Mazarron, its merchants and their relations with the Kingdom of Granada in the 17th century

Abstract

Mazarrón and its merchants gave life to a mercantile traffic that remained in the seventeenth century despite the alum crisis in 1592 and was composed of other mineral products (almagra, salt, saltpeter) and agrarian products (barilla, cereals, charcoal or soda and esparto grass), in which Genoese, French and English merchants from Cartagena and Alicante, or Portuguese from Murcia, Cartagena and Lorca, participated, without excluding others and merchants installed in the town. An entire activity was this that generated others induced, such as the transformation of saltpeter into mills or transport of alum, barrilla, almagra, esparto grass, snow, which generated relations with Almeria (Vera, Los Vélez, Cuevas de Almanzora) and Grenadines (Baza, Benamaurel, Galera, Huéscar, Orce and Puebla de Don Fadrique), in which it is possible to point to the intermediate geographical position of Mazarrón between Cartagena and the ports of the Almeria coast, such as Garrucha, Mojácar or Carboneras, since Águilas (Lorca, Murcia) had no commercial activity. The almagra, barrilla and esparto grass embarked in Mazarrón completed many times chartered cargoes in Cartagena and Alicante, destined for Genoa and Venice, but also to Marseille, Nantes, La Rochela and Saint Maló, through Genoese, Breton and Béarnian agents. However Mazarrón had its own mercantile circuit with Orán, Málaga, Motril, Cádiz, Sevilla and Genoa.