introduction

A Mercenary Logic

A

handful of documents, scattered about the chancery registers of the

Archive of the Crown of Aragon, tell of a remarkable journey: Some-

time around April 1285 , five Muslim horsemen crossed from the Islamic

kingdom of Granada into the realms of the Christian Crown of Aragon.

Their arrival should have raised an alarm. Bands of Muslim cavalry —

whom the Aragonese called jenets— crossed this frontier in times of war

and peace, wreaking havoc.^1 Their incursions were violent and swift. Raid-

ers would arrive suddenly, driving panicked villagers into town walls, ran-

sacking homes, taking captives for ransom, and burning fields. For two

decades, these same soldiers had supported massive rebellions among the

Crown’s Muslim population — the Mudéjares.^2 On this occasion, however,

they did not inspire terror. The five jenets— famous for their prowess on

horses — rode mules that they had borrowed from a Jew in Granada. When

they reached the border of Valencia, they produced letters of safe conduct,

Latin documents coupled with Arabic trans lations that they presented to

local officials, who then seized their swords, making them the least likely

of marauders.^3

Riding mules, unarmed, and from here confined to public roads, the

jenets found themselves under the laws of the Crown of Aragon and

the watchful eyes of royal officials, but they carried on, riding northeast

(map 1 ).^4 The soldiers next appeared in the city of Valencia, where they

met with the local Mudéjar leader who had facilitated their recruitment.^5

Some days after, the jenets stayed in the town of Vilafranca, north of Va-

lencia, where a local Christian official would later write a letter to the

king, grumbling that these Muslim travelers had borrowed fifteen solidi

from him and failed to settle their tabs before leaving town, an incident

that foreshadowed many more moments of tension to come.^6 Finally, they

arrived at the base of the Pyrenees, at a mountain pass called Coll de