chapter four

A Mercenary Economy

T

racing the Crown of Aragon’s efforts to recruit jenets across the later

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries reveals not only the broader

scope of their ambitions but also the deeper history of their imperial ide-

als.^1 As evidenced by Latin, Romance, and Arabic treaties in the Archive

of the Crown of Aragon — which include the Cartas árabes, one of the

most important and underexamined collections of medieval Arabic chan-

cery material in the world — King Pere II and his successors recruited

jenets not only from Granada but also from the rulers of North Africa.

These new soldiers joined the ranks of the Marīnid Ghuzāh already in the

service of the Aragonese kings. Beyond bringing more soldiers into the

lands of the Crown of Aragon, however, these recruitment efforts dem-

onstrate two significant facts. First, they show that the Aragonese kings’

efforts to rule Sicily were inextricable from their desire also to rule Tunis.

While these kings claimed the legacy of the Holy Roman emperors to

justify their conquest of Sicily, they invoked the memory of the Almo-

had caliphs to justify their authority in North Africa. In other words, they

cast themselves as the heirs of not only the Hohenstaufens but also the

Almohads. Second, these records show the recruitment of Muslim sol-

diers was not merely a curious parallel to but also developed out of the

well- known and longer- standing use of Christian soldiers by Muslim rul-

ers. In this period, Christian and Muslim troops were exchanged for one

another through agreements by which Aragonese and North African rul-

ers accepted limits upon the use of foreign soldiers that respected politi-

cal and religious boundaries. As such, Christian militias in North Africa

provide another important precedence for the jenets. These connections

to the history of North Africa point to a deeper genealogy for the ideas

that linked emperors to privileged servants, one that led beyond Sicily