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

a mercenary economy 93

authorities moved belatedly to legitimize the enduring presence of Chris-

tian soldiers in Muslim kingdoms, but they also bent to meet the desires

of these soldiers for spiritual recognition. These thirteenth- century popes

were not indifferent to the beliefs and practices of Christian soldiers in

North Africa.

The Aragonese control over Christian militias in North Africa peaked

during the thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries. By the middle of

the fourteenth century, both Aragonese and Castilian influence appeared

to have waned.^134 In Tunis, where the Aragonese had been strongest, one

finds a Genoese captain in 1358.^135 The movement of fifty thoroughly as-

similated families of Christian soldiers, known as the farfanes, from Fez

to Castile at the end of the fourteenth century may have indicated that

the political climate in Morocco had shifted away from reliance on non-

Muslim troops.^136 Nevertheless, these militias continued to exist elsewhere

in North Africa. Roser Salicrú has found permissions for individual Castil-

ian soldiers to depart for North Africa as late as the fifteenth century.^137

When the friar Juan Gallicant arrived in Tunis in 1446 to negotiate the

release of captives, he sought the assistance of the captain of the Christian

militia, Mossen Guerau de Queralt.^138 The pilgrim Anselm Adorno found a

thriving and well- assimilated Christian community at Tunis a few decades

later.^139 Almost at the end of Ḥafṣid rule, Leo Africanus (d. 1552 ) attested

to the continued existence of a Christian “secret guard” in Tunis.^140 In other

words, while official exchanges of soldiers had vanished, Christian royal

guardsmen, at the very least, continued to serve in North African courts.

The use of Christian Iberian soldiers by the Muslim rulers of al- Andalus

and North Africa provides an important precedent for the jenets. From at

least the eighth century, Christian soldiers were present in Islamic armies

and courts. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the Almohads

institutionalized the use of these soldiers. Their agreements with Chris-

tian kings regularized customs and practices concerning pay, limitations

on use, and spiritual and liturgical practices. When the Aragonese kings

ultimately sought to recruit jenets from North Africa in the late thirteenth

and early fourteenth centuries, these customs were either implied or ex-

plicitly invoked. The employment of Muslim jenets grew out of and into

an already established tradition. The Mediterranean trade in “infidel”

soldiers also declined in tandem. In parallel with the case of the guardia

morisca of the Castilian kings, after Christian soldiers disappeared from

the Islamic armies of North Africa, they remained a regular feature of

North African courts. In other words, in both regions, the performative