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

the unpaid debt 107

If these Christian villagers, rescuers and captives, were on opposite sides

of a political border, freeing each other’s captives of war served their local

and financial interests in the long run.

Catlos’ reading of this episode offers an opportunity to consider his

broader attempt to rethink the dynamics of religious interaction in medi-

eval Iberia.^52 Rather than a monolithic clash between religions, as historians

of an earlier generation imagined, or a subtler process of acculturization,

as more recent scholarship has envisioned, Catlos has contended that in-

teraction between Christians, Jews, and Muslims followed a different logic.

To his mind, religious abstractions like crusade and jihād were not deter-

minants but rather later justifications for and explanations of events.^53

Similarly, “confessional,” “sectarian,” or “ethno- religious identities” did

not determine but were rather the consequences of interaction.^54 In other

words, religion, whether understood as ideology or identity, was an after-

thought to practices on the ground. Catlos has suggested instead that inter-

actions between Muslims, Jews, and Christians followed a social calculus,

an equation of competing individual and communal interests. In a witty

play on and criticism of convivencia, religious tolerance, Catlos calls this the

principle of conveniencia, convenience.

Catlos is certainly right that an overemphasis on religion or identity risks

dissolving agency and contingency, but he risks running too far in the oppo-

site di rection, sacrificing agency and contingency to another all- consuming

principle: convenience. Again, my point is not to say that self- interest

played no role in such interaction but to ask why this kind of reading pre-

sumes that religion is divorced from rational thoughts and practical motiva-

tions, to ask why religion can only be a dependent variable.^55 Ultimately,

the principle of convenience dismisses religion on precisely the same terms

as liberal positivists and cultural theorists. It casts religion as either ideol-

ogy or identity, as either political manipulation or reflexive adherence to

community. If one starts with these familiar explanations of religion, then

beliefs can never play a role in explaining events like those at Calatayud.

What is more, in the case of Abenadalil, convenience and rational self-

interest fall short of fully explaining the villagers’ actions. While, as for-

eigners, the jenets may have appeared to be easy marks for rogues and

grifters, the Calatayud villagers took enormous risks in attacking them.

The jenets were not only well armed but also protected by the Crown. And,

by targeting the jenets, these Calatayud villagers immediately incurred

the wrath of the Aragonese king. Initially, they faced extraordinary fines,

2 , 200 solidi. Eventually, King Alfons ordered both the villagers’ arrest and