chapter one

Etymologies and Etiologies

T

he scholar reading through the chancery registers in the Archive of the

Crown of Aragon, turning page after page of brittle paper, will find

the Latin and Romance terms jenetus and genet (as well as a handful of

other orthographic variants) scattered throughout the copious thirteenth-

and fourteenth- century documentation, terms referring to certain but not

all Muslim soldiers. By and large, historians have ignored these words in

this context. In his handwritten, partial eighteenth- century catalog to the

registers — the only such guide for contemporary researchers — the archi-

vist Jeroni Alterachs y Avarilló mistakenly read jenet as a surname belong-

ing to a Mudéjar, a subject Muslim.^1 And thus, these soldiers have remained

mostly buried in these paper books. Only four scholars have seen some-

thing more.^2

In these four earlier studies, however, the identity of the jenets has

been a matter of confusion. For Andrés Giménez Soler, writing in 1905 ,

their origin seemed obvious: they were Zanāta Berbers from North Af-

rica. He saw the word jenet as a Romanization of the name of the tribe.^3

In 1927 , when Faustino Gazulla wrote a second study of the jenets, he fol-

lowed his predecessor on the matter of origin. A significant entanglement,

however, arises from this etymological claim. To say that the jenets were

Zanāta Berbers — a broad ethnic category — is only slightly more reveal-

ing than calling them North African. After all, from which Zanāta tribes

did they come? And how, when, and why did they end up in the Iberian

Peninsula?^4 The two more recent studies have challenged this North Af-

rican origin. In 1978 , Elena Lourie suggested that the jenets were in fact

Iberian Muslim cavalry soldiers, members of the Banū Ashqilūla who had

rebelled against the Naṣrid rulers of Muslim Granada and were therefore

predisposed to trade allegiances.^5 And in 2003 , Brian Catlos suggested