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

a mercenary logic 15

evidence for the transfer of certain imperial conceptions and practices

from the Islamic to the Christian Mediterranean.

Chapter 5 , “The Unpaid Debt,” provides an account of the lives of the

jenets beyond the royal court and beyond ideas of privileged servitude.

How did the Aragonese kings use these soldiers in practice? How did

Christians view Muslim soldiers in the service of their kings? And how did

the jenets, in turn, make their way through these foreign lands? This chap-

ter begins with the jenets’ families, the women and children who accom-

panied them into the lands of the Crown of Aragon, and then examines

the jenets’ encounters with local Christian officials and villagers. It turns

finally to the relationship between the jenets, as foreign Muslims, and the

Mudéjares, the subject Muslim population of the Crown of Aragon. This

evidence points to the numerous challenges and threats to the kings’ and

jenets’ claims to power and privilege. It reveals an irreducible context of

indeterminacy, one of competing claims to law and legitimacy. On a local

level, the effect of the Crown’s alliance with the jenets was to heighten ten-

sions between Christians and Muslims. Far from being naïve or unaware

of these challenges, the Aragonese kings turned this competition and dis-

order to their advantage.

Chapter 6 , “The Worst Men in the World,” turns to the point of view

of the jenets. The career of one fourteenth- century jenet commander, al-

‘Abbās b. Raḥḥū, whose troops were called “the worst men in the world”

by an Aragonese royal official, offers an opportunity to examine the mo-

tivations of these Muslim soldiers. Al- ‘Abbās and his jenets understood

their service to the Aragonese king on limited terms. More precisely, they

saw their service not as a transgression but rather as an extension of their

commitment to the Marīnid Ghuzāh, with whom their loyalty ultimately

lay. This not only forces us to reconsider the meaning and practice of jihād

in medieval al- Andalus and North Africa but also underscores the thinness

of the Aragonese kings’ claim to sovereignty. The Aragonese kings de-

pended upon soldiers who were not in fact their slaves or servants, empty

ciphers for their will, but rather holy warriors, who denied their divinely

sanctioned authority altogether.

In the light of these considerations of sovereignty, religion, and vio-

lence, the epilogue, “Medievalism and Secularism” returns to and ex-

plores more fully the origins and consequences of an implicit secular bias

in the study of religious interaction in the Middle Ages and beyond.