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

26 chapter one

sense, it referred to the Berber inhabitants of North Africa, which is prom-

ising. The word functions in this manner in the anonymous Mozarabic

Chronicle of 754 , an eighth- century text written by Christians living under

Islamic rule in al- Andalus, which distinguishes consistently and accurately

between “Arabs and Moors (Arabes et Mauri),” the Arabs and Berbers,

among the Muslim invaders.^57 The Miraculos romanzados— which re-

cord miracles between 1232 and 1293 of Christians who escaped captivity

among Muslims through the intercession of Saint Dominic of Silos — make

mention of two “Moorish” captains of jenets who in 1283 terrorized the

Murcian frontier: “Zahem and Zahet Azenet came with a thousand horse-

men and killed two hundred Christians and took as many captive.”^58 The

name “Azenet” suggests that these men were Berber Zanāta tribesmen.

Moors, in other words, consistently seem to be Berbers.

Does this mean that when Aragonese royal administrators wrote “jenet”

in the thirteenth century, they understood that these soldiers were ethni-

cally Berber? In fact, there is some indication that they were making such

a distinction. For instance, in November 1290 , the Crown’s royal treasurer,

Arnaldus de Bastida, was ordered to issue two sets of payments, one to

a company of jenets and another to “certain Arab Saracens.”^59 Similarly,

on another occasion, in March 1291 , King Jaume II dispatched a letter to

an Arab soldier, “Mahomat, son of Abulgayri el Arabi,” agreeing to his

terms to bring “good Arab knights” into the Crown.^60 Nevertheless, among

the hundreds of documents referring to Muslim cavalry in the service of

the Crown, these are the only two occasions that refer specifically to Arab

cavalry as opposed to jenets, which might weaken the conviction that some-

thing deeper was at play. Moreover, not unlike the term jenet, “Moor”

shifted its meaning over the Middle Ages. In the twelfth- century Crónica

Najarense or the thirteenth- century Primera crónica general, “Moors” were

not simply Berbers but any and all Muslims living in the Iberian Peninsula.^61

Somewhere along the line, the matter- of- fact- sounding ethnic denomina-

tions of earlier texts had given way: “The Moors of the host wore silks and

colourful cloths which they had taken as booty, their horses’ reins were like

fire, their faces were black as pitch, the handsomest among them was black

as a cooking- pot.”^62 All the same, even if one argued that archival docu-

ments were less susceptible to confusion than literature, “Moor” gives us

only the impression that the jenets were Berbers, but not when and how

they arrived or who they were.

Relying on the Latin and Romance sources, even unexplored sources,

from the chancery registers, brings us only so far in our search of the ori-

gins of the jenets. For all the wealth of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon,