epilogue

Medievalism and Secularism

I

set out to write a different book.

Long before I stumbled across the jenets, I knew the kind of story I

wanted to tell. In the light of events that seemed to defy human reason,

the distant past provided a way to make sense of the present. The ragged

history of religious coexistence in medieval Iberia lay somewhere be-

tween a clash of civilizations and a world of interfaith harmony, between

the poles of blind intolerance and benign tolerance. The steady move-

ment of men and women across boundaries demonstrated that religious

beliefs were not fate, that religious identities were flexible, negotiable,

and permeable — subject to circumstance and human agency. In short, I

postulated that these interactions demonstrated that religion was as poor

an explanation of events — both violent and peaceful — then as now.

That was not the book that I wrote.

At every turn, the history of the jenets said something else. Religion

reasserted itself in unexpected ways and ran out of its bounds. The alli-

ance of the Muslim jenets with the Christian Aragonese kings both de-

pended upon and reproduced ideas of religious difference. Although the

Aragonese kings first recruited the jenets, a motley band of holy warriors,

out of practical necessity to fill the lines of its armies, mere pragmatism

failed to explain the significance of their enduring alliance. While marking

the jenets as Muslims and outsiders to the Crown’s laws and communi-

ties, the Aragonese kings nevertheless treated these soldiers as privileged

agents, bringing them into their courts as members of their entourage,

and parading with them as their personal protectors. Across this period

and around the Mediterranean, the Muslim jenets fought in battles against

the Crown’s Christian enemies. These soldiers were conspicuous symbols

and expressions of royal authority. And at every level from the court to