versailles and its subsequent peregrinations in European visual and textual sources. For Baskins, the portrait’s myriad interpretations (and misinterpretations) over the centuries offer a roadmap for rethinking the role and reception of the Hafsid king himself as he migrated across the Mediterranean, both in person and in print.

In the second chapter, “Hafsids and Habsburgs,” Baskins recovers what she terms Muley al-Hassan’s “lost world” by sketching the contours of Tunis as a cosmopolitan capital. As she describes, in the lead-up to the watershed campaign of 1535, the city was a node in the sprawling networks of cultural and mercantile exchange that connected the Hafsid, Ottoman, and Habsburg worlds. Beginning with a comprehensive account of Muley al-Hassan’s involvement in the political wheeling and dealing that paved the way for the Habsburg victory, the chapter offers a nuanced reconsideration of the origins of the Hafsid king’s vassalage.

The third chapter, “Sovereign Display,” surveys the elaborate ephemeral installations that commemorated Charles V’s triumphal journey across Sicily and the western coast of the Italian peninsula between the summer of 1535 and the spring of 1536. In the absence of surviving visual records of the king’s Italian entries, scholars have combed a wealth of textual sources––printed pamphlets, letters, avvisi, and relazioni––to reconstruct the iconographical program crafted by the crown. However, as Baskins notes, these unabashedly propagandistic displays have not previously been considered as instruments in the Habsburg construction of the symbolic persona of Muley al-Hassan––a persona the crown leveraged to support its often-tenuous claims to hotly-contested territories in North Africa.

The tables turn in the fourth chapter, “Italian Sojourn,” which instead foregrounds the forgotten history of Muley al-Hassan’s diplomatic journey across Italy between the spring and fall of 1543 as he followed in the footsteps of Charles V, traveling from Tunis to Palermo, Naples, Rome, Siena, and Florence. The Hafsid king’s spectacular reception and months-long stay in Naples as a guest of then-viceroy García de Toledo forms the focus of the chapter. Through a meticulous review of the monuments, antiquities, and portraits that formed part of the rich visual and material fabric of the viceregal court in in the mid-sixteenth century, Baskins convincingly posits Naples as the origin of the Versailles portrait, deepening our understanding of the cultural dynamics that fueled the generation and dissemination of images of Muley al-Hassan during the period. In doing so, the chapter contributes to ongoing scholarly efforts to counteract the provincialization of Naples in art historical discourse, posing the city as a center of artistic production in the Iberian Mediterranean.

The final two chapters, “Vanishing Acts,” and “Pious Fictions,” chronicle the final years before Muley al-Hassan’s death in 1550 in Mahdiyya, as well as the posthumous accounts (many apocryphal) that memorialized––and villainized––the exiled king in the centuries that followed. Here, Baskins brings her project to unravel the history of the Versailles portrait to a natural conclusion, tracing its own afterlife from Naples to Flanders and ultimately to Antwerp, where was ultimately recorded in a 1640 inventory prepared for the sale of the estate of painter Peter Paul Rubens. In a book that so effectively reads against the grain of established histories of the early modern Habsburgs, Baskins’s deft association of the Versailles portrait with Rubens signals a provocative conclusion: once cast aside as a stepping-stone in the rise of Charles V, here Muley al-Hassan is returns to the canon.

Beyond its contributions to existing literature on the rise and fall of early modern empire, Facing Tunis marks a turning point for scholars focused on the tumultuous waters of the southern Mediterranean. As Houssem Eddine Chachia (University of Tunsia) and Borja Franco Llopis (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) have already noted, the book makes strides in highlighting the often-overlooked history of sixteenth-century North Africa. So too does it invite new scholarly investment in the study of the Kingdom of Sicily and Naples, which figures as a prominent protagonist in Baskins’s narrative. To redress Muley al-Hassan’s historiographical marginalization is to reconsider the peripheralization of cities like Palermo and Naples––cities that were not simply staging grounds for conquest or witnesses to triumphalism, but active players in crafting the early modern imperial imaginary.

This is an ambitious book, realized through a remarkable investment in the close reading of primary sources in Italian, Spanish, Latin and Arabic––some well-thumbed, others rarely consulted. For scholars across disciplines, Facing Tunis represents the culmination of a Herculean task: the creation of a veritable archive of material for the study of Mediterranean entanglements that promises to animate scholarship for years to come.