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

106 chapter five

that they brought back from enemy territory, suggesting that he thought

that the attacks were related to this privilege.^44 Although nothing is known

of what ultimately came of the captives, goods, or debt, the tension be-

tween the king, royal administrators, jenets, and the villagers of Calatayud

is what concerns us.

What motivated the villagers’ attack on the jenets? Canon law, which is to

say, the law of the Catholic Church, banned Muslims from buying or selling

Christian captives. Thus, one could argue that in trying to sell their goods

to villagers, the jenets were crossing a well- established legal boundary.^45

This transgression, moreover, may have been felt less abstractly and more

viscerally by Christian frontiersmen, who were themselves regularly vic-

tims — in person and property — of Ghuzāh raids from Granada. In ad-

dition, Soria was a short distance from Calatayud, meaning robbers and

captives may have known one another and may have felt some sense of

community on account of their shared suffering at the hands of the Mus-

lim Ghuzāh. Should one say, then, that this transgression of religious law

motivated these assaults? In his reading of the Calatayud episode, Catlos

suggested that this motivation is “a convenient rationalization.”^46 After

all, Christian soldiers from Castile also raided these regions, taking their

own captives and ransacking homes. What is more, Christian soldiers ran

into similar problems in selling goods from raids. At the same time that

Abenadalil complained of trouble, a Christian almogàver, Vincent de Say-

ona, informed the Crown that a villager from Calatayud, Johannes Petri,

still owed him 50 solidi for a captive.^47

For his part, Catlos attributed the attack on Abenadalil’s troops not

to the privilege of raiding, as King Alfons had, or to religion but to the

jenets’ own vulnerability as foreigners. In 1286 , for instance, the king or-

dered Muçe de Portella, the Jewish bailiff of Aragon, to compensate a

jenet named Abduahet for goods that were stolen from him by a Chris-

tian.^48 Similarly, in 1290 , the king ordered the arrest of Mosse Maymono,

a Jew from Valencia, who had stolen (surripuit) promissory notes from

some jenets.^49 Catlos saw these incidents as evidence that the jenets were

easy prey for petty criminals. Thus, the events at Calatayud, like frontier

war in general, better reflected greed rather than grievance. They were

the actions of men accustomed to “the misery and opportunity” of the

frontier, something like what Hobbes saw as “the war of all against all.”^50

And while the villagers’ decision to free the Castilian captives displayed

a “spirit of confessional cohesion,” Catlos suggested that this, too, should

ultimately be accounted for by self- interest rather than religious belief.^51