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

medievalism and secularism 151

remains disciplinary and hortatory.^64 It belongs to the language of dispu-

tation, not description. Yet this polemical ideal has enshrined itself at the

core of the social sciences as the category of religion.^65

When I first set out to write this book, I was also following the well-

worn tracks of a long and unresolved intellectual tradition. Far from find-

ing the past, I was seeking a version of it that satisfied a certain moral

understanding of the present. My intention here is neither to mount a

criticism or a defense of secularism as an ideal, nor is it to enter into the

ongoing debates across the spectrum about the relationship of religion to

politics. Instead, my intention is to question the value of these terms for

scholars of religious interaction and scholars of religion more widely.^66

If a secular understanding of religion and politics depends upon a cer-

tain view of the medieval past, then medieval history also holds the key

to shifting that understanding and reorienting these tired debates. Those

medievalists that have questioned the seemingly natural distinction be-

tween religion and politics, body and spirit, matter and meaning have

not impoverished the study of the past but enabled richer versions of

it.^67 In the same fashion, abandoning these strict distinctions has brought

and will bring new perspectives to urgent contemporary debates. Rather

than seeking a transcendent definition, new scholarship must embrace re-

ligion as what Bruno Latour has called a “specific order of difficulty.”^68

To ask if the Aragonese kings and the jenets were motivated by reli-

gion or politics only beggars the past. It measures history according to its

progress away from or toward a secular ideal. The sovereign ambitions of

the Aragonese kings were grounded in tightly imbricated and impartible

ideas of law and theology. The strategic choices of the jenets were also not

beyond belief. For both, collaboration was neither opposed to something

called religion nor reducible to it. Their alliance emerged within a con-

text of evolving, competing, and overlapping claims to imperial authority

across the medieval Mediterranean. It was grounded in mutual distrust

and exception rather than agreement. While this kind of history cannot

fully satisfy the needs of the present, it can help to direct it toward new

futures.