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

74 chapter three

Thus, in employing the Muslim jenets, King Pere and his successors

were not merely acquiring skilled soldiers but also satisfying a certain

vision of imperial power, an extreme political theology. They were not

recruiting men that they saw as equals or boon companions but rather

men that they saw as wholly dependent upon them — as their slaves. The

privileges that they heaped upon these warriors, in other words, also sym-

bolized their perfect submission. “Beware of all enterprises that require

new clothes,” Thoreau wrote.^158 Indeed, the sumptuous clothes granted

to the jenets were freighted with danger. These new clothes indexed the

king’s claim to transcendence, his desire to stand apart from and above

the law, to be sovereign. By putting on these rich silks, the jenets risked

becoming embodiments of the king’s assertions of exceptional authority

and extensions of the king’s body. To state this more provocatively, rather

than religious indifference or cultural accommodation, the Crown’s rela-

tionship with the Muslim jenets both depended upon and reinscribed the

fact that these men were non- Christians.