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

96 chapter four

Thus, when the Umayyads and later the Almoravids and Almohads first

employed Frankish and Galician military slaves — whom they also called

‘abīd or mamālīk— they were intentionally invoking and drawing com-

parison with the practices of their contemporaries and rivals to the east.

Although it has not been, the history of Christian mercenary soldiers in

North Africa in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries should be also

understood as an important extension of this tradition of military slavery.

The ‘Abbāsids may have also influenced other emperors around the

Mediterranean. For instance, in the ninth century, the Byzantine emperor

established the Hetaireia (ἑταιρεία), an imperial bodyguard composed of

mainly of Turkic Khazars, which is to say, the very same soldiers who were

used in caliphal military retinues.^160 Indeed, contemporary observers saw

the ‘Abbāsid and Byzantine practices as indistinct.^161 And as discussed

above, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II also maintained a palatine

guard of Muslim slave soldiers.

From here, one need only travel a short distance to close the circuit

of ideas. The thirteenth- century Aragonese kings not only styled them-

selves the heirs to the universal claims of the Holy Roman emperors before

Christians but also invoked the supreme authority of the Almohad caliphs

in North Africa before Muslims. Like each of these emperors and caliphs,

they employed foreign soldiers, whom they treated as legal slaves, in their

armies and in their courts as their personal protectors. The fact that the

jenets were not actually slaves or of slave origin mattered little to the Ara-

gonese kings just as it mattered little to Islamic rulers. The Aragonese tra-

dition was not an aberration from the tradition of military slavery but a

reflection of its deepest logic. In addition to adding military might, these

soldiers brought imperial prestige to rulers. By treating these soldiers as

slaves, as their possessions, the Aragonese kings articulated their claims to

absolute authority and universal jurisdiction. The jenets were just another

in a line of military slaves belonging to Mediterranean emperors.

This tradition, which intimately bound emperors and religious oth-

ers across the Mediterranean, outlasted the Middle Ages. It was not

simply a premodern mode of governance. In the nineteenth century, for

example, rulers from the Ottoman governor of Baghdad to Napoleon

Bonaparte em ployed mamlūks as elite guardsmen.^162 But the most fasci-

nating and relevant modern case comes from twentieth- century Spain. In

addition to casting himself as the new El Cid, a preserver of Spanish Ca-

tholicism, General Franciso Franco ( 1892 – 1975 ) also established a Moor-

ish Guard (Guarda Mora) of some 80 , 000 troops brought from Morocco,