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

110 chapter five

blind to the reasons for their actions, the foregoing documents reveal many

overlapping motivations: opportunism, revenge, criticism of royal power,

and religious animus. The nature of these conflicts could have been simul-

taneously private, local, and public to varying degrees. One has no reason

or means to discount any of these readings. Religion is not separable from

other processes or from material circumstances. While complex matters

resist systematization, the violence was also not arbitrary or chaotic. Just

as King Alfons made clear in his circular to all royal official in Aragon, the

jenets’ raiding — or more particularly, their taking and ransoming Christian

captives — was the occasion and catalyst for the pattern of events above.^65

In other words, it was the blatant transgression of a legal boundary — un-

derstood rationally and felt viscerally — that shaped and channeled the

mul tiple motivations of the attackers, made them take excessive and bold

risks, giving them a sense of legitimacy. By extension, moreover, beliefs

and practices gained greater meaning and power through these local acts,

through their iteration. A moment of boundary crossing became a moment

of boundary making. For the case at hand, this understanding allows us to

speak of the complex motivations for violence without reducing actors to

ciphers and history to a painted backdrop.

Killed but Not Murdered

The vulnerability of the jenets derived not from their physical weak ness

but rather from the weakness of their claim to privileged exception. These

attacks on the jenets also highlighted the impotence of the Aragonese kings,

their inability to either enforce or realize their claims to absolute jurisdic-

tion and sovereign authority. The story of Abenadalil and his troops in

Calatayud holds a final chapter that suggests that the Aragonese kings

both were well aware of these challenges to their authority and navigated

them with canny ability. The practice of royal power differed sharply from

its towering rhetoric.

This story begins with a murder. A month after the controversial raids

into Soria and during the furious exchange of letters between King Alfons II

and the various justices of Aragon, two curious attacks were recorded in

the chancery registers. First, a group of Christian almogàvers — Paschasius

Valentini, Matheus de Galera, Juanyes Bono, Raimundus Petri, Galmus

Petri, and others — attacked and killed a man named Puçola, the “Big

Flea,” who had raided alongside Abenadalil’s troops into Navarre.^66 The