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

18 chapter one

about Othello: “[Y]ou’ll have /coursers for cousins and jennets for ger-

mans!”^11 The breeding of jennet horses made them a ready symbol of not

only racial transgression but also sexual excess throughout early modern

literature, propelling the semantic afterlife of the jenets forward in new

ways: “A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud,” according to Venus

and Adonis; “Glew’d like a neighing Gennet to her Stallion,” for salacious

Massinger in Renegado; or in Fletcher’s Thierry and Theodoret, “power

they may love, and like Spanish Jennetts Commit with such a gust.”^12 It

is worth mentioning that hippological metaphors for race were not an in-

novation of early modern literature. In late medieval Iberia, the Castil-

ian word raza— from which the English “race” derives — referred first to

the breeding of horses before it moved to men.^13 But jennet horses were

not only “good to think” in the early modern and modern periods.^14 They

also carried the Spanish conquistadors to the New World. Wealthy Eu-

ropean gentlemen prized them for their speed and strength as well as

their multitude of colors and patterns, their beauty, which made them a

regular feature in eighteenth- century portraiture and literature. In Ivan-

hoe, for instance, one reads: “A lay brother, one of those who followed

in the train, had, for his use upon other occasions, one of the most hand-

some Spanish jennets ever bred in Andalusia, which merchants used at

that time to import, with great trouble and risk, for the use of persons

of wealth and distinction.”^15 And if only for the irrepressible pleasure of

pulling a loose thread, even later in English, the word also attached itself

to a mule, the modern jenny. Thus, from jenets riding mules, we come to

jenets as mules.

The contorted afterlife of the word jenet is rather like the scattershot

cosmic microwave background, the remnants of an explosion, in this case,

one that leads back to the medieval Iberian Peninsula. At the beginning

of the thirteenth century, Christian Iberian knights rode into battle in the

manner of heavy cavalry. They sat low in their saddles, anchored with

their legs outstretched — a style known as a la brida— in order to bear

the weight of their armor and long lances.^16 And while these soldiers were

expensive and slow, like high- maintenance armored vehicles, they could

deliver granite blows to their enemies. Although the cause of this transfor-

mation is not well understood, by the late medieval or early modern period

in Iberia and Europe more widely, this style had shifted.^17 The majority

of Iberian Christian knights were now lightly armored. They rode smaller

horses, bearing the so- called jineta saddle, with a low pommel and short

stirrups, which allowed them to stand when in gallop. These saddles also