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

etymologies and etiologies 17

that although the word jenet derived from the name of the Berber tribe,

by the thirteenth century it “became a generic term for all foreign Mus-

lim soldiers.”^6 Each of these possibilities would lead to drastically differ-

ent readings of this history. Therefore, it is worth asking the deceptively

simple question: Who were the jenets?

Jennets for Germans

The confusion surrounding and scant scholarly attention upon the jenets

stands in sharp contrast to the wide diffusion of the term and its linguistic

descendants across the early modern and modern periods.^7 Tracing the

word forward from the Middle Ages reveals a rapid dilation of its mean-

ing and a web of significations. In thirteenth- century Iberian Latin and

Romance sources, the first to use the term, jenet referred only to specific

Muslim soldiers and their military accoutrements: jenet saddles, jenet stir-

rups, and jenet lances. However opaque to readers centuries later, the

word had been specific in this context. By the early modern period, jenet

had already expanded in meaning, referring to both Muslim and Chris-

tian cavalry, the so- called jinetes, who rode in the fashion of these earlier

soldiers. According to Covarrubias in his 1611 dictionary, the Tesoro, it

meant “a man on horseback, who fights with a spear and a leather shield,

his feet gathered into short stirrups, which do not reach below the belly of

the horse.”^8 And by the time one reaches modern Castilian and Catalan,

even this degree of specificity had dissolved. The linguistic descendants of

jenet— the Castilian jinete and the Catalan genet— simply and generically

mean “horseman,” a fact that might explain why so many scholars have

passed over the term in earlier sources: it seemed unremarkable and obvi-

ous. Precisely because of this linguistic genericide, a steady semantic slip-

page toward generality, I have chosen to use the term jenet (a truncated

form of the Latin jenetus) in order to refer to this particular thirteenth-

and early fourteenth- century Muslim cavalryman, to avoid confusion with

these later variants.

Beyond the Iberian Peninsula, particularly in French and English, the

term evolved differently, demonstrating again how “the words of things

entangle and confuse.”^9 From at least the early modern period, the term

transferred its meaning from rider to mount: jennet refers to a diminu-

tive and much prized horse or palfrey (roncino) of mixed Spanish and

North African stock.^10 That detail makes sense of Iago’s famous barb