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

etymologies and etiologies 21

even if the Berber Zanāta inspired the term, it does not follow that the

thirteenth- century jenets were Zanāta.

To press this point as far as it goes: the etymology upon which Giménez

Soler relied in fact reflects this ambiguity precisely. Although philologists

and historians have generally accepted that the words jinete and genet (as

well as related terms) derive from Zanāta, the transformation of one word

into the other — Zanāta into jinete— presents a difficulty for linguists.^31 In

only one other case has an Arabic word with the letter zāy entered into

Cas tilian with a c or Catalan with an s. Thus, for instance, the name of the

Zanāta tribe was rendered in medieval Castilian as Cenete.^32 What the cu-

rious initial letter might suggest is that the path from the Arabic Zanāta

to jinete and genet was indirect, passing through some intermediary lan-

guage. Using contemporary evidence, Helmut Lüdtke has proposed that

the word was brought to Spain in the mouths and on the tongues of Berber

tribesmen, who pronounced the Arabic zāy in a fashion that more closely

approximated the Castilian j (ž) or Catalan g (ẑ) in jinete and genet.^33 While

this is a tempting and elegant explanation, the likeliest one, it also has

to be admitted that other paths remain open. Indeed, in the one other

case — the transformation of the Arabic zarafa (giraffe) into the Castilian

jirafa and the Catalan girafa— the Italian giraffa served as an intermedi-

a r y.^34 Thus, again, although the word jenet likely derived from the Berber

Zanāta, there is no reason to conclude that Berbers directly introduced

the term into Romance, or that the first jenets were themselves Zanāta. In

brief, this etymology tells us more about the importance of the style of the

jenets, their unacknowledged impact on military history, than about the

identity of the thirteenth- century jenets themselves.

A Threshold of Indistinction

Although they have never been employed in etymological studies, the ear-

liest references to the word jenet appear in the thirteenth- century Latin

and Romance sources of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon.^35 Before

examining this evidence, however, the words of Arlette Farge are worth

remembering: “History is never the simple repetition of archival content,

but a pulling away from it, in which we never stop asking how and why

these words came to wash ashore on the manuscript page.”^36

The records of the Crown of Aragon are a miracle of sorts.^37 Unlike

the French royal archives, they avoided destruction in the medieval and