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

medievalism and secularism 141

the village, this strange alliance had a powerful and polarizing social im-

pact. The presence of these Muslim soldiers did not inspire interreligious

harmony or lift the veil from people’s eyes but rather provoked deeper

divisions and tensions between Christians and Muslims, a state of disorder

that the Aragonese kings turned to their advantage, further entrenching

their power.

What then was the logic that brought these Christian kings and Muslim

holy warriors into an alliance? Neither high- minded tolerance nor simple

indifference paved this path. The Aragonese kings’ decision to recruit the

jenets emerged from their inextricably entwined ideas of religious and

political authority. Drawing upon novel and casuistic readings of Roman

law, as well as precedents by Christian and Islamic rulers, the Crown of

Aragon enacted its claims to sovereignty through and upon the bodies of

privileged ethnic and religious others whom they also considered their pos-

sessions and slaves. To put this differently, these aspirations were not only

partly influenced by Islamic models — the tradition of military slavery —

but also partly enacted through Muslim agents. Nevertheless, these claims

to transcendent authority were just that: claims. They were met with resis-

tance from every corner, including from the jenets themselves. Indeed, the

jenets understood their service in terms that denied the king’s assertions of

transcendent authority altogether and pursued their own agendas. For the

jenets, service to the Aragonese kings was not a contradiction but rather a

continuation of their role as al- Ghuzāh al- Mujāhidūn, the Holy Warriors.

What explains the disjunction between the book that I planned to write

and the one that I eventually did? When religion was my central subject,

why had I been inclined to minimize its effects, to see it as a minor vari-

able?^1 What invisible hands nudged me toward certain paths rather than

others? I was not alone in this regard. Across deeply opposing methodolog-

ical, political, and philosophical positions, every scholar who has studied

the jenets or their Christian counterparts has come to the same con clusion

about these figures. All have seen these soldiers as transgressors, as men

driven by secular rather than religious motivations. All have seen this al-

liance as a product of rational and pragmatic needs. If this book aimed to

demonstrate how this kind of reading concealed more than it revealed,

then here I want to explore more fully the origins and consequences of

this secular bias. What explains this broad agreement? Why has it en-

dured? Why should it trouble us? These concerns are not confined to the

study of medieval Iberia. They sit stubbornly at the center of ongoing

debates about religion and politics. And although they remain too often