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

12 introduction

between the Aragonese kings and each of these successor states but also

brings to light a critical, triangular tension. The Ḥafṣids, once tributaries

of the Hohenstaufens, soon became the target of Aragonese predation.

Kings Alfons II and Jaume II invoked the legacy of Frederick II to claim

authority over Tunis. The Marīnids, by contrast, who carried forward a

militant messianism, posed a threat to the Crown of Aragon. Like the Al-

mohads before them, these Berber rulers crossed the Strait of Gibraltar

for the sake of jihād in order to aid the Muslims of al- Andalus. In addition

to several large- scale invasions, the Marīnids also permanently settled a

contingent of holy warriors, known as al- Ghuzāh al- Mujāhidūn, composed

of Arab and Berber troops from across North Africa and commanded by

three Marīnid princes, on borders of the lands of the Crown of Aragon

and Castile in 1262. From this moment until their dissolution at the end of

the fourteenth century, the Ghuzāh remained a powerful and independent

force on the Iberian Peninsula.

Through a Mediterranean approach, this book makes two central argu-

ments about the history of the jenets that confound secular expectations

for religious interaction. First, in recruiting and employing Muslim sol-

diers, the Aragonese kings not only expressed pragmatism in the face of

political crisis but also drew upon an ancient and evolving Mediterranean

tradition, far deeper than that of the court of Frederick II, one that bound

legal and theological conceptions of imperial authority to the servitude

of religious others. This tradition ties the history of the jenets not only

to the longer history of Christian soldiers in Muslim armies but also to

the history of military slavery in the Islamic world. Rather than ignoring

religious difference, the Crown of Aragon’s use of the jenets emphasized —

often spectacularly so — their status as non- Christians. Put differently, the

Crown of Aragon’s claims to divinely sanctioned authority and absolute

jurisdiction found their clearest and perhaps only expression over and

through the bodies of non- Christians, whom they saw as their personal

possessions, their slaves.

Second, in their written agreements and negotiations with the Ara-

gonese kings, the jenets justified and expressed their service through a

tradition of jihād. Indeed, rather than free- wheeling soldiers- for- hire, as

earlier studies have presumed, the Marīnid Ghuzāh, holy warriors who had

and would continue to threaten the lands of the Crown of Aragon, were

the principal source of the Aragonese jenets and their leaders. Across the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Crown of Aragon recruited jenets

from Granada and North Africa and placed them under the command of