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

86 chapter four

conquest of Sardinia, which is to say, he refused to let these troops fight

against other Christians, saying this would break with custom, but offered

Muslim soldiers in their stead.^65 Far from belying religious boundaries,

these agreements for the exchange of soldiers proved to be a surprising

confirmation of those boundaries. Religious commitments did not im-

pede these exchanges but rather channeled them through certain types

of in teraction. To be certain, all interaction, all trade across the Medi-

terranean, was not bound and determined by belief or religious law, but

the perduring assumption that interaction occurred despite or regardless

of re ligion, that all commerce was what Montesquieu called “sweet com-

merce,” risks running so far in the opposite extreme only to achieve the

same reductive end.

Christian Militias

The connection of the jenets to the longer- standing service of Christian

soldiers to Muslim rulers exposes another narrative thread. It suggests

a more profound ancestry for the jenets than that of the Hohenstaufen

court. Indeed, by the late thirteenth century, when the Crown of Aragon

moved to bring them under its jurisdiction, Christian militias had been

well entrenched for centuries. What kind of precedent for the jenets did

these militias offer?

Although the earliest evidence is sparse, within the Iberian Peninsula

the use of foreign Christian soldiers by Muslim rulers can be traced at

least as far back as the Umayyads ( 711 – 1031 ).^66 As part of a wider military

reform, the amīr al- Ḥakam I (r. 796 – 822 ) established an army of foreign,

salaried troops, known as the ḥasham, composed of both Europeans and

Berbers.^67 Simultaneously, he also organized a palatine guard (dā’ira),

a bodyguard, composed of Galician (Eastern European) and Frankish

slaves or former slaves (‘abīd or mamālīk).^68 Called “the Mute” (al- khurs)

in chronicles — perhaps because they could not speak Arabic — these

guardsmen were led by a Mozarab (must‘arab or must‘arib), that is, an

Arabic- speaking Christian, captain (qā’id), named Rabī‘ b. Teodulfo.^69

Al- Ḥakam’s son, ‘Abd al- Raḥmān II (r. 822 – 852 ) continued this tradition,

employing foreign soldiers in both his armies and his personal guard.^70

The palatine guard of slave soldiers is attested to again during the reign

of ‘Abd Allāh (r. 888 – 912 ).^71 The first Umayyad in al- Andalus to proclaim

himself caliph, ‘Abd al- Raḥmān III (r. 912 – 961 ), also employed foreign