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

66 chapter three

that clothing was freighted with spiritual and moral danger in the medieval

Crown of Aragon. Indeed, clothing was deeply bound up in social and re-

ligious identity throughout medieval and early modern Europe.^94 Clothes

were a matter of religious concern.^95 In other words, these gifts demand not

a sociological explanation but rather a soteriological one.^96 For instance,

Christian legislation specified how non- Christians should dress, comport

themselves, and wear their hair. The Customs of Tortosa stated: “Saracens

must wear their hair cut round and wear long beards, unlike the Christians,

and their outer garment must be the aljuba or almexia.”^97 The aljuba and

almexia— from the Arabic al- jubba and al- maḥshiya— were long tunics

worn over clothing, to mark the Mudéjar population as distinct and to pre-

vent miscegenation.^98 Subject Muslims were required to make these tunics

from plain cloth, underscoring their abject and inferior status.^99 Chris-

tians, in turn, were forbidden from wearing the aljuba or almexia at all.^100

One might protest that such sumptuary laws were more honored in the

breach than in the observance: evidence of punishments is rare, and the

punishments, when they exist, varied widely from fines to enslavement.^101

Nevertheless, Muslims and Jews regularly sought and received privileged

exceptions from these restrictions, indicating that even the arbitrary ap-

plication of these laws remained a threat.^102 In 1290 , for example, the king

wrote to his justices in Valencia to remind them that although the Jews

of Barcelona and Valencia were required to wear capes, two Jews of the

royal household, Abrahim Abennamies and Abrahim el Jenet, should not

be compelled to wear them.^103

From the perspective of these sumptuary laws, the fact that the Ara-

gonese kings presented elite jenets with not simply tunics but also rich and

colorful aljubas or what they sometimes called “Saracen” tunics is ambig-

uous at best. If, on the one hand, the sumptuous cloth implied the jenets’

freedom from the discriminatory laws that threatened non- Christian sub-

jects, on the other, the aljuba itself continued to mark them as Muslims.

In other words, one cannot say that these gifts were properly gestures of

inclusion or exclusion. Instead, they underscored the jenets’ exceptional

status within in the lands of the Crown of Aragon. The cultural account of

the relationship between the Aragonese kings and jenets, which empha-

sized their shared sense of community, conceals this meaning. It leaves “a

bit of undigested theology” in the throat.^104

The trouble with these tunics is placed in even sharper contrast by ex-

amining a later echo of the jenets, the Moorish Guard (guardia morisca) of

the fifteenth- century Castilian kings. In a period of even deeper hostility

towards Muslims and Jews, the Trastámara kings also maintained a corps