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

etymologies and etiologies 33

Pere’s warning explicitly connects the jenets to Abū Yūsuf’s jihād. This

connection not only provides an explanation for the jenets’ appearance

during the Valencian uprising but also suggests that the term jenet or

Zanāta, as Ibn Khaldūn used it, functioned in a broad rather than ethnic

or tribal sense, as a synecdoche for the Marīnid cavalry, composed, as the

Dhakhīra noted, of both Berber and Arab soldiers from the Maghrib.

Thus, we can identify some of the hostile jenets in the Iberian Peninsula

as members of the Marīnid cavalry.

When Abū Yūsuf departed the Maghrib for his fourth jihād in August

1284 , however, Marīnid ambition in al- Andalus was already waning. Af-

ter the death of King Alfonso X in April 1284 , the Castilians petitioned

for and eventually signed a peace with Fez. This treaty removed levies on

the merchandise of Muslim traders, forbade Christians from meddling in

the affairs of Muslims (tark al- taḍrīb bayn mulūk al- muslimīn wa’l- dukhūl

baynahum f ī fitna), and perhaps reflecting an awareness of new transla-

tion and missionizing efforts by the Dominicans, requested that all Arabic

science books (kutūb al- ‘ilm) that had fallen into Christian hands be re-

turned to Morocco.^99 Foreseeing the departure of the Marīnids, the rulers

of Granada agreed to cobble together alliances with both Castile and the

Crown of Aragon. Abū Yūsuf died a year later, and his son and successor,

Abū Ya‘qūb (r. 1286 – 1307 ), decided to abandon the Marīnid’s foothold

in al- Andalus, renouncing all but a handful of his fortresses, and return

his armies to North Africa, where he became embroiled in a struggle to

secure his own authority.^100 In a few short years, the political scene of

the Iberian Peninsula had been radically transformed. The only remain-

ing warfront lay between the Crown of Aragon and Castile, two Chris-

tian kingdoms, a hostility that would continue for twenty years. Put most

succinctly, 1284 saw the beginning of a dramatic demobilization of the

Marīnid cavalry along the Christian- Islamic frontier, a seeming end to their

decades- long jihād.

Holy Warriors

The soldiers who accompanied Abū Yūsuf across the straits joined a

second and separate branch of Marīnid cavalry, known as al- Ghuzāh al-

Mujāhidūn, the Holy Warriors, who had settled permanently in Granada

decades earlier and remained the most enduring and influential cavalry on

the Iberian Peninsula.^101 Ibn Khaldūn devoted the final part of his Kitāb