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

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were not spontaneous acts of greed. Second, the justice of Calatayud was

deeply involved in this resistance. He did not simply represent royal au-

thority. He not only treated the jenets with some suspicion but also, given

the raids on Aguaro, had good reason to do so. In this light, the fact that

Petrus Sancii dragged his feet in implementing the Crown’s justice for

Abenadalil in 1290 looks less like bureaucratic inefficiency and more like

defiance of royal authority, a vestige of the anger that drove the Unions.^61

One could therefore argue that the villagers who attacked Abenadalil’s

jenets were not acting selfishly or blindly but rather with the knowledge

that royal officials — if only tacitly — would support their actions.^62 This

kind of local and strategic solidarity in Calatayud suggests a more com-

plex approach to the question of motive than self- interest. While these at-

tacks appeared illegal in the eyes of the king, there is no reason to assume

that the people of Calatayud saw them the same way. The tensions at Ca-

latayud reflected competing ideas of law and legitimacy. Such competition

rendered visible the obvious limits of the Crown of Aragon’s claim to ab-

solute jurisdiction and sovereignty. More to the point, it undermined the

value of the exceptional privilege of the jenets.

Although tensions in Calatayud appeared to be particularly high be-

cause they were particularly well recorded, it is worth mentioning that this

was not the only region where the presence of jenets led to tension and

conflict. In March 1290 , for instance, royal officials from Játiva took captive

several jenets serving in Villena, near Alicante. The king “angrily (irato)”

rebuked them, his words indicating that he saw their actions as malicious

and defiant.^63 In November 1290 , immediately before they arrived in Cala-

tayud, Abenadalil’s also troops ran into problems on the Navarrese front.

The troops of the Aragonese nobleman Lope Ferrench de Luna, who

participated with the jenets in raids, despoiled Abenadalil’s soldiers after

they returned from battle.^64 The attack reveals that military cooperation

between the jenets and Christian soldiers did not necessarily imply accep-

tance or equivalence. In brief, these conflicts demonstrate that Christian

villagers, local administrators, and soldiers, all took issue with the jen-

ets and their privilege. The incidents in Calatayud in 1290 were neither

isolated nor passing.

In this context, one can ask again, why were the jenets attacked? To ask

whether these attacks were religiously or politically motivated only begs

the question. Religion was neither a thin mask for selfish desires, an ideol-

ogy, nor a reflexive sense of communal belonging or identity. Rather than

suggesting that the villagers were cold and calculating manipulators or