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

a mercenary logic 13

the Ghuzāh leaders and soldiers in their lands. Moreover, the Aragonese

kings agreed to and accepted limits on the use of these soldiers, limits by

which, for example, Muslims could only fight Christians. Thus, far from

marking the collapse of religious boundaries or the triumph of toleration,

the relationship of the Aragonese kings to the jenets both depended upon

and reproduced ideas of religious difference. This history forces us to re-

consider the relationship between ideas of sovereignty, religion, and vio-

lence in the Middle Ages.

While these overlapping political and theological claims help to eluci-

date the logic that bound Christian kings and Muslim soldiers, they never-

theless also fall short, as David Nirenberg has recently argued, of a total

explanation of the practice of royal power in the Middle Ages.^25 The Ara-

gonese kings’ claims to sovereignty masked a context of competing claims

to jurisdiction and authority by the French, the Castilians, the Papacy,

their own subjects, and most strikingly, by the jenets themselves. Indeed,

far from slaves, as the kings imagined them, or practical rationalists, as

historians have imagined them, the jenets continued to see themselves as

members of the Ghuzāh, holy warriors who rejected the Aragonese kings’

authority altogether. Significantly, however, none of these many challenges

undermined the Crown of Aragon. The practice of Aragonese power dif-

fered from its lofty rhetoric and performances. Indeed, the Aragonese

kings remained resilient in this period not through coercive violence or

decision, which have been seen as constitutive features of political sover-

eignty, but rather through a politics of continual evasion and indecision.^26

*

Across six chapters, The Mercenary Mediterranean approaches the his-

tory of the jenets at a variety of scales and from multiple points of view,

gradually shifting its perspective from that of the Aragonese kings to that

of the jenets themselves. Chapter 1 , “Etymologies and Etiologies,” begins

where others have begun, in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, in order

to explain why a reliance on either Latin and Romance archival sources or

Arabic chronicles can offer only a partial view of the jenets. Careful com-

parison of these seemingly incommensurate sources, however, unearths

the unexpected source of these soldiers, members of a motley corps of

North African cavalry, al- Ghuzāh al- Mujāhidūn, a band of holy warriors

who entered the Iberian Peninsula for the purpose of defending Muslims.

This fact raises the questions that frame the remainder of the book: How