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

40 chapter two

To pursue the question of how and why the Aragonese kings turned

to their former enemies, the Marīnid Ghuzāh, it serves us to follow these

two ambassadors as they made their way into the kingdom of Granada in

1284. This was a watershed moment, after which the Crown’s use of these

soldiers increased dramatically. An overlooked list of names and loca-

tions, scribbled alongside the letter of introduction above, enables us not

only to recreate these ambassadors’ itinerary and to confirm the identity

of the soldiers that they hoped to recruit but also to place this mission

in a broader social, political, and intellectual context. This story spans

the Mediterranean — from Spain to Sicily and North Africa — and draws

upon Latin, Romance, and Arabic sources in order to demonstrate that

this alliance not only responded to immediate circumstance — to extreme

crisis — but was also a piece of political theater. It grew out of a much

longer and deeper history of Aragonese aspiration.

A Rupture?

Claiming that there is no evidence of their use prior to 1284 , Faustino

Gazulla began his history of jenets with the date of this mission to recruit

these soldiers.^8 Indeed, from the perspective of the chancery registers, the

year 1284 seems to be a levee- breaking moment, after which jenets flood

these pages. Is this the beginning of our story, the start of something new?

To call something a first is no minor or middling matter: it imposes a cer-

tain interpretation on all the documents that follow. In this case, to begin

in 1284 implies a rupture: one moment the Muslim jenets were raiding

Valencia; the next, they were trotting in as soldiers- for- hire with letters

of invitation from the Aragonese king. Accepting this narrative raises a

challenge — which Gazulla, perhaps wisely, sidestepped — the challenge

of accounting for sudden change.

Aside from a general suspicion of ruptures, two significant factors im-

pede writing a study of the origins of the Aragonese jenets. First, in this

period, the chancery registers remained nascent; they were kept irregu-

larly, unsystematically, or simply not at all.^9 Thus, any starting point may

be nothing more than a fiction of the documents themselves, a mirage of

paper and ink. Second, and more significantly, evidence from the earliest

registers hints at a longer and more convoluted history of interaction be-

tween the Aragonese kings and jenet soldiers before this mission.

An overlooked fragment from the archives — the earliest surviving