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

sovereigns and slaves 67

of Moorish knights as their personal guard, who appeared in parades

alongside them, physically marking out the space of the sovereign. And

as Ana Echevarría has shown, despite the fact that many of these soldiers

had converted to Christianity, the Castilian kings continued to dress them

lavishly as “Moors”— adorned in turquoise tunics, sheepskin garments,

doublets, and laced boots. To put this clearly, the Castilian kings contin-

ued to dress their soldiers as Muslims even after they had become Chris-

tians. And although the practice of recruiting and hiring Muslim soldiers

had disappeared in this period, the spectacle and indeed, more precisely,

the display of Muslim soldiers continued to have importance to Christian

kings.^105 What was the relationship of these kings to these ersatz jenets?

What notion of authority was being performed in these processions?

The challenge of reading these tunics reveals the limit of recent ap-

proaches to religious interaction in medieval Iberia. In step with the wider

historical discipline, many medievalists have come to see religion as an

aspect of culture, which is to say that they see religion as part of a broader

set of norms and rules that clothe individuals in identity and dress their

choices in a deep sense of pragmatism, purpose, and order.^106 They see reli-

gion as a lived, pragmatic, and flexible system that responds to the needs of

individuals in community.^107 Thus, rather than stifling agency, religion can

express agency. Rather than inevitably leading to collision or transgression,

religious interaction becomes a process of encounter and acculturation.^108

Although I am not alone in making this critique but precisely because

this cultural approach continues to hold power among scholars of medi-

eval Iberia, I want to suggest that the time has come to shift the furniture

piled up in the lumber room once again.^109 As Steven Justice has recently

argued, in a quest to provide rational and coherent explanations for reli-

gious belief, the cultural account of religion has provided a familiar under-

standing of religious belief.^110 If one contends that believers were aware

of the underlying reasons for their beliefs, then they also held a curious

detachment from them. If one contends they were unaware of those rea-

sons, then they appear to be in bondage to their beliefs. In other words,

one must either see believers as cunning manipulators, who secretly dis-

believed, or delusional fools, who believed unblinkingly.^111 Sincere belief

remains, as it had for Spanish liberals and conservatives, a form of blind

adherence and constraint. As such, the cultural theory of religious iden-

tity can not provide a genuine alternative to views it seeks to overcome.^112

If one begins with the understanding that religious belief is a form of com-

munity, then religious interaction can only be read as transgression.

Indeed, recent accounts of Muslim and Christian mercenaries in the