the unpaid debt 113
On closer inspection, this document — recording the marriage of a jenet
to a Mudéjar woman — opens itself to many possible readings. One could
read it as congratulatory, as a pure formality, which would suggest that the
king was merely adding honor to the occasion. Thus, one could argue that
the letter speaks of the Crown’s approval of interaction between the jenets
and the Mudéjares. Sensitive to the dialogic quality of texts, one could read
this document as a response. Did the Mudéjar çalmedine, who was techni-
cally in the king’s employ, first seek approval for the marriage, knowing
that the king took a keen interest in the affairs of his Muslim subjects, his
possessions, with these foreigners, who were servants and agents of his au-
thority? In this scenario, the Mudéjares might have been taking tentative
steps in their relationship with the jenets. Perhaps again, one could take a
less subtle view of the king and see this document as a monologue, as the
“order (mandatum)” that it claims to be and nothing more. This perspec-
tive might suggest that the king, an aspiring sovereign, was pressing his
will on the Mudéjares, staving off any stated or potential objections to the
marriage. Did Abdullasis or the local Muslim leader disapprove? This is all
to say, given the fact of the relationship of the jenets to the Mudéjares, one
must still ask whether theirs was a happy or unhappy marriage.
Arriving by land or sea, jenets entering the service of the Crown of Ara-
gon found a world simultaneously familiar and strange. Like the five jenets
with whom this book began, most entered through the kingdom of Valen-
cia. Crossing over the rough and arid hills that surrounded this territory,
they would have caught sight of an expansive green plain, covered with an
arterial network of canals, all framed by the blue Mediterranean. Pope
Gregory IX (d. 1241 ) once remarked upon this land’s wealth and beauty.^73
But one might say that it was Valencia’s delicate nature, environmental
and political, that lent its inhabitants an unusual mixture of ironic detach-
ment and nostalgia. The Muslim poet Ibn Ḥarīq, Gregory’s contemporary,
composed these lines on the eve of the kingdom’s fall to the Aragonese:
“Valencia is the dwelling of all beauty.”
This they say both in the East and the West.
If someone protests that prices there are high
And that the rain of battle falls upon it
Say: “It is a paradise surrounded by
Two misfortunes: famine and war!”^74