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

4 introduction

kings of the Crown of Aragon recruited thousands of foreign Muslim sol-

diers from al- Andalus (Muslim Iberia) and North Africa.^7 Across hun-

dreds of Latin, Romance, and Arabic accounts, letters, court cases, spy

reports, and diplomatic agreements, the jenets appear in far- flung battle-

fields across the Mediterranean as well as in the royal court, where they

served as members of the king’s entourage, his bodyguards, his diplomats,

and even his entertainment. Put simply, this book seeks to explain how

and why the Christian Aragonese kings and Muslim jenets came into an

alliance with one another. It uses their relationship not only to offer a

novel perspective on interactions between Muslims and Christians in the

Middle Ages but also to rethink the study of religion more broadly.

The jenets immediately provoke the kinds of questions that have con-

sumed scholarship on medieval Iberia since the nineteenth century: Was

this a world of religious boundaries or democratic frontiers? When and

how did religion shape or limit interaction? When did it lead to violence?

These types of questions attempt to locate religion within complex interac-

tion, to discover when and why it mattered. They have been and remain

anxious questions because they were and are inextricable from contempo-

rary concerns about the relationship of religion to politics and the sources

of religious violence. This book argues that they are also the wrong kinds

of questions because they already hold their own answers.

Despite an abundance of surviving records and the provocative ques-

tions that they elicit, the jenets have received surprisingly scant scholarly

attention. They are absent from general histories of medieval Iberia.^8

And in the handful of previous studies of these soldiers, there has been no

agreement about who they even were.^9 Why the jenets have been more or

less ignored is inextricable from how historians have approached them —

or indeed, parallel figures such as Christian soldiers in the service of me-

dieval Muslim rulers.^10 Particular methodological and philosophical as-

sumptions have contributed to the marginalization and misunderstanding

of these men.

With respect to methodology, although these Muslim and Christian sol-

diers crossed political and linguistic boundaries, scholars have hesitated to

do the same. Earlier studies of these soldiers have employed either Latin

and Romance sources, focusing on Christian Iberia, or Arabic sources,

fo cusing on al- Andalus and North Africa. The result is that significant

connections and continuities have fallen into the divide. This scholarly dys-

praxia, as if the right and left hands are ignorant of one another, has only

reinforced the artificial divisions between the study of Christianity and