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

142 epilogue

on the margins, medievalists still have the most to gain from and contrib-

ute to these urgent and unresolved discussions.^2

Beyond Convivencia

No scholar of religious interaction in medieval Iberia can avoid the legacy

of the bitter convivencia debates, debates over the nature and significance

of the coexistence of Christians, Muslims, and Jews.^3 Across the twentieth

century, these disputes pitted Spanish liberals against conservatives, each

proposing a different understanding of the past and its consequences for

the present. These debates about religion were constitutive of Iberian me-

dievalism, and despite efforts to overcome them, they continue to set the

terms in which religious interaction is studied.

Writing in 1905 , Andrés Giménez Soler saw the jenets as evidence of

the wider spirit of tolerance in medieval Iberia.^4 Giménez Soler admired

these mercenaries’ ability to place self- interest before religious commit-

ment. This attitude, he argued, was exemplary of Muslims in general, who,

since the earliest invasions, had been driven by material gain and martial

glory rather than by eschatological fervor.^5 As such, Islamic warfare and

commerce had a “civilizing” effect on the western Mediterranean, en-

couraging diplomatic and economic exchange with Christian kingdoms.^6

This admirable period of toleration, he concluded, lasted until the age

of expulsions, the Inquisition, and the arrival of the Ottomans in North

Africa.

Giménez Soler belonged to a wave of late nineteenth- century Spanish

Arabists committed to the twinned ideals of positivism and liberalism.^7

Rejecting the romantic embellishments of earlier historians and under the

influence of neo- Kantian thought, these scholars sought to write history

with scientific rigor — “as it really was.”^8 Nevertheless, as John Tolan has

put it, their confidence betrayed a “blend of melancholy and nostalgia.”^9

Witnessing the decline of Spain’s imperial fortunes, its descent into re-

ligious and political extremes, liberals sought to revalorize and reorient

modern Spain by casting medieval Iberia as the birthplace of the Euro-

pean Enlightenment. The invocation of tolerance was not an anodyne

call for religious pluralism, as it is often meant today, but rather a ra-

tionalist critique of religion itself. Liberal Arabists dismissed religion as

mere ideology, a thin veil for politics, and an archaic mode of thinking.

To their minds, religion was a set of empty delusions employed by elites