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

a mercenary economy 97

who served in his armies and as his personal protectors.^163 These troops

fiercely attacked Republican sympathizers, suppressed rebellions, and ap-

peared in parades alongside Franco, riding white horses, dressed in scar-

let tunics with white capes, bearing turbans, and carrying lances. From

a distance, Franco’s employment of these Muslim soldiers was seen as

a failure of his Spanishness, his descent into “Moslem fatalism.”^164 The

service of these soldiers was seen as expression of their “semi- oriental

loyalty,” of their slavish obedience.^165 Seen from the history of the jenets,

however, there was nothing surprising about any of this, or about the fact

that when he was forced to disband the Moorish Guard, Franco dressed

his new Spanish Christian protectors in the same red and white clothes,

which is to say that he continued to dress them as Muslims. The fiction of

sovereignty persisted.