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

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conferred upon the jenets could be read as evidence of honor and esteem,

then they might also be read as evidence of caution and unease. As in

the case of jenets captured by Aragonese villagers in 1290 , mentioned

above, the Crown was fully aware of the threats and challenges that these

soldiers faced when traveling around Christian territory.^87 Christian vil-

lagers regularly barred these soldiers from entering towns and violently

attacked them, sometimes raiding their camps in the middle of the night.^88

Thus, perhaps in granting these soldiers basic military and nonmilitary

necessities, the Aragonese kings may have hoped to minimize encounters

between its Christian subjects and the jenets.^89 From this perspective, such

privileges served to isolate these soldiers and made them dependent on

royal administrators.^90 In short, they did not mark the jenets as favorites

but rather exceptions.

This sense that the jenets were exceptional is further underscored by

the fact that the Crown also granted them the privilege of keeping the

king’s customary fifth or quinta of all war spoils.^91 Whereas other soldiers

were required to share their spoils with the king, the jenets were not. What

is more, Christians who raided alongside the jenets were required to give

a fifth of their spoils to the jenets, a fact that occasionally led to violent

confrontation within mixed companies, complicating any claim that these

were easy collaborations.^92 It is worth adding that this privilege was not

an Aragonese innovation but rather the customary right of the Marīnid

Ghuzāh. The Naṣrid rulers had always granted these soldiers their fifth

(khums) of all war spoils (ghanīma).^93 Thus, whereas salaries and other

privileges kept the jenets tightly bound to royal administrators, the fifth

share marked the jenets’ independence from them. By surrendering its

fifth of spoils, the Crown permitted the jenets to operate outside of its

purview and more problematically for the historian, outside of the view of

the chancery registers. Moreover, since these spoils may have outweighed

salaries, it could be argued that raiding rather than salaried service was

the principal motivation for jenets in entering the lands of the Crown of

Aragon. In other words, rather than as professional soldiers, who traded

their roles in the Granadan army for ones in the Aragonese army, jenets

might be seen as raiders and bandits, who belonged to neither kingdom.

Despite their crossing into the lands of the Crown of Aragon, they essen-

tially remained Ghuzāh.

Can one say, at least, that the jenets found some common ground at the

Aragonese court among elites of similar tastes and values? To see the gifts

of cloth that the jenets received as style as opposed to substance, as objects

that could freely move from Christian to Muslim bodies, overlooks the fact