58 chapter three
Finally, one also finds the jenets fighting alongside almogàvers and
adalids, lightly armored Catalan and Aragonese foot soldiers who spe-
cialized in cross- border raids against Muslim Granada, soldiers who were
in some sense a mirror image of the Ghuzāh.^32 Desclot described these
soldiers vividly:
These men, called almogàvers, live only by their weapons. They do not live in
villages or cities but rather in the mountains and forests. They fight every day
with the Saracens, entering into their lands for a day or two, raiding and seizing
many people and goods, and that is how they live. They endure many terrible
things that other men cannot: they go many days without eating, and survive
on grass at no harm to themselves. The adalids who guide them know the lands
and the paths. They wear no more than a tunic (gonella) and a shirt in sum-
mer or winter. On their legs, they wear leather pants; and on their feet, leather
sandals. They carry a good knife and scabbard, strapped to their belts. Each
one has a javelin, two arrows, and a leather purse to carry food. They are very
strong and very fast to flee and chase.^33
Despite being raiders against Muslims but as the Arabic origin of their
names hints — mughāwir (raider) and dalīl (guide)— these soldiers likely
had their genesis in the Islamic armies that swept through Iberia centuries
earlier.^34 All the same, like the jenets, these raiders of obscure origin and
composition increasingly moved from the political and social margins into
the bureaucratic control of the Crown in the thirteenth century.
The extent of these collaborations raises a critical question: Did an
emerging military profession override religious profession in medieval
Iberia? If one takes into account the long- standing use of Christian sol-
diers by Muslim rulers, then it would seem that men on both sides of the
Mediterranean seemed to value good soldiers and good salaries above
religion. Did these fighters cast aside their beliefs for money? Did they
rise above their differences?
These were precisely the questions that most concerned the first stud-
ies of these soldiers. For Giménez Soler, the first to write about the jenets,
this history evinced a wider spirit of tolerance.^35 In this context, toler-
ance did not signify religious openness but rather, in the vein of classi-
cal liberalism, signaled a criticism of religion itself. At the turn of the
twentieth century, Spanish liberals like Giménez Soler saw religion as a
primitive form of politics, as a cunning ideology used to manipulate cred-
ulous masses.^36 They saw religious beliefs as delusions that stifled free and
