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

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a handful of other men, also royal administrators, dealt with the jenets.

The Crown’s grip on these soldiers, in other words, was relatively direct

and tight.

Despite obvious differences in language, the encounter with elite Ara-

gonese bureaucrats may have been familiar to the jenets. As a centralized

system for dealing with royal correspondence, land tenure, taxation, and

the military, the Crown’s nascent chancery mirrored the Marīnid dīwān al-

inshā’, with which the jenets would have been familiar.^9 The Crown’s key

legal instrument, the albaranum— a promissory note used to pay jenets—

derived its name and function from the Arabic al- barā’a, meaning the

same.^10 The jenets may have also seen something familiar and not strange

in the Crown’s reliance upon Jewish bureaucrats. Jewish administrators

served at both the Marīnid and Naṣrid courts.^11 What is more, Jews like

Samuel Abenmenassé, who spoke Arabic fluently, likely served under the

Almohads before serving the Aragonese, making them perfect interlocu-

tors and intermediaries. Finally, it should be added that even Christian

bureaucrats like Pere’s treasurer Arnaldus de Bastida would have been

very familiar with Muslim foreigners. Arnaldus dealt regularly not only

with the jenets but also with Muslim diplomats, captives, and slaves across

his career.^12 In short, the arrival of the jenets may have been a matter of

business as usual.

As members of a professional army, all jenets received a salary that

was managed centrally, as it would have been in the Marīnid dīwān. Dur-

ing the late thirteenth century, Arnaldus de Bastida personally handled

the vast majority of disbursements, paying the soldiers directly or, occa-

sionally, authorizing local officials to do so if time was limited.^13 Soldiers

or their companies were paid upon receipt of a promissory note (alba-

ranum). Determining the average monthly salary of a jenet based upon

these documents, however, poses several problems.^14 Not all promissory

notes given to jenets specify the number of months’ service or the number

of soldiers being compensated, and as the case of one jenet named Muçe

demonstrates, payments were occasionally made in installments.^15 To add

further confusion to the matter, the Crown of Aragon relied upon sev-

eral standards of currency.^16 In general, coinage followed the Carolingian

system: librae, solidi, and denarii.^17 However, each kingdom employed a

different standard: that of Jaca, Barcelona, or Valencia.^18 In addition, gold

coins, the Castilian dobla and Islamic dīnār, circulated and were used to

pay jenets on occasion.^19 Setting aside equivocal data, however, the hand-

ful of remaining documents indicates that a jenet earned approximately