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

22 chapter one

modern periods, providing us with a near continuous record of the Barce-

lonan counts and Aragonese kings’ activities through the fifteenth century.

The earliest documentation relates to the ninth- century counts of Barce-

lona, and the first explicit mention of an “archive,” which is to say, of a

conscious effort to maintain royal documents, dates to the reign of King

Alfons I (r. 1164 – 1196 ). Across its history, the Crown’s administrators held

on to royal letters, account books, court records, and an often- overlooked

but vital collection of Arabic charters, the so- called Cartas árabes, which

hold correspondence with and from Muslim rulers. Nevertheless, the im-

portance of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon rests principally upon the

wealth of its paper registers, a wealth that borders on scribomania. After

the conquest of Islamic Valencia (and its paper mills) in 1236 , and in imita-

tion of the Papacy and French kings, King Jaume I (r. 1213 – 1276 ) adopted

this practice of maintaining registers. Jaume’s registers, thirty- three in to-

tal, begin as brief but increasingly become more extensive summaries of

the most important letters and orders sealed and dispatched by the royal

chancery.^38 Jaume’s successor and son, King Pere II (r. 1276 – 1285 ), later re-

dacted these early records, raising the specter of manipulation, but he also

recognized the value of these records and expanded the practice of keeping

registers. At this stage, organizational habits remained inchoate. Rather

than self- consciously burnishing the image of the king, the first eighty reg-

isters record unexpected details such as what the prince and princess ate

and wore each day. This remained the practice until King Jaume II, whose

reign (r. 1291 – 1327 ) corresponded with the greatest expansion of royal

power and administrative prowess. He ordered all the existing registers as

well as records from the royal treasurers, some of which remained in the

private hands, be brought under one roof, an archive in the former chapel

of Great Royal Palace.^39 Simultaneously, he ordered royal scribes to copy

systematically and completely all correspondence, leading to the produc-

tion of 342 registers. By the reign of Alfons III (r. 1327 – 1336 ), these pa-

per registers would grow in size to 1 , 240 , becoming impossible for a single

scholar to survey, particularly in the absence of a catalog. This shifting

terrain of paper is our principal source for the early history of the jenets,

where we first find them riding. What do these Latin and Romance regis-

ters reveal about these Muslim soldiers?

Although Faustino Gazulla began his study of the jenets in the year

1284 , a watershed moment after which the Crown’s use of these soldiers

dramatically increased, the jenets’ Aragonese story does not in fact be-

gin here but earlier, at the end of King Jaume I’s reign and at the very