The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

a mercenary economy 85

menassé’s mission to Granada in 1285 was only a part. The Crown of Ara-

gon regularly sent ambassadors to each of the major kingdoms of North

Africa in order to recruit jenets for decades to come.^61 The three interlock-

ing missions above also formed part of an ambition to control Tunis, the

last representative of Almohad authority in North Africa and the great

rival of the Marīnids. The jenets were not disconnected from this ambi-

tion. As the accounts of Roger de Lauria held in the Cathedral of Valencia

reveal, several jenet companies served aboard Aragonese ships, alongside

both Mudéjar oarsmen and Christian knights from Rhodes and Lucera,

as they raided the Tunisian coast.^62 The strategy of the Aragonese kings

in Tunis, however, was never to rule directly but rather over and through

representatives of Almohad authority. Indeed, this policy continued well

after the death of ‘Uthmān b. Abī Dabbūs, the last Almohad. Following

repeated attacks by Roger de Lauria’s fleet along the Tunisian coast in

1313 , Jaume II reprised this strategy with the sultan Abū Yaḥyā al- Liḥyānī

(r. 1311 – 1317 ), a latter day Abū Zayd, who may have also been convinced

to convert to Christianity.^63 This was not mere politics. Just as the Ara-

gonese kings cast themselves as heirs to the universal claims of the Holy

Roman emperors before their Christian subjects, they also borrowed and

adapted the universal claims of the Almohad caliphs before Muslims.

These missions also reveal a fact that has otherwise gone unnoticed.

Over the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the Aragonese

kings and North African sultans exchanged soldiers, Muslim jenets for

Christian militias. As these treaties make clear, these rulers were not in-

different to belief. They neither employed religion as mere ideology nor

were blindly obedient to it. Instead, in these treaties one finds creative at-

tempts to navigate and negotiate emerging spiritual and pastoral concerns.

Indeed, these concerns were a central aspect of the instructions issued to

Aragonese ambassadors. But perhaps more strikingly, a regular feature

of these exchanges was the mutual agreement on limitations for the use

of these soldiers. Sultans regularly agreed to use their Christian militias

only against their Muslim enemies, and the Aragonese kings agreed to use

their jenets only against their Christian enemies.^64 On some occasions, the

limits followed political lines, as in the willingness of the Marīnids to let

the Aragonese use jenets against the Ḥafṣids. Among these many treaties,

‘Abd al- Wāḥid’s agreement in 1287 to aid the Aragonese against all their

enemies, whether Christian or Muslim, was unusual. To give one salient ex-

ample of the degree of the respect for these limits: in 1323 , the Marīnid sul-

tan refused to return Christian troops in his service to support Jaume II’s