Spain’s early Habsburg kings campaigned in North Africa but never visited the Americas

Evidence

It might be argued that in such a context lists of a king’s realms are little more than idle boasts, but they do show that Ferdinand had not altogether expunged from the records his kingdoms’ eastward yearnings. In the days when Spain’s treasure came above all from the Indies, neither Ferdinand nor Charles (and certainly not Philip!) ever thought of actually treading American soil, whereas the first two of these three kings campaigned energetically in North Africa (and Philip, from Spanish soil, conducted, up to the point in time when events elsewhere forced him to abandon it, an energetic anti-Muslim foreign policy). — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 424

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the modern intuition that Spain’s rulers were drawn to the Americas; the reader’s work on sacrifice and empire touches on this divergence.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how Spain’s ‘old-world’ imperial priorities (Mediterranean, North Africa) predated and competed with its Atlantic empire.