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

54 chapter three

It was pecuniary nature of the professional or contractual bond, how-

ever, that led Machiavelli to warn rulers against relying upon mercenaries.

Nothing binds the soldier- for- hire, he said, nothing, that is, but greed.^1

Mercenaries are faithless (infedeli). In the case of the jenets, they were

rather literally infidels. So why did the Aragonese kings then put their

faith in the hands of non- Christians?

The arrival of the jenets in the armies of the Crown of Aragon coin-

cided with and accelerated the decline of the feudal army. In principle,

the Aragonese king could expect all his subjects to contribute to the de-

fense of his kingdoms without remuneration.^2 This obligation had been

enshrined, for instance, in the article “Princeps namque” of the twelfth-

century Usatges de Barcelona, the basic customs of Catalonia.^3 In this law

code, war was a matter of custom — grounded in rituals, in which vassals

kneeled and kissed, exchanged sweet words and signs, and swore alle-

giance to their lords — not business. Over the course of the late thirteenth

century, however, as the Aragonese kings embarked on a new path of sov-

ereign self- fashioning, bureaucratic centralization, and aggressive expan-

sion, this feudal system came under stress. Cash- starved kings replaced

feudal duties with war taxes and increasingly relied on salaried soldiers,

whom they could manage directly, resulting in a move toward smaller

armies and new military strategies.^4 Alongside and in parallel with the

royal administration, the military was professionalized in the service of an

emerging ideal of authority. Under these pressures, by the end of the thir-

teenth century, the demise of the feudal army seemed all but inevitable.

Joseph Strayer understood the emergence of professionals and bureau-

crats as part of the broader “laicization” of Europe, that is, the transfer of

power from the hands of religious clerics to educated laymen.^5

These laicizing trends were evident in the fact that upon arriving for

service in the lands of the Crown of Aragon, the jenets first met with royal

bureaucrats. Generally, they encountered the royal treasurer or in later

periods, the king’s master of accounts (maestre racional) from whom they

gathered a series of official documents — expenses, requisitions, prom-

issory notes, and marching orders — that may have been issued in both

Latin and Arabic.^6 At first irregularly but later more systematically, these

slips were then copied into the chancery registers or account books, where

the historian can now find them. What one discovers is that King Pere’s

treasurer, Arnaldus de Bastida, interacted almost exclusively with the jen-

ets through 1294.^7 After this period, Guillelmus Dufort, who was master

of accounts after Conrad Lancia, played this central role for a while.^8 Only