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

68 chapter three

medieval Mediterranean have come to the same understanding of them

as their liberal and conservative predecessors. If for an earlier generation,

these soldiers crossed lines in spite of religion, in either heroic or trea-

sonous transgression of it, then for contemporary scholars, they crossed

regardless of their religious beliefs. In spite of religion or regardless of it,

the conclusion is the same: this religious encounter curiously has nothing

to do with religion. In the century of scholarship on Christian and Muslim

mercenaries, every historian has concluded that social and economic inter-

ests, secular and pragmatic motivations, drove these kings and soldiers.^113

My argument is not that this reading of the jenets is wrong but rather

that it underdescribes their relationship to the Crown of Aragon. To imag-

ine the Aragonese kings’ employment of the jenets solely as a matter of

rational pragmatism or cultural accommodation not only excludes the

question of religion from the outset but also, as a result of that exclu-

sion, reproduces an enduring historiographical bias that sees the Middle

Ages as a period of incomplete secularism, a way station on the road to a

disenchanted modernity. What then would it mean to write the history of

the Crown of Aragon’s reliance upon the jenets beyond secular terms that

oppose political and religious impulses?

Law and Theology

Given the sustained efforts of the Aragonese kings to style themselves the

heirs of Frederick II, which is to say, as the heirs to the most successful

thirteenth- century Holy Roman emperor, it is necessary to consider the

model of authority that Frederick himself embodied.^114 Armed with his

own professional bureaucrats and lawyers, Frederick II had transformed

his court at Sicily into a miracle of fiscality and centralized authority. This

change bore the influence of two overlapping traditions. First, from North

Africa, the rationalist political philosophy of the Almohads entered Sicily

through translations of the works of Ibn Tūmart and Ibn Rushd, known

more famously as Averroes, the Arabic commentator on Aristotle. The

Almohads had imagined their ruler, the caliph, as a supreme lawmaker, a

“lamp of reason,” and an earthly reflection of the divine sovereign, who

they understood as radically distant and utterly inscrutable, unique and

transcendent.^115 Second, Frederick’s court was a center for the revival of

Roman law. In this regard, beginning with the argument that “every king

is an emperor in his own domain (rex est imperator in regno suo),” jurists