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

a mercenary logic 5

that of Islam.^11 In this respect, recent efforts within Mediterranean studies

to overcome such divisions are welcome. A new generation of scholars has

profitably combined the study of Latin, Romance, Arabic, and Hebrew

texts in order to reveal new histories and overturn old biases.

With respect to philosophy, over the past century, across deeply oppos-

ing methods, there has also been a surprising consensus about the moti-

vations of these boundary- crossing soldiers. For Spanish liberals, writing

in the early twentieth century, these Christian and Muslim soldiers were

heroes who had cast off the chains of religious delusion. For their Catholic,

conservative opponents, these soldiers were traitors who had undermined

Spain’s essential religious and national spirit. These opposing positions

were part and parcel of the bitter “convivencia” debates.^12 Superficially,

these were historical debates about the coexistence of Christians, Muslims,

and Jews in medieval Iberia, but more fundamentally, they were moral

disputes about the value of tolerance in modern Spain. More recent and

far more temperate cultural historians have sought to distance themselves

from and circumvent these earlier polemics. Instead, they have seen these

soldiers as evidence for the essential malleability of religious identities.

Nevertheless, these different paths have led all these scholars to much

the same outlook. All have seen these soldiers as driven by secular rather

than religious motivations, by rational self- interest rather than abstract

belief — in short, by a rather mercenary logic.

This conclusion is not a coincidence. It has not persisted because it is

empirically correct, but, rather, it points to an inner solidarity between

these seemingly opposed approaches: a shared secular bias. By secularism,

I mean not the liberal doctrine but more fundamentally the assumption

that religion and politics are distinct, separate, and competing forces.^13 To

put this differently, secularism is not an intellectual position but rather an

intellectual background that underwrites certain self- satisfying accounts

of history.^14 Through this bias, the cultural history of religious interaction

remains unwittingly bound to the very polemics it hopes to overcome.^15

It remains bound to the value of tolerance. Across this book and particu-

larly, in the epilogue, I discuss the nature and consequences of this im-

plicit secularism, but for the moment, my point is simply this: Why could

religious beliefs not have motivated the jenets? The preemptory exclusion

of religion represents a significant analytical foreclosure.

If we can only imagine the jenets as motivated by politics as opposed

to religion, then perhaps, our understanding of “politics” and “religion”

needs some adjustment. In the late medieval Mediterranean, multiple