CHAPTER ONE
The scholar reading through the chancery registers in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, turning page after page of brittle paper, will find the Latin and Romance terms jenetus and genet (as well as a handful of other orthographic variants) scattered throughout the copious thirteenth- and fourteenth-century documentation, terms referring to certain but not all Muslim soldiers. By and large, historians have ignored these words in this context. In his handwritten, partial eighteenth-century catalog to the registers—the only such guide for contemporary researchers—the archivist Jeroni Alterachs y Avarilló mistakenly read jenet as a surname belonging to a Mudéjar, a subject Muslim.1 And thus, these soldiers have remained mostly buried in these paper books. Only four scholars have seen something more.2
In these four earlier studies, however, the identity of the jenets has been a matter of confusion. For Andrés Giménez Soler, writing in 1905, their origin seemed obvious: they were Zanāta Berbers from North Africa. He saw the word jenet as a Romanization of the name of the tribe.3 In 1927, when Faustino Gazulla wrote a second study of the jenets, he followed his predecessor on the matter of origin. A significant entanglement, however, arises from this etymological claim. To say that the jenets were Zanāta Berbers—a broad ethnic category—is only slightly more revealing than calling them North African. After all, from which Zanāta tribes did they come? And how, when, and why did they end up in the Iberian Peninsula?4 The two more recent studies have challenged this North African origin. In 1978, Elena Lourie suggested that the jenets were in fact Iberian Muslim cavalry soldiers, members of the Banū Ishqalyūla who had rebelled against the Naṣrid rulers of Muslim Granada and were therefore predisposed to trade allegiances.5 And in 2003, Brian Catlos suggested that although the word jenet derived from the name of the Berber tribe, by the thirteenth century it “became a generic term for all foreign Muslim soldiers.”6 Each of these possibilities would lead to drastically different readings of this history. Therefore, it is worth asking the deceptively simple question: Who were the jenets?
Jennets for Germans
The confusion surrounding and scant scholarly attention upon the jenets stands in sharp contrast to the wide diffusion of the term and its linguistic descendants across the early modern and modern periods.7 Tracing the word forward from the Middle Ages reveals a rapid dilation of its meaning and a web of significations. In thirteenth-century Iberian Latin and Romance sources, the first to use the term, jenet referred only to specific Muslim soldiers and their military accoutrements: jenet saddles, jenet stirrups, and jenet lances. However opaque to readers centuries later, the word had been precise in this context. By the early modern period, jenet had already expanded in meaning, referring to both Muslim and Christian cavalry, the so-called jinetes, who rode in the fashion of these earlier soldiers. According to Covarrubias in his 1611 dictionary, the Tesoro, it meant “a man on horseback, who fights with a spear and a leather shield, his feet gathered into short stirrups, which do not reach below the belly of the horse.”8 And by the time one reaches modern Castilian and Catalan, even this degree of specificity had dissolved. The linguistic descendants of jenet—the Castilian jinete and the Catalan genet—simply and generically mean “horseman,” a fact that might explain why so many scholars have passed over the term in earlier sources: it seemed unremarkable and obvious. Precisely because of this linguistic genericide, a steady semantic slippage toward generality, I have chosen to use the term jenet (a truncated form of the Latin jenetus) in order to refer to this particular thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Muslim cavalryman, to avoid confusion with these later variants.
Beyond the Iberian Peninsula, particularly in French and English, the term evolved differently, demonstrating again how “the words of things entangle and confuse.”9 From at least the early modern period, the term transferred its meaning from rider to mount: jennet refers to a diminutive and much prized horse or palfrey (roncino) of mixed Spanish and North African stock.10 That detail makes sense of Iago’s famous barb about Othello: “[Y]ou’ll have/coursers for cousins and jennets for germans!”11 The breeding of jennet horses made them a ready symbol of not only racial transgression but also sexual excess throughout early modern literature, propelling the semantic afterlife of the jenets forward in new ways: “A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud,” according to Venus and Adonis; “Glew’d like a neighing Gennet to her Stallion,” for salacious Massinger in Renegado; or in Fletcher’s Thierry and Theodoret, “power they may love, and like Spanish Jennetts Commit with such a gust.”12 It is worth mentioning that hippological metaphors for race were not an innovation of early modern literature. In late medieval Iberia, the Castilian word raza—from which the English “race” derives—referred first to the breeding of horses before it moved to men.13 But jennet horses were not only “good to think” in the early modern and modern periods.14 They also carried the Spanish conquistadors to the New World. Wealthy European gentlemen prized them for their speed and strength as well as their multitude of colors and patterns, their beauty, which made them a regular feature in eighteenth-century portraiture and literature. In Ivanhoe, for instance, one reads: “A lay brother, one of those who followed in the train, had, for his use upon other occasions, one of the most handsome Spanish jennets ever bred in Andalusia, which merchants used at that time to import, with great trouble and risk, for the use of persons of wealth and distinction.”15 And if only for the irrepressible pleasure of pulling a loose thread, even later in English, the word also attached itself to a mule, the modern jenny. Thus, from jenets riding mules, we come to jenets as mules.
FIGURE 1. Granello-Tavaron-Castello y Cambiasso, Battle of Higueruela (1431). Skirmish of the Jinetes. Monasterio-Pintura, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid. Photograph: Album / Art Resource, New York.
The contorted afterlife of the word jenet is rather like the scattershot cosmic microwave background, the remnants of an explosion, in this case, one that leads back to the medieval Iberian Peninsula. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Christian Iberian knights rode into battle in the manner of heavy cavalry. They sat low in their saddles, anchored with their legs outstretched—a style known as a la brida—in order to bear the weight of their armor and long lances.16 And while these soldiers were expensive and slow, like high-maintenance armored vehicles, they could deliver granite blows to their enemies. Although the cause of this transformation is not well understood, by the late medieval or early modern period in Iberia and Europe more widely, this style had shifted.17 The majority of Iberian Christian knights were now lightly armored. They rode smaller horses, bearing the so-called jineta saddle, with a low pommel and short stirrups, which allowed them to stand when in gallop. These saddles also gave cavalry soldiers the striking appearance of having their legs trussed beneath them, like chickens heading to the oven, making them readily identifiable and easily distinguishable from heavy cavalry in the famous sixteenth-century murals depicting the Battle of Higueruela (1431) in the Sala de Batallas of the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial (fig. 1). This new Spanish knight carried a short throwing lance, called a jineta, as well as small leather shield, called an adarga (derived from the Arabic daraqa, meaning “shield”).18 His military advantage lay in the ability to attack and flee, a tactic known as tornafuye, which allowed him to harass and scatter heavy cavalry without engaging them directly.19 As sixteenth- and seventeenth-century riding manuals like Tapia y Salcedo’s Exercicios de la gineta demonstrate, the steady diffusion of this style—appropriately called a la jineta—led to the decline of heavy cavalry, which had dominated Iberia.20 Indeed, so thorough and successful was this revolution that eventually in Spain jinete and genet simply came to mean horseman.21
As is well attested to in Arabic sources, this lightly armed style of riding as well as the tactic of attacking and fleeing (known as al-karr wa’l-farr) began among the Arabs and Berbers of North Africa, in particular members of the Zanāta tribes.22 According to the eleventh-century historian Ibn Ḥayyān (d. 1097), lightly armored Berber troops rode on saddles with low pommels, the so-called sarj ‘udwiyy (racing saddle), that allowed them greater maneuverability on horseback.23 While seeing this technique as strategically and morally inferior to closed formations, which had been the style employed by the early Islamic armies, Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) confirmed that light cavalry was the only style employed in the Maghrib in his time: “Fighting in closed formation (zaḥf) is steadier and fiercer than attacking and fleeing. . . . [But] the fighting of people of their country [i.e., North Africa] is all attacking and fleeing.”24
This North African origin was not lost upon early modern Spaniards. In 1599, Juan de Mariana recommended the technique for training Christian princes while nevertheless admitting its “Moorish (Mauricae)” derivation.25 A year later, Bernardo de Vargas Machuca bragged of this style’s effectiveness in combatting the “barbarians” of the New World while also acknowledging—without a hint of irony—the fact that the Berbers, who were once Greece’s quintessential “barbarians,” had first innovated this technique: “Although it is true that Barbary (Berberia) first gave it to Spain, and Spain to the Indies, it has been perfected here more than elsewhere.”26 And Covarrubias recorded that some in his time ascribed the style specifically to “a certain nation or caste of Arabs called ‘Cenetas’ or ‘Cenetes,’ who lived in the mountains of Africa.”27 Despite the willingness of Spanish noblemen and princes to adapt and adopt this Moorish style, the popularity of riding a la jineta struck foreign travelers to Spain as something strange and exotic.28 So, the thirteenth-century jenets stood at the heart of the transfer of this effective but culturally troubling cavalry style to the Iberian Peninsula, a significant military transformation in need of an explanation. And it thus might make sense to leap to the conclusion, as Giménez Soler did in 1905, that the jenets were Zanāta Berbers.
There are at least two problems with this leap. First, as noted earlier, to say that the jenets were Zanāta Berbers—a broad ethnic group—reveals little. Second, given the wide-ranging path of the term jenet, one must ask: by the time the word reached the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, had it already swung out of orbit, coming to signify the light style of riding over the ethnicity of the rider? For instance, writing in the thirteenth century, Ramon Lull (ca. 1232–1315), the Mallorcan mystic, described all Iberian Muslim cavalry—not just Berbers—as lightly armed: “They neither arm their bodies nor horses but rather ride into battle almost nude.”29 The same generalization, but with admiration, was made later by Don Juan Manuel (1282–1348) in his Libro de los Estados.30 In other words, even if the Berber Zanāta inspired the term, it does not follow that the thirteenth-century jenets were Zanāta.
To press this point as far as it goes: the etymology upon which Giménez Soler relied in fact reflects this ambiguity precisely. Although philologists and historians have generally accepted that the words jinete and genet (as well as related terms) derive from Zanāta, the transformation of one word into the other—Zanāta into jinete—presents a difficulty for linguists.31 In only one other case has an Arabic word with the letter zāy entered into Castilian with a c or Catalan with an s. Thus, for instance, the name of the Zanāta tribe was rendered in medieval Castilian as Cenete.32 What the curious initial letter might suggest is that the path from the Arabic Zanāta to jinete and genet was indirect, passing through some intermediary language. Using contemporary evidence, Helmut Lüdtke has proposed that the word was brought to Spain in the mouths and on the tongues of Berber tribesmen, who pronounced the Arabic zāy in a fashion that more closely approximated the Castilian j (ž) or Catalan g (ẑ) in jinete and genet.33 While this is a tempting and elegant explanation, the likeliest one, it also has to be admitted that other paths remain open. Indeed, in the one other case—the transformation of the Arabic zarafa (giraffe) into the Castilian jirafa and the Catalan girafa—the Italian giraffa served as an intermediary.34 Thus, again, although the word jenet likely derived from the Berber Zanāta, there is no reason to conclude that Berbers directly introduced the term into Romance, or that the first jenets were themselves Zanāta. In brief, this etymology tells us more about the importance of the style of the jenets, their unacknowledged impact on military history, than about the identity of the thirteenth-century jenets themselves.
A Threshold of Indistinction
Although they have never been employed in etymological studies, the earliest references to the word jenet appear in the thirteenth-century Latin and Romance sources of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon.35 Before examining this evidence, however, the words of Arlette Farge are worth remembering: “History is never the simple repetition of archival content, but a pulling away from it, in which we never stop asking how and why these words came to wash ashore on the manuscript page.”36
The records of the Crown of Aragon are a miracle of sorts.37 Unlike the French royal archives, they avoided destruction in the medieval and modern periods, providing us with a near continuous record of the Barcelonan counts and Aragonese kings’ activities through the fifteenth century. The earliest documentation relates to the ninth-century counts of Barcelona, and the first explicit mention of an “archive,” which is to say, of a conscious effort to maintain royal documents, dates to the reign of King Alfons I (r. 1164–1196). Across its history, the Crown’s administrators held on to royal letters, account books, court records, and an often-overlooked but vital collection of Arabic charters, the so-called Cartas árabes, which hold correspondence with and from Muslim rulers. Nevertheless, the importance of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon rests principally upon the wealth of its paper registers, a wealth that borders on scribomania. After the conquest of Islamic Valencia (and its paper mills) in 1236, and in imitation of the Papacy and French kings, King Jaume I (r. 1213–1276) adopted this practice of maintaining registers. Jaume’s registers, thirty-three in total, begin as brief but increasingly become more extensive summaries of the most important letters and orders sealed and dispatched by the royal chancery.38 Jaume’s successor and son, King Pere II (r. 1276–1285), later redacted these early records, raising the specter of manipulation, but he also recognized the value of these records and expanded the practice of keeping registers. At this stage, organizational habits remained inchoate. Rather than self-consciously burnishing the image of the king, the first eighty registers record unexpected details such as what the prince and princess ate and wore each day. This remained the practice until King Jaume II, whose reign (r. 1291–1327) corresponded with the greatest expansion of royal power and administrative prowess. He ordered all the existing registers as well as records from the royal treasurers, some of which remained in the private hands, be brought under one roof, an archive in the former chapel of Great Royal Palace.39 Simultaneously, he ordered royal scribes to copy systematically and completely all correspondence, leading to the production of 342 registers. By the reign of Alfons III (r. 1327–1336), these paper registers would grow in size to 1,240, becoming impossible for a single scholar to survey, particularly in the absence of a catalog. This shifting terrain of paper is our principal source for the early history of the jenets, where we first find them riding. What do these Latin and Romance registers reveal about these Muslim soldiers?
Although Faustino Gazulla began his study of the jenets in the year 1284, a watershed moment after which the Crown’s use of these soldiers dramatically increased, the jenets’ Aragonese story does not in fact begin here but earlier, at the end of King Jaume I’s reign and at the very beginning of King Pere II’s.40 These were precisely the unstable moments when these records were coming into existence, a fact that complicates a search for origins, an etiology.
The final years of Jaume’s reign were troubled. Inspired by an invitation from the Mongol Khan and a desire to curry favor with Pope Clement IV (r. 1265–1268), Jaume planned and led a crusading expedition to the Holy Land in 1269.41 It ended in failure when the king and the majority of his host prematurely disembarked at the marshy port of Aigues-Mortes in Southern France. Rumors spread that Jaume had landed because he wished to return to his mistress, adding insult to injury. Stung, Jaume tried to muster support for a new crusade at the Council of Lyon in 1274 but, once more, had little success. At home, he fared even worse, facing querulous barons: their criticisms of royal power had crystallized around Jaume’s taxes to support Castile in its war against Muslim Granada. Tired, it seems, of the king’s efforts to play the crusader at their expense, the barons revolted. Although Jaume’s instinct was to show leniency and negotiate, his aggressive son Pere crushed the baronial rebellion in 1275, displaying a penchant for violent force that would carry into his kingship.42 This fire was temporarily put out, but a worse one flared.
Although known as el Conqueridor, that is, “the Conqueror,” for his capture of the former Almohad province of Valencia, Jaume’s epithet-granting achievement became his undoing.43 After decades of unrest, and following closely on the heels of a similar revolt in Castile-controlled Murcia (1264–1266), a Muslim uprising under the leadership of al-Azraq, “the Blue,” erupted in 1275 and threatened to overturn Aragonese rule.44 The aged king died on June 27, 1276, at Valencia, uncertain of the kingdom’s future. The famous inscription on Jaume’s tomb, “He always prevailed over the Saracens,” was only added a century later.45 The future king Pere left the battlefront briefly several months after Jaume’s death to be crowned and then labored on, effectively having to conquer the kingdom for a second time. He extinguished the Mudéjar rebellions and reduced al-Azraq to a half-forgotten myth. Robert Ignatius Burns suggested that one still hears a hint of al-Azraq in the bogeyman of contemporary Valencian children’s tales, el Drach. “¡Que vindra el Drach!” say admonishing mothers to their wayward children.46
With a single exception, to which I return later, the jenets first appear in the records of the Crown of Aragon during events surrounding these Muslim uprisings in Murcia and Valencia—not as soldiers of the Crown of Aragon but rather as invaders into its kingdoms. Speaking of the Murcian rebellion, which threatened Castile, King Jaume recorded in his autobiography, the Llibre dels feyts:
And we had already heard that the king of Castile [Alfonso X (r. 1252–1284)] had fallen out with the king of Granada [Muḥammad I (r. 1232–1273) of the Naṣrids] and that the king of Granada had, for a long time, had recourse to the Moors on the other side of the sea; and that jenets had crossed to his land and could take all the king of Castile’s land.47
Jaume specifies that these jenet soldiers were from “the other side of the sea (d’allèn mar),” a claim corroborated by the fourteenth-century Castilian Crónica del Alfonso XI, which adds, “they say these were the first jenet knights that crossed the sea.”48 In his Llibre dels feyts, Jaume also tells us something of their numbers and movements, which he observed with concern:
While we were in Oriola, where we stayed well for eight days, one night two almogàvers [fighters who specialized in cross-border raids on Grenada] of Lorca came to us, and knocked on our door near midnight. They reported to us that eight hundred jenets, with two thousand loaded mules and two thousand men-at-arms guarding them, were entering supplies into Murcia.49
During the Muslim rebellion in the kingdom of Valencia a decade later, the jenets appeared again. In this case, King Pere moved to contain the threat. In a circular dated May 15, 1277, to the vicars and bailiffs of Gerona, Besalú, and other locations, Pere ordered export restrictions:
Because in the kingdom of Valencia many of the jenets have risen up, and the alcaydus and Saracens of the castle of Montesa have broken the agreements that we had with them for the restitution of this castle; therefore, we are at war with them. We order you immediately to forbid the export from our land to any parts horses or large palfreys under the penalty of the loss of said horses and palfreys.50
And although such export restrictions were not usual, Pere does specify that these foreign cavalry soldiers were a central threat. Palfreys (roncinos) were preferred by the jenets. Nevertheless, like Jaume before him, Pere reveals little about the identity of these soldiers. They are distinguished from the “Saracens” of Valencia—which is to say, the Mudéjares. These subject Muslims are cited for having “broken agreements” and failing to deliver a castle to the king, complaints that have the tempered air of feudal disloyalty rather than religious contempt. In the same vein, King Jaume had referred to al-Azraq, the leader of the Mudéjar rebellion, as “our traitor (proditor noster).”51 In other words, from the perspective of the Crown of Aragon, the Mudéjares were definitively insiders—disloyal and treacherous but feudal subjects nonetheless. Their treason was not only rebellion but also conspiracy with outsiders:
The Saracens [of Valencia] rebelled with soldiers from castles and forts against the Lord King and his land, leading, moreover, Saracen spies from Granada and North Africa into Valencia at the greatest cost and dishonor to his land and all of Christendom.52
Only in speaking of the Mudéjares in this second sense—as conspirators—did King Pere’s language take on the cast of eschatology, presenting them as enemies of Christendom.
The jenets, by contrast, are never spoken of as rebels. In fact, they are never spoken of as the king’s subjects or, indeed, subjects of any one king or kingdom in these early documents. While some appear to be attached to specific castles within Valencia, others, one learns from war reports, have entered Valencia by land from Naṣrid Granada or by sea from North Africa during the rebellion.53 A surrender treaty—negotiated directly with Mudéjar leaders—reveals, moreover, that the Crown was fully aware of the jenets’ disaggregated organization.54 At the end of August 1276, Pere signed an agreement with “shaykh Abrurdriz Hyale Abenayech, knight Abenzumayr Abenzaquimeran, and the wazīr Abulfaratx Asbat,” who represented several castles in Valencia. The Muslim leaders would pay the Aragonese king an unspecified amount and vacate their strongholds within three months. And significantly, they agreed that none of their “jenets and other cavalry of Moors, in this land, in Granada, or any other place . . . would do harm to the kingdom of Valencia or any other part of the king’s land.”55 In addition to confirming that the jenets were scattered “in this land,” “in Granada,” and indeed, “any other place,” the surrender treaty appears to insist that the jenets were a particular and distinct form of cavalry—different from “other cavalry of Moors”—although in what sense remains unclear.
What might the term Moor tell us about the jenets? Although the origins of this word are unknown—perhaps Semitic (mahourím) or Greek (Μαύροίςτιος)—by the classical period, the Latin Mauri indicated the inhabitants of the Roman provinces of Mauretania.56 And at least in a general sense, it referred to the Berber inhabitants of North Africa, which is promising. 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 record 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 horsemen 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 ethnically 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 something 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 denominations 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 documents 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 origins of the jenets. For all the wealth of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, it cannot be used unproblematically as a window onto the past. It inevitably reflected a certain perspective on the world, that of the royal court, and one that in this early period is partial or inchoate at best. We, the solitary readers, holding these remarkable papers some eight hundred years later, can only join the story in that epic fashion, in the middle of things.
A Curious Embrace
Arabic sources present new opportunities to break through this impasse and new challenges. Although we find a great deal written about the Berbers of North Africa, by and large our sources are chronicles rather than archives. These narratives served and responded to different pressures than the documents in the chancery registers and also cannot be used as a window onto the past. The earliest accounts of North Africa, for instance, were filled with embellishments and legends that coded political and ethnic tensions between Arabs and Berbers.63 From the tenth century onward, however, written materials on the Berbers increased. And of these sources, the most thorough and complete, the Kitāb al-‘ibar (The Book of Lessons) of Ibn Khaldūn, a near contemporary of the jenets, devoted its longest section to a description of the Zanāta.64 At different stages of his life, Ibn Khaldūn served in the major courts of North Africa and al-Andalus, giving him a unique but complicated vantage point.
A great deal has been written about Ibn Khaldūn, and it is worth reiterating some of those arguments.65 Nineteenth-century European Arabists stressed Ibn Khaldūn’s exceptional status and his rather unorthodox opinions. They cast him as a premodern materialist and as the father of secular social science.66 Aziz al-Azmeh and others have strongly rejected these approaches. Although Ibn Khaldūn pursued a rational explanation of historical and religious development, his views were, in fact, traditional and unexceptional for his period, which is to say that they were fully compatible with a widely held understanding of divinity in medieval Islam and with his position as an Islamic jurist (faqīh).67
Nevertheless, his Kitāb al-‘ibar is somewhat unusual, and self-consciously so. What began as a conventional introduction to his theory of history developed into a universal history, a detailed elaboration of the cyclical nature of society, in which nomadic and tribal groups settle, lose their spirit of cohesion (‘aṣabiyya), and are overtaken by hardier ones.68 This dynamic not only shaped Ibn Khaldūn’s exposition of history but also explains why he emphasized the centrality and vitality of nomadic warriors such as the Zanāta to the universal mission of Islam.69 Thus below, wherever possible, I have attempted to balance Ibn Khaldūn’s text with other sources.
In his time, Ibn Khaldūn described the Zanāta as an ethnic grouping comprising numerous tribes that dominated the central Maghrib (contemporary Morocco and Algeria), so numerous, in fact, that the entire region was colloquially known as the “land of the Zanāta (waṭan al-zanāta).”70 He roughly divided the history of these tribes into two periods of ascendancy, key examples of his recurrent cycle: in the tenth century, under the Maghrāwa (specifically, the Banū Khazar and Banū Yifran), and again, in the thirteenth century, under the two great Berber dynasties, the Marīnids (Banū Marīn) and the ‘Abd al-Wādids (also known as the Zayyānids).
In that first period, according to Ibn Khaldūn, although these tribes were composed of a variety of transhumant stockbreeders, cultivators, and city dwellers, the Zanāta had already developed a singular reputation for their formidable warriors, above all their cavalry (fāris, pl. fursān), who were lightly armed and specialized in raiding.71 The Zanāta, in particular the Maghrāwa tribe, formed the backbone of the Andalusī Umayyad’s resistance against the Fāṭimids, shī‘īs, who—supported by the traditional rivals of the Zanāta, the Ṣanhāja—were making inroads into central North Africa.72 And although the Zanāta eventually agreed to become clients of the Umayyad Caliphs, as Ibn Khaldūn described, this alliance involved a curious embrace of reciprocal manipulation.73 Ruling from a distance, the Umayyads played the various Zanāta tribes off of one another, showering honors and titles on one chief in order to incite the jealousy of others.74 Through this policy, engineered by the ambitious chamberlain (ḥājib) and later sultan, Ibn Abī ‘Āmir al-Manṣūr (Almanzor in contemporary Spanish sources), the Umayyads pursued a short-lived but failed imperial project in North Africa.75 For their part, the Zanāta chiefs, above all those of the Maghrāwa, turned this strategy to their own advantage by using the threat of rebellion to negotiate for land grants (iqṭā‘), rights, and honors.76
Throughout this first period of ascendancy, the Umayyads recruited Zanāta and Ṣanhāja troops into al-Andalus, that is, into the Iberian Peninsula.77 They referred to these new troops generically as the Tangerines (Ṭanjiyyūn) because they arrived from the port of Tangiers. And in the period of the Caliph al-Ḥakam II al-Mustanṣir (r. 961–976), these paid troops entirely displaced Arab Syrian armies, becoming the dominant force on the Muslim-Christian frontier. Simultaneously, the Berber tribes also became a powerful political force in al-Andalus. Their involvement in the succession crisis following the death of al-Ḥakam II led to a civil war (fitna), the bloody sack of Cordoba—which had actively resisted the Berber candidate—in 1013, and ultimately, the downfall of the Umayyad Caliphate in al-Andalus.
It is worth underscoring, again, that Ibn Khaldūn’s version of these events is refracted through the prism of the politics of fourteenth-century North Africa, a period and region with a strong identification with the Berber past. And in this sense, as M’hammad Benaboud and Ahmad Tahiri have warned, his clear distinctions between Andalusīs and Berbers as well as the seeming solidity of tribes should be approached with caution.78 All the same, two broad conclusions can be drawn from this material. First, a large and influential contingent of Zanāta soldiers settled permanently on the Christian-Islamic frontier in Iberia in the tenth century, more than two centuries before the chancery registers of the Crown of Aragon began. Second, the Umayyad-Zanāta history also reveals a mutually coercive dynamic—between royal court and warrior—that would echo throughout the history of the jenets in Islamic and Christian lands.
Zanāta Kingdoms
Ibn Khaldūn’s first period of Zanāta ascendency ended with the rise of the Almoravids (al-Murābiṭūn) in the eleventh century, backed by Ṣanhāja Berbers, and subsequently the Almohads in the twelfth century, supported by Maṣmūda Berbers.79 During the periods of Almoravid and Almohad rule in North Africa and al-Andalus, the Zanāta tribes found themselves widely dispersed: some, like the Maghrāwa, who had dominated the first period, were entirely destroyed; others submitted to the new powers; and yet others declared short-lived independence on the frontiers.80 According to Ibn Khaldūn, the old Zanāta tribes showed little desire or ability to rise above this condition: “They are, up to this day, a people taxed and besieged by states.”81 Only with the collapse of the Almohad power, Ibn Khaldūn explains, did a new set of Zanāta tribes—the Marīnids and ‘Abd al-Wādids—a “second wave (al-ṭabaqa al-thāniyya),” untouched by luxury, seize the opportunity to build new states:
[The Zanāta] remained in that land [the desert], wrapped in clothes of pride (mushtamilīn lubūs al-‘izz) and ceaseless disdain (mustamirrīn li’l-anafa [sic]) for others. The majority of their earnings were from livestock (an‘ām wa’l-māshiya), and they satisfied their desires for wealth by pillaging travelers (ibtighā’ahum al-rizq min taḥayyuf al-sābila) and by the ends of the spears (fī ẓill al-rimāḥ al-mushra‘a). They made war with other tribes, fought against other nations and states, and had victorious battles over kings, of which little is known. . . . During these ancient periods (al-aḥqāb al-qadīm), no king of this generation of Zanāta encouraged men of letters (ahl al-kitāb) to record events or write history (taqyīd ayyāmihim wa-tadwīn akhbārihim).82
While this stylized description emphasizes the military prowess of these new tribes, reflecting his basic typology, Ibn Khaldūn’s image of the Berbers as marauding nomads, innocent of civilization (what he calls ‘umrānḥaḍārī) in fact fits poorly with the story he tells.83 In the period before the Almohad collapse, the ‘Abd al-Wādids had already established an alliance with the Almohad Caliphs; their foundation of a kingdom at Tlemcen (Tilimsān) reflected only one of many ways their rule developed out of Almoravid and Almohad models.84 For their part, the Marīnids, based in Fez (Fās), employed religious ideals to their advantage by establishing alliances with religious leaders in urban centers, building madrasas, and establishing a messianic mission through jihād.85 In other words, these redoubtable Zanāta tribes of the “second wave” were canny and well suited to take advantage of the religious and political situation of the Maghrib and the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the thirteenth century.
The appearance of these new Zanāta kingdoms reminds us that in the decades preceding 1284—the year when the jenets begin to appear in the records of the Crown of Aragon in large numbers—the political order of North Africa shifted dramatically (map 4). From the wreck of the Almohad Empire, three new successors—the Ḥafṣids (an offshoot of the Almohads) at Tunis, the ‘Abd al-Wādids at Tlemcen, and Marīnids at Fez—emerged, effecting a profound shift in the political and commercial landscape of the western Mediterranean. The Ḥafṣids declared themselves independent in 1229, and the ‘Abd al-Wādids in 1239. The Marīnids dealt the final blows, conquering Marrakesh (Marrākush) in 1269 and Tīnmallal, the sacred center of the Almohads in the Atlas Mountains, seven years later. While only the latter two were Zanāta, all three employed Zanāta cavalrymen, which is to say, all or any of the three could have been the source of the Muslim soldiers called jenets.86
The rivalry between these three states produced a complex array of diplomatic arrangements with Christian Iberian kings. For instance, despite their initial hostility during the Aragonese conquests of the Balearics (1229) and Valencia (1238), the Ḥafṣids eventually developed a consistent and pacific relationship with the Crown of Aragon, continuing up to 1282.87 This relationship developed out of and depended upon the influence already established by Christian adventurers—merchants, missionaries, renegades, and soldiers—who lived at or attended the Ḥafṣid court.88 Aragonese soldiers, in particular, helped to defend Tunis from its predatory neighbors, both Christian and Muslim. In 1285, at Coll de Panissars, where the five jenets riding mules were headed, King Pere agreed to a monumental fifteen-year peace with Tunis, temporarily defusing the emerging tension between them.89
Like the Ḥafṣids, the ‘Abd al-Wādids sought alliances across the Mediterranean to defend themselves against their ambitious neighbor, the Marīnid sultan.90 A powerful contingent of Christian soldiers, including the captain “Bīrnabas,” served valiantly in the struggle against the Marīnids and facilitated connections between the ‘Abd al-Wādids and the Christian Iberian kingdoms.91 The tripartite alliance between the ‘Abd al-Wādids, Castilians, and Naṣrids against the Marīnids ended abruptly with the death of the founder of the ‘Abd al-Wādid dynasty, AbūYaḥyā Yaghmurāsan, in 1283. At the advice of his ailing father, Abū Sa‘īd ‘Uthmān b. Yaghmurāsan (r. 1283–1304) decided to sue for peace with the Marīnids.92 Thus, by 1285, the ‘Abd al-Wādids had taken an introverted posture, hoping that the sultan of Fez would focus his attention elsewhere.
The Marīnids followed a different path from the Ḥafṣids or ‘Abd al-Wādids. With the exception of the year 1274—when they struck a brief alliance with the Aragonese king—the Marīnids were openly hostile toward both the Crown of Aragon and Castile.93 The sultan Abū Yūsuf (r. 1258–1286) displayed a particular passion for jihād and conducted four expeditions for the purpose of aiding the Mudéjares in 1275, 1276, 1283, and 1284: “From the beginning, the commander of the Muslims, Abū Yūsuf, was disposed to perform jihād (kāna . . . mu’thiran ‘amal al-jihād), addicted to it (kalifan bi-hi), and opting for it (mukhtāran lahu) to such a degree that it became the greatest of his hopes.”94 The anonymous al-Dhakhīra al-saniyya described in vivid terms the appearance of the first Marīnid army as it departed for Spain:
In the year 674 (1275 CE) on the first day of Muḥarram, the commander of the Muslims Abū Yūsuf arrived at the Fortress of the Crossing (qaṣr al-majāz) and settled there. He undertook transporting the holy warriors to al-Andalus with swift horses (bi’l-khayl al-‘itāq), equipment (al-‘udda), and weapons. It was a mercy of God that every day crossed a tribe of the Banū Marīn and groups of volunteers (muṭṭawwi‘ūn) as well as tribes of Arabs. . . . [T]hey crossed, company after company (fawjan ba‘da fawj), tribe after tribe, group after group. The boats and ships journeyed morning and evening from the break of day to night (kānat al-marākib wa’l-sufun ghādiyāt wa-rā’iḥātānā’ al-layl wa-aṭrāf al-nahār) from the crossing to Tarifa (Ṭarīf), and they crowded the passage (ma‘bar): “They crossed morning and evening to assault the foe/As if the ocean were a pavement for their steeds,/With the seaweed bearing the chargers up/As if the two shores were joined together,/And all had become a single causeway to tread.” And when all had crossed and had settled (istaqarrū) in al-Andalus, the Muslim armies spread from the city of Tarifa to Algeciras, then Abū Yūsuf crossed last with his noblemen, ministers, officials of state, along with a group of holy men (ṣulaḥā’) of the Maghrib.95
Thus, in the period of the Muslim uprisings in Murcia and Valencia—which is to say, when jenets first begin to appear in the records of the Crown of Aragon—Abū Yūsuf had transferred a large body of volunteer and salaried Zanāta and Arab troops onto the Iberian Peninsula. He had established a beachhead at Algeciras, where he constructed the fortress, al-Binya (“the Edifice”) not only to house these soldiers but also to isolate them and thus protect the local populations from their depredations.96
According to Ibn Khaldūn, the Marīnid attack began with a vanguard of five thousand cavalry soldiers, whom he simply calls “the Zanāta,” under the command of Abū Ya‘qūb, the sultan’s son. The expedition ravaged the frontier, and in these raids, Ibn Khaldūn adds, the Zanāta knights distinguished themselves: “The Zanāta once more showed their clear-sightedness and determination; their zeal was roused. They proved their loyalty to their lord (ablat fī ṭā‘a rabbihim) and were restless in the cause of their religion.”97 Were these Marīnid soldiers the jenets first mentioned in the chancery registers as invaders? During Abū Yūsuf’s third incursion in April 1284, King Pere sent the following letter to the Master of the Templars and various castellans:
We know for certain that jenets and armies of the King of Morocco [i.e., Abū Yūsuf] and many others are coming shortly to inflict harm to the kingdom of Valencia. Therefore, we tell, urge, demand, and counsel you to prepare yourselves and your soldiers, weapons, foodstuffs, and other equipment for the defense of the aforementioned kingdom.98
Pere’s warning explicitly connects the jenets to Abū Yūsuf’s jihād. This connection not only provides an explanation for the jenets’ appearance during the Valencian uprising but also suggests that the term jenet or Zanāta, as Ibn Khaldūn used it, functioned in a broad rather than ethnic or tribal sense, as a synecdoche for the Marīnid cavalry, composed, as the Dhakhīra noted, of both Berber and Arab soldiers from the Maghrib. Thus, we can identify some of the hostile jenets in the Iberian Peninsula as members of the Marīnid cavalry.
When Abū Yūsuf departed the Maghrib for his fourth jihād in August 1284, however, Marīnid ambition in al-Andalus was already waning. After the death of King Alfonso X in April 1284, the Castilians petitioned for and eventually signed a peace with Fez. This treaty removed levies on the merchandise of Muslim traders, forbade Christians from meddling in the affairs of Muslims (tark al-taḍrīb bayn mulūk al-muslimīn wa’l-dukhūl baynahum fī fitna), and perhaps reflecting an awareness of new translation and missionizing efforts by the Dominicans, requested that all Arabic science books (kutūb al-‘ilm) that had fallen into Christian hands be returned to Morocco.99 Foreseeing the departure of the Marīnids, the rulers of Granada agreed to cobble together alliances with both Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Abū Yūsuf died a year later, and his son and successor, Abū Ya‘qūb (r. 1286–1307), decided to abandon the Marīnid’s foothold in al-Andalus, renouncing all but a handful of his fortresses, and return his armies to North Africa, where he became embroiled in a struggle to secure his own authority.100 In a few short years, the political scene of the Iberian Peninsula had been radically transformed. The only remaining warfront lay between the Crown of Aragon and Castile, two Christian kingdoms, a hostility that would continue for twenty years. Put most succinctly, 1284 saw the beginning of a dramatic demobilization of the Marīnid cavalry along the Christian-Islamic frontier, a seeming end to their decades-long jihād.
Holy Warriors
The soldiers who accompanied Abū Yūsuf across the straits joined a second and separate branch of Marīnid cavalry, known as al-Ghuzāh al-Mujāhidūn, the Holy Warriors, who had settled permanently in Granada decades earlier and remained the most enduring and influential cavalry on the Iberian Peninsula.101 Ibn Khaldūn devoted the final part of his Kitābal-‘ibar to the history of these soldiers from 1262 until the arrest of their last leader in 1369.102 He traced the origin of this corps to the revolt around the year 1260 at Salé (Salā) by a grandson of the founder of the Marīnid dynasty against the sultan Abū Yūsuf.103 The rebellion was supported by Christian merchants living in the port city as well as three nephews of the sultan, whose names are mentioned here because they are critical to the history of the Aragonese jenets: Muḥammad b. Idrīs, ‘Āmir b. Idrīs, and Raḥḥū b. ‘Abd Allāh.104 Nevertheless, this putsch failed. Abū Yūsuf massacred the Christian community at Salé and then marched against the three princes and their followers, who had retreated to their tribal homeland in the Rīf Mountains, in the western Maghrib, beyond Marīnid control.105 Anticipating their own defeat, the young rebels repudiated their rebellion and negotiated terms. Crucially, rather than killing these princes, the sultan strong-armed them into accepting his terms.106 According to Ibn Khaldūn, “He forced (intadaba) them to perform jihād (ghazw) and to cross the seabecause of the cries of the Muslims of al-Andalus.”107 In short, they were exiled, banned from the kingdom. In this sense, Abū Yūsuf kept these quarrelsome competitors at a distance, while nevertheless using them to support his overarching efforts to aid the Muslims of al-Andalus. In 1262, therefore, the cousins, now bandits, crossed into the Iberian Peninsula at the head of three thousand cavalry soldiers.108
The Naṣrid ruler in Granada greeted these exiles with honors, as new allies against the encroaching Christian kingdoms to the north, and named them the first leaders of the Ghuzāh:
They pressed the amīr of al-Andalus to give them the leadership [of the Ghuzāh] on the coast. So he ceded to them (tajāfā lahum) the battlefront, command of the Ghuzāh living on the shore (ahl al-‘udwa) as well as the other tribes and factions of Berbers. They passed [command] to one another and shared the tax revenues (jibāya) with him [the amīr]. He also generously paid the salary of their soldiers (bi-farḍ al-‘aṭā’ wa’l-dīwān fa-badhalahu lahum). They continue in this manner until today. Their impact on [al-Andalus] was great, as we will note in the history that follows.109
By uniting various Berber tribes on the frontier of al-Andalus, these men wielded enough force to demand a portion of the Naṣrid tax revenue, military supplies, including a regular supply of horses, and control of any lands they conquered.110 Although the commander of the Ghuzāh took his title from the Naṣrid sultan, Granada’s authority over these soldiers appears to have been no more than nominal.111 Until the Ghuzāh’s dissolution, their leaders were almost exclusively elected from among a handfulof the descendants of the three Marīnid princes.112 The two neighborhoods in Granada in which contingents of these troops were settled were known as and continue to be known as “Cenete” and “Gomerez”; the latter alludes to the Ghumāra, the Zanāta tribe of these three exiled princes.113
These princes’ promotion of jihād lent them a fame and authority beyond the scope of al-Andalus.114 Ibn Khaldūn captured the messianic fervor that surrounded these troops:
The Banū Idrīs and ‘Abd Allāh . . . arrived in al-Andalus at a time when it lacked protection (aqfara min al-ḥāmiya jawwuhā). The enemy (al-‘aduww) seized its frontier (ista’sada); their mouths drooled (taḥallabat) with anticipation of the pleasure [of seizing it]. But they [the Ghuzāh] took hold of it like vicious lions with sharpened swords, accustomed to encountering champions and striking them down with one deadly blow (mu‘awwadīn liqā’ al-abṭāl wa-qirā‘ al-ḥutūf wa’l-nizāl). Toughened by life in the desert (mustaghliẓīn bi-khushūna al-badāwa), the rigor of holy war (ṣarāmat al-ghazw), and intrepid barbarity (basālat al-tawaḥḥush), they inflicted great harm to their enemy. . . . They inspired zeal in the weakened Muslims behind the sea (warā’a al-baḥr) [i.e., in al-Andalus] and gave them hope of overcoming their oppressor.115
The successes of the Ghuzāh inspired other Zanāta princes, Marīnid and ‘Abd al-Wādid, to imitation and their own crossing into al-Andalus.116 Most but not all were Berbers: Mūsā b. ‘Alī, a Kurd who had served as chamberlain to the ‘Abd al-Wādids, joined the Ghuzāh after a fall from grace.117 Eventually, the Ghuzāh incorporated a miscellany of mainly Zanāta tribesmen—some salaried, others volunteers, from across the kingdoms of North Africa—all devoted to the defense of the frontier. From here, they regularly invaded Aragonese and Castilian lands.
Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb (1313–75), the fourteenth-century polymath and rival of Ibn Khaldūn, surveyed the status of Granada’s military and provides a more precise picture of the Ghuzāh, distinguishing them from the other Muslim cavalry of al-Andalus. In his time, Ibn al-Khaṭīb explained, the Naṣrid military was divided into two distinct armies, one Berber and the other Andalusī, by which he meant one comprising the North African soldiers and the other the Iberian Muslims.118 Confirming what Ibn Khaldūn had told us, Ibn al-Khaṭīb explained that the “Berber” army was in fact made up of a variety of Zanāta and Arab tribes from the Maghrib: “As for the Berber, who come from the Marīnid, Zayyānid, Tijānī, ‘Ajīsa, and North African Arab tribes, they fall under the jurisdiction of their own captains and leaders who, in turn, answer to the leader of them all, who is drawn from the eldest of the Marīnid tribe.”119 These Marīnid leaders, he continued, dressed like their Andalusī counterparts, but the majority of the “Berber” troops did not.120 Nevertheless, Ibn al-Khaṭīb was frustratingly terse in describing how the majority did dress, saying only that these “Berber” soldiers used a throwing weapon called a madas (pl. amdās), a two-headed lance made of two sticks joined by a grip in the middle, which is likely the precursor of the jineta lance used by early modern Spanish jinetes.121 By the fourteenth century, he added, these soldiers had also mastered the use of the Frankish arblete or crossbow (qusiyy al-firanja) to complement the throwing lance.122
When describing the Andalusī troops, however, Ibn al-Khaṭīb was clearer. They were commanded by relatives of or men close to the Naṣrid sultan. In the past, he continued, these Andalusī soldiers were outfitted in the same manner as their Christian counterparts.123 They wore long coats of mail, carried heavy shields and long lances, and traveled with a squire, which is to say that they rode in the fashion of other European heavy cavalry. By his time—that is, the late fourteenth century—however, this style had changed. The cavalry now wore shorter coats and gilded helmets; they used “Arab saddles,” North African leather shields, and light lances.124 Importantly, therefore, Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s description reveals that Iberian Muslim cavalry underwent a military transformation parallel to that of their Christian counterparts, but well before them. In other words, Muslim cavalry in al-Andalus had not always been light cavalry. At some point before 1363 (when the Lamḥa was completed), they adopted and adapted the Zanāta style; they started to ride in a la jineta. The illuminations from the late thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa Maria by Alfonso X of Castile indicate the coexistence of both styles of dressing—with and without armor—and riding—a la brida and a la jineta—in the Granadan army, suggesting that the transformation was not complete at this moment (fig. 2).125 And thus, the question is: were these light soldiers depicted in the Cantigas Iberian or North African troops? A description by the historian Ibn Sa‘īd al-Andalusī (d. 1286) strongly suggests the latter. In his time, he explains, the Andalusī cavalry was still comprised singularly of heavily armed knights.126 If one accepts Ibn Sa‘īd’s portrait, then the only light cavalry in the Iberian Peninsula in 1284 were the North African arrivistes—mainly but not exclusively Zanāta Berbers—under the command of the Marīnid sultan or the Marīnid princes who led the Ghuzāh. These North African soldiers who had come to the Iberian Peninsula for the sake of jihād must have become the Aragonese jenets.
FIGURE 2. Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Maria (no. 187) (ca. 1284) (detail, middle-left panel). Heavy and light cavalry in the Granadan army. Monasterio-Biblioteca-Colección, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid. Photograph: Album / Art Resource, New York.
Is there definitive proof of this transformation? Ibn Khaldūn did tell us that a handful of the commanders of the Ghuzāh sought refuge in Christian courts across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.127 But he never says that the Ghuzāh sold their services to the Aragonese kings in large numbers at that time. Indeed, from his perspective, the Ghuzāh were admirable defenders of Islam, true holy warriors. This is the limitation of the Kitāb al-ibar, which strongly identified with these Berber warriors and saw them as the vital spirit of renewal.
Latin and Romance archival records, on the one hand, and Arabic chronicles, on the other, thus appear incommensurable. Each set of sources presents us with a partial view. Each possesses its own concealments and biases. While Latin and Romance sources speak of jenets, they tell us little to nothing about the origin of these troops. In fact, the success of these soldiers or, more precisely, the style of riding associated with them has only further obscured their history and allowed them to hide in plain sight. In these paper records, the word jenet has become unremarkable, trivia for hippologists. Arabic sources speak of the Ghuzāh, one of many waves of holy warriors, Islamic heroes who crashed upon the shores of al-Andalus. But the Aragonese jenets and the Marīnid Ghuzāh never clearly meet.
A careful comparison of all these sources does reveal that they, the jenets and the Ghuzāh, were one and the same soldiers. As Arabic names enter into Romance sources, they are often mangled and misshapen beyond recognition. Letters are transposed, dropped, or changed as a scribe strains to make sense of what he has heard. But occasionally and particularly in the case of prominent figures, their names can be reconstructed. Across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in missions to recruit jenets, contracts for service, and records of employment, some familiar-sounding names appear in the Crown’s archive. For instance, one reads: Iça Abenadriz, Muça Abenrohh, Alabes Abarraho, Iyca Abenrraho, Baratdin Abarraho, Greneladim Abarraho, and Hali Ebemuca Abenrraho among others.128 In Arabic sources, one finds: ‘Isā b. Idrīs, Mūsa b. Raḥḥū, al-‘Abbās b. Raḥḥū, ‘Īsā b. Raḥḥū, Badr al-Dīn [b. Mūsā] b. Raḥḥū, Jamāl al-Dīn [b.Mūsā] b. Raḥḥū, and ‘Alī b. Mūsā b. Raḥḥū, among others. These men weremembers of the Marīnid royal family, relatives and descendants of the three Marīnid princes, exiled to al-Andalus, who were the founders of al-Ghuzāh al-Mujāhidūn.129 Some of these men would command the Ghuzāh, and some would also command the Aragonese jenets. These names tell us without a doubt that the Ghuzāh were also members of the jenets.
This realization presents a new challenge. How and why did the Aragonese kings turn to the Ghuzāh, men who as late as 1284 were invading its lands and would continue to invade it, to serve in their armies and more strikingly, as their personal protectors? Why would the Ghuzāh seemingly abandon their cause? What bound these Christian kings to Muslim holy warriors over the period of a century?