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

20 chapter one

Ibn Ḥayyān (d. 1097 ), lightly armored Berber troops rode on saddles with

low pommels, the so- called sarj ‘udwiyy (racing saddle), that allowed

them greater maneuverability on horseback.^23 While seeing this technique

as strategically and morally inferior to closed formations, which had been

the style employed by the early Islamic armies, Ibn Khaldūn ( 1332 – 1406 )

confirmed that light cavalry was the only style employed in the Maghrib in

his time: “Fighting in closed formation (zaḥf ) is steadier and fiercer than

attacking and fleeing.... [But] the fighting of people of their country [i.e.,

North Africa] is all attacking and fleeing.”^24

This North African origin was not lost upon early modern Spaniards.

In 1599 , Juan de Mariana recommended the technique for training Chris-

tian princes while nevertheless admitting its “Moorish (Mauricae)” deriva-

tion.^25 A year later, Bernardo de Vargas Machuca bragged of this style’s

effectiveness in combatting the “barbarians” of the New World while also

acknowledging — without a hint of irony — the fact that the Berbers, who

were once Greece’s quintessential “barbarians,” had first innovated this

technique: “Although it is true that Barbary (Berberia) first gave it to Spain,

and Spain to the Indies, it has been perfected here more than elsewhere.”^26

And Covarrubias recorded that some in his time ascribed the style specifi-

cally to “a certain nation or caste of Arabs called ‘Cenetas’ or ‘Cenetes,’

who lived in the mountains of Africa.”^27 Despite the willingness of Spanish

noblemen and princes to adapt and adopt this Moorish style, the popularity

of riding a la jineta struck foreign travelers to Spain as something strange

and exotic.^28 So, the thirteenth- century jenets stood at the heart of the trans-

fer of this effective but culturally troubling cavalry style to the Iberian Pen-

insula, a significant military transformation in need of an explanation. And

it thus might make sense to leap to the conclusion, as Giménez Soler did in

1905 , that the jenets were Zanāta Berbers.

There are at least two problems with this leap. First, as noted earlier, to

say that the jenets were Zanāta Berbers — a broad ethnic group — reveals

little. Second, given the wide- ranging path of the term jenet, one must

ask: by the time the word reached the Archive of the Crown of Aragon,

had it already swung out of orbit, coming to signify the light style of rid-

ing over the ethnicity of the rider? For instance, writing in the thirteenth

century, Ramon Lull (ca. 1232 – 1315 ), the Mallorcan mystic, described all

Iberian Muslim cavalry — not just Berbers — as lightly armed: “They nei-

ther arm their bodies nor horses but rather ride into battle almost nude.”^29

The same generalization, but with admiration, was made later by Don

Juan Manuel ( 1282 – 1348 ) in his Libro de los Estados.^30 In other words,