CHAPTER TWO
Six months before the arrival of the five horsemen riding mules, in October 1284, King Pere II ordered Conrad Lancia, his master of accounts (maestre racional), as well as a Jew named Samuel Abenmenassé, a physician and translator, to prepare for a journey to Granada.1 The Crown had recently concluded a truce with the Muslim kingdom, and this mission seemed routine.2 Before their departure, Pere had ordered the release of all Granadan captives in his territories. He had instructed a royal official to give each prisoner a tunic and sufficient money to “return to their king.”3 In return, Pere asked his ambassadors, Conrad and Samuel, to confirm the release of two Valencian captains and their crews held in Granada.4 Curiously, Pere also asked a local Muslim leader (alaminus, from Ar. al-amīn), Abrahim Abençumada, to cover the cost of Conrad’s mission to Granada.5 Why were the Crown’s Mudéjares being asked to finance what seemed like a diplomatic effort? The king described the mission’s intent in a letter of introduction:
Know all that we, Don Pedro, by the grace of God, king of Aragon and Sicily, order you, our special procurator, noble and beloved, Conrad Lancia, chamberlain of our house, and master of accounts, to speak with the captains of the jenets and with others regarding the date of their arrival and stay with us in our service. And regarding what we must give them [i.e., salary], we hold firmly to whatever will be said and done or promised by the said Conrad in this [negotiation], and this we will observe. And that this charter should be firm and no doubt enter, we order it sealed.6
Conrad and Samuel had been ordered to recruit Muslim soldiers from Granada. They were about to depart on the first known mission to recruit jenets for the Crown of Aragon.7
To pursue the question of how and why the Aragonese kings turned to their former enemies, the Marīnid Ghuzāh, it serves us to follow these two ambassadors as they made their way into the kingdom of Granada in 1284. This was a watershed moment, after which the Crown’s use of these soldiers increased dramatically. An overlooked list of names and locations, scribbled alongside the letter of introduction above, enables us not only to recreate these ambassadors’ itinerary and to confirm the identity of the soldiers that they hoped to recruit but also to place this mission in a broader social, political, and intellectual context. This story spans the Mediterranean—from Spain to Sicily and North Africa—and draws upon Latin, Romance, and Arabic sources in order to demonstrate that this alliance not only responded to immediate circumstance—to extreme crisis—but was also a piece of political theater. It grew out of a much longer and deeper history of Aragonese aspiration.
A Rupture?
Claiming that there is no evidence of their use prior to 1284, Faustino Gazulla began his history of jenets with the date of this mission to recruit these soldiers.8 Indeed, from the perspective of the chancery registers, the year 1284 seems to be a levee-breaking moment, after which jenets flood these pages. Is this the beginning of our story, the start of something new? To call something a first is no minor or middling matter: it imposes a certain interpretation on all the documents that follow. In this case, to begin in 1284 implies a rupture: one moment the Muslim jenets were raiding Valencia; the next, they were trotting in as soldiers-for-hire with letters of invitation from the Aragonese king. Accepting this narrative raises a challenge—which Gazulla, perhaps wisely, sidestepped—the challenge of accounting for sudden change.
Aside from a general suspicion of ruptures, two significant factors impede writing a study of the origins of the Aragonese jenets. First, in this period, the chancery registers remained nascent; they were kept irregularly, unsystematically, or simply not at all.9 Thus, any starting point may be nothing more than a fiction of the documents themselves, a mirage of paper and ink. Second, and more significantly, evidence from the earliest registers hints at a longer and more convoluted history of interaction between the Aragonese kings and jenet soldiers before this mission.
An overlooked fragment from the archives—the earliest surviving reference to the jenets—demonstrates the problem. Dated October 13, 1265, during the reign of King Jaume I, twenty years before the mission of Conrad Lancia and Samuel Abenmenassé, this document is brief—a list of expenses, copied into the registers:
While desultory, this list of accounts, recorded three years after the establishment of the Ghuzāh in al-Andalus and well before the first Marīnid incursion into the Iberian Peninsula, is the earliest proof of an encounter between the Muslim jenets and the Crown of Aragon. What was happening here? A payment was made for expenses to jenets. Cloth and clothes were distributed to the representatives (nuncii) of the jenets as well as the jenets themselves. As we shall see, payments for travel expenses and gifts were typical of later negotiations for recruitment. The presence of an Arabic translator at this encounter also suggests that these are the traces of a negotiation.11 Clothing was generally given to soldiers who had agreed to enter the service of the Crown, and thus one might contend that this was also a successful recruitment effort. The terse language—the fact that the scribe did not explain who or what the jenets were—may also imply that this was also not the Crown’s first encounter with these soldiers. One can push further. These expenses appear in the account books of Prince Pere. In fact, there is no evidence that King Jaume ever employed jenets, suggesting that Pere may have been the first to show an interest in these soldiers, a claim that is borne out by the story told below. Additionally, these records appear tucked among the expenses of the prince’s household—his personal expenses—including, for instance, 11 solidi, 7 denarii to buy a tunic for “a Saracen of the Lord Prince,” perhaps, a domestic slave.12 Pere as well as later Aragonese and Castilian kings did employ Muslim soldiers in their households—as members of their entourage and as their personal protectors.13 And although these shreds of evidence cannot give confidence to the assertion, perhaps the prince was already using these soldiers in this intimate capacity.
For the two decades after this brief notice, during the period of the massive Mudéjar rebellions that shook Valencia, there is no indication of jenets in the Crown’s employ, only as enemies of it. But in the months just before Conrad and Samuel’s departure, hints of jenets in the service of the Crown begin to appear again. For instance, the chancery registers record that in August 1284, a jenet named Muçe (Mūsā) received “53 solidi and 4 denarii that remained of his salary.”14 And in the same month, Pere ordered an official to give traveling expenses to Aixe (‘Ā’isha), the wife of a jenet currently in his service, such that she could move to Valencia.15 In November 1284, the bailiff of Valencia was asked to pay three jenets who had already agreed to enter the king’s service.16 All of these documents suggest the continued use of jenets between 1265 and 1284. In the first case, Muçe received the remainder of his salary, which is to say that he had been paid before and had completed some service without leaving any imprint upon the documentation. Even if these early registers limit our ability to know the extent of the use of jenets before 1284, they confirm that King Pere had successfully recruited and employed these soldiers before the mission of Conrad and Samuel.
It is also worth adding that the jenets were not the first or only Muslim soldiers in the employ of the Aragonese kings. Although early studies of the Mudéjares rejected the fact, both Burns and Boswell have shown that the Crown of Aragon did in fact use subject Muslims in its armies.17 In part, the evidence of their service is negative. Surrender agreements, such as those at Tudela (1115) or Chivert (1234), agreed to limit the service owed by Mudéjares to local or municipal defense.18 Similarly, the chancery registers preserve certain exemptions from military service (exercitus) given to prominent or skilled Muslims.19 For instance, in 1259, two brothers, Mahomet and Abdela, were granted freedom from military service because of “certain work” they provided the king.20 Of course, the implication of such documents is that the Crown expected the rest of the Mudéjares to provide military service.21 But one also finds more explicit evidence, such as assurances from the king to Mudéjar soldiers that their goods would be protected in their absence during war or that they would be exempted from any extraordinary taxes related to war.22 In 1285, for example, Pere asked the Mudéjares of Valencia to deliver over four thousand solidi “in one bag” to pay the salaries and expenses of the Muslim soldiers that they had already sent to the king.23 What is more, the Aragonese kings openly prized and praised their Muslim archers—who specialized in using the heavy “two-foot crossbow,” so called not because of its length but because archers used both feet to tense it.24 Christian Aragonese soldiers, by contrast, only employed a light crossbow. Relatedly, the Crown employed Mudéjares for the purpose of weapon making. In 1280, an engineer (faber) named Mahomet (Muḥammad) arrived at the court and so impressed the king with his metalwork, in particular crossbow bolts (cairells), that the king placed him in his private employ.25 And in 1295, the king called upon the Mudéjares of Daroca and Calatayud to make weapons for his armies.26 There is, however, no evidence of Mudéjar cavalry, a fact that may provide an explanation for the need to recruit North African soldiers for this role.
Significantly, the Crown’s experience with Mudéjar soldiers was not without problems. During al-Azraq’s second uprising, when the jenets were attacking the lands of the Crown, King Jaume expressed anger and surprise at the refusal of certain Mudéjares to come to his aid:
While we were in Valencia, the leader (alcait from Ar. al-qā’id) of Játiva came to us with a large group of Saracens and about ten elders from the village. He entered very happily and kissed my hand and asked how we were. And we said, “Well by the grace of God, but that we are very distressed by the wrongs al-Azraq has committed in [taking] our castles and marvel at your allowing it.” [And he said:] “Lord, if it distresses you, know that it distresses us and causes grief.” But they seemed happier and more content than we had ever seen them. We thought that they would be distressed by the wrong al-Azraq had done us and offer help, but none of them offered it.27
Thus, while the Crown was willing to use its Mudéjar soldiers against other Muslims, at least on this occasion, it found the Mudéjares unwilling to serve. Eventually, both Jaume and his successor Pere agreed to commute military service into a payment for several Mudéjar communities.28 In 1277, for instance, numerous Mudéjar villages in Aragon were given the choice of serving in the army or paying to support the army.29 Nevertheless, despite questions of their loyalty, with regard to the military, the Aragonese kings ultimately treated their Mudéjar subjects just as they did their Christian ones: they expected service in men or in kind, which is to say that the Mudéjares were regarded as members of the Crown’s feudal army.
Three important facts thus emerge from these crucial fragments belonging to the earliest registers. First, not all jenets were hostile to the Crown. Before the mission of 1284, some jenets were already willing to enter into its service. The relationship of the jenets and the Crown of Aragon may have been as old as the Ghuzāh. In other words, the cluster of documents highlighted in the previous chapter, in which the jenets appear attacking the lands of the Crown of Aragon during the Mudéjar uprising in Valencia, represents only part of the picture and masks a deeper continuity. Second, the evidence for these early dealings point exclusively to the future King Pere. During his lieutenancy, Pere may have employed the jenets in his personal entourage, as members of his household. Third and finally, the Crown had not only used Muslim soldiers in its armies but also experienced challenges in dealing with them, a fact that would shape its history with the jenets. The first known recruitment of the jenets therefore did not represent a clean rupture from this past.
The Sicilian and the Jew
In and of itself, Pere’s choice of leaders for the mission to Granada to recruit jenets was telling. One of Pere’s closest confidants, his childhood companion, and relative of his wife, Conrad Lancia was not an Aragonese nobleman but rather a Sicilian one. More precisely, he was the illegitimate grandson of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II (1194–1250).30 With Pere’s ascent to the throne, Conrad rose to fortune as well, becoming commander of the Aragonese navy in 1278.31 A year later, in that capacity, Conrad boldly invaded the North African port of Ceuta (Sabta), from which the Marīnid sultan had been providing support for al-Azraq’s rebellion in Valencia.32 In the same year, Conrad participated in the dramatic coup that placed Abū Isḥāq (r. 1279–1283) on the Ḥafṣid throne at Tunis.33According to the chronicler Muntaner, Conrad had the Aragonese flag raised above Tunis’ citadel.34 For such service, Pere rewarded him with a castle and lands and made him governor of the Mudéjar-dominated kingdom of Valencia in 1280.35 By 1284, Conrad was also the head of the king’s household as well as his master of accounts.36
Although his name does not appear in the letter of introduction above, the prominent figure Samuel Abenmenassé accompanied Conrad.37 A member of the royal household (de domo regis), Samuel served as the king’s physician (alfaquimus et fisicus) as well as his Arabic secretary (scriptor de arabico), a dual role that was not uncommon for Jews at the court.38 Like Conrad, Samuel was a confidant and intimate of Pere. The king, for instance, entrusted his doctor to carry special messages to the queen and prince, and the letters between these men evince an unusual familiarity in both tone and content.39 But Samuel’s superior knowledge of Arabic also made him indispensable to the Crown.40 For instance, in 1280, when negotiating with the Mudéjares of Játiva, King Pere signed a “certain Arabic letter,” trusting only in Samuel’s translation.41 Samuel wrote and delivered the peace treaty with Granada in 1282 that paved the way for this mission.42 He traveled on secret missions to Tunis.43 On the domestic front, he managed the sale of captives from Valencia’s Mudéjar rebellion.44 And most significantly, Samuel had already acted as a recruiter among Muslims. Three months prior to the mission to Granada, he visited the Mudéjar communities of Aragon and Valencia, seeking “well-appointed crossbowmen and lancers” in return for a “good salary,” suggesting that these Muslim soldiers were needed for extraordinary service.45 As a reward, Pere similarly granted Samuel privileges as well as lands in Valencia.46
Thus, as leaders for this mission, Pere chose two trusted representatives with ties to local Muslims as well as sultans. One might be tempted to argue that this mission both reflected and leveraged the cosmopolitan character of the Aragonese court, and that it demonstrated the manner in which religious and political boundaries were easily pierced or ignored in this world. The deeper implication of this presumed cosmopolitanism is that religious and political identities were shibboleths that could be shrugged off by men of a certain perspective and status like old clothes. But such logic, however much it satisfies a democratic and inclusive vision of the world, did not drive Pere’s choice. Indeed, the fact that Pere relied heavily upon a foreigner and a Jew brings to the surface a rather different motivation for his recruitment of the jenets.
The Sicilian Vespers
What follows is a story that revolves around Sicily, a history of repetitions: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.47 It begins twenty years earlier, in 1262, around the same time the Ghuzāh first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula, when Pere’s father, King Jaume I, arranged the marriage of the young Prince Pere to fourteen-year-old Constanza (1249–1302), the granddaughter of the Emperor Frederick II and daughter of Manfred of Sicily as well as half-cousin to Conrad Lancia.48 Constanza arrived at the Aragonese court with her royal household, including a school-aged Conrad, our main protagonist, as well as Roger de Lauria, the future admiral of fame.49 This marriage alliance, which drew together the Aragonese and Hohenstaufen dynasties, immediately met objections from many, including King Louis IX of France (r. 1226–1270). Both Jaume and Louis desired control of the central Mediterranean and through it, right to the title of Holy Roman emperor.50 And the tension between them only mounted when four years later, in 1266 at Benevento, Louis’ brother, Charles of Anjou, killed Constanza’s father and then seized the island kingdom. These maneuvers marked the beginning of a protracted and violent struggle between the Angevins and the Aragonese.
Initially, Hohenstaufen loyalists and rebels, championing a young nephew of Manfred, sought refuge with Sicily’s longtime tributary, the Ḥafṣid sultan of Tunis.51 Among those who traveled to North Africa was Federico Lancia, Conrad’s father, who subsequently entered the service of the sultan as a member of his Christian guard, a phenomenon that ran parallel to and intersected with that of the jenets.52 Federico and other exiles defended the city from Louis’ crusaders in 1270, extending the Hohenstaufen and Angevin war into North Africa.53 In fact, Conrad’s support of a coup in Tunis less than ten years later should be seen as a continuation of this same struggle, the effort to restore Hohenstaufen rule to Sicily.54 Nevertheless, when the efforts of these rebels in Tunis were foiled in 1268, King Jaume pushed Constanza, his daughter-in-law, to proclaim herself the rightful heir to the Hohenstaufen throne. And thus, in the years that followed, a variety of Sicilian exiles—noblemen, jurists, officers, and administrators—arrived in the lands of the Crown of Aragon, where they would gain extraordinary sway over Prince Pere.55
In the decades after this marriage, the Aragonese court also took on the appearance of Frederick’s. For instance, under Constanza’s influence, Pere issued a set of sweeping palatine ordinances that implemented sophisticated innovations from Sicily related to dress, diet, and diversion.56 Like Frederick, Pere now maintained Arabic secretaries—including Samuel Abenmenassé—for translating “Saracen books.”57 Institutionally, Pere borrowed whole cloth the idea of an independent royal treasury as it existed in Sicily and tellingly made Conrad Lancia its first maestre racional, master of accounts.58 He established the royal pantheon at Santes Creus on the model of the Sicilian one at Palermo.59 Most significantly, it is also at Frederick’s court that one finds a precedent for the jenets. Both Frederick II and Manfred had recruited Muslim soldiers from the colony of Lucera in Apulia to serve in their armies as well as their courts as bodyguards, a fact that drew more than passing notice from visitors.60 That Pere also called upon Conrad Lancia, the grandson of Frederick, to recruit his own Muslim guard reveals the clear path of influence from Sicily to Aragon. Collectively, these courtly and administrative reforms aimed at imagining, performing, and ultimately realizing a vision of imperial authority modeled upon the Hohenstaufens’ lofty conception of empire.
Given all these Sicilian echoes, it is not surprising that from 1279, if not earlier, Pere directed his foreign policy toward the goal of retaking that kingdom from the Angevins.61 An aggressive maritime strategy along the North African littoral was part and parcel of a desire to control the central Mediterranean, an effort to envelope the island of Sicily. In 1282, while the Aragonese navy—captained by the Hohenstaufen exiles, Roger de Lauria and Conrad Lancia—was fumbling a putsch to impose a puppet ruler on the throne of Tunis, a rebellion erupted in Angevin Sicily, perhaps kindled by Aragonese agents.62 Samuel Abenmenassé was one of many Aragonese representatives to travel to Sicily just before the uprising. Upon receiving news of the rebellion, the ships of Roger de Lauria temporarily abandoned the North African coast and succeeded in capturing the island kingdom from Charles of Anjou, returning Sicily to the heirs of the Hohenstaufens.
Having accomplished his singular ambition, however, Pere ironically unleashed the greatest threat to his sovereignty, a French invasion and one of the worst wars suffered by the lands of the Crown of Aragon.63 Enraged by the conquest of Sicily, the French pope, Martin IV, excommunicated King Pere, undercutting the Crown’s claim to divinely sanctioned authority. Martin offered the Crown of Aragon to the Capetians. When the French ruler accepted in 1284, a crusade against Pere was launched. Meanwhile, the situation within the Crown of Aragon deteriorated dramatically. Pere’s uncle, Jaume of Mallorca, threw his lot in with the Papacy. The powerful nobleman Juan Nuñez de Lara declared Albarracín, a region in Aragon, an independent lordship in support of the French. Half of Pere’s other vassals declared themselves unwilling to defend him, rising up in rebellion. In their first forays across the Pyrenees, the French committed horrible excesses, killing men, women, children, and nuns. Panicked villagers fled the lands north of Barcelona. Whole cities were abandoned.
Pere thus faced a major crisis in 1284. With his navy in Sicily and Calabria, many of the Aragonese and Catalan noblemen in open revolt, and the threat of a massive French invasion gaining support from his own men, King Pere could only muster a scant force—thirty-eight knights and seventy foot soldiers—at Coll de Panissars to prepare for war.64 He was capable of little more than hurling invectives through his court jongleur at the French.65 And it is precisely at this point that he ordered Conrad and Samuel to depart for Granada to seek new allies. In responding to this crisis, Pere’s decision to reach out to the jenets, his former enemies, reflected desperate necessity, but he also traveled upon well-worn tracks, following a model of authority that led back to the Holy Roman emperors.
All the Names
From this point, we would be lost if it were not for a list of names recorded alongside Lancia’s letter of introduction, a list that recorded with whom he was to meet:66
Also, we made for him [Conrad Lancia] a letter of introduction to the below named:
Also, we gave Conrad a letter of passage, addressed to Castilian officials.
Later, we gave him letters of introduction and also procurement regarding the jenets named below:
These names allow us to track Conrad’s progress toward Granada and confirm the source of the soldiers he aimed to recruit (maps 1 and 3). Conrad first sought a meeting with “Iça Abenadriz” through his custodians. Abenadriz was a captive of the Crown of Aragon, a prisoner held in the Castle of Empostà (Amposta), south of Teruel in Catalonia, by the Hospitaller Knights. Both Kings Pere II and Alfons II treated Abenadriz and his wife with some deference.67 Three years later, the Marīnid sultan, after extended negotiations, would secure Abenadriz’s release for an astonishing 3,600 gold dinars.68 Abenadriz would also return freely to the Crown of Aragon in 1291 as an ambassador from the Marīnid court.69 All this suggests that he was a man of some importance, and indeed, he is easily identified in Arabic sources. He was ‘Īsā b. Idrīs, a nephew of Abū Yūsuf, the Marīnid sultan. The significance of Conrad’s visit with this prince becomes clearer in the light of his whole itinerary.
Conrad then carried on to Crevillente (Qirbilyān), where he held a letter of introduction to the Muslim ruler (Raiz from Ar. ra’īs), Abuabdille Abenhudeyr (Abū ‘Abdallah b. Hudhayr).70 Crevillente was a curiosity, a neutral “village-state” near Murcia that nominally paid homage to the Castilians in this period but would eventually come under the protection of the Aragonese kings.71 Its leaders, the Banū Hudhayr, maintained their independence until 1318 by serving as intermediaries between the Crown of Aragon and Granada.72 In later periods, part of their service to the Crown of Aragon included acting as recruiting agents for jenets. As early as 1286, one finds evidence of jenets entering and departing the realms of the Crown of Aragon through Crevillente.73 Later, in 1303, King Jaume II would write to the Muslim ruler of Crevillente to inform him that he had hired forty jenets and was returning the remaining forty, whom he did not require, suggesting that Ibn Hudhayr facilitated their recruitment.74 And on at least two occasions, moreover, the Muslim ruler would write to Jaume II reporting on the activities of the jenets in Valencia and Ghuzāh across the border in Granada.75 In short, Conrad’s arrival in Crevillente may have marked the beginning of their long-standing intermediary role with the jenets.
Conrad continued south in order to meet the consul of Almería (al-Mariyya), a strategic port city in southeastern Spain, where almost all Mediterranean powers had interests and representatives. Although it was momentarily under Christian rule, Almería was a contested zone that changed hands regularly.76 Its desirability derived from the fact that it served as the major commercial artery between Valencia and Granada.77 And as a hub of legal and illegal trade, Almería represented a quintessential zone of overlapping jurisdictions.78 Significantly, it was also famous for its ribāṭs, military-religious fortresses for those devoted to jihād, which had been and would be used by Ghuzāh soldiers for raids into Christian Spain.79
Finally, Conrad arrived in Granada, where he met the chief minister of the Naṣrid sultan as well as man named Muça Abenrrohh, who was the well-known figure, Mūsā b. Raḥḥū. The fact that Conrad met both ‘Īsā b. Idrīs and Mūsā b. Raḥḥū is extremely revealing. These men were the sons and nephews of the three Marīnid princes—Muḥammad b. Idrīs, ‘Āmir b. Idrīs, and Raḥḥū b. ‘Abd Allāh—who had crossed into Spain in 1262 at the head of three-thousand Marīnid cavalry to become the first commandersof al-Ghuzāh al-Mujāhidūn, the Holy Warriors. According to Ibn Khaldūn, Mūsā b. Raḥḥū was commander of these soldiers (shaykh al-ghuzāh) on three occasions.80 His brother al-‘Abbās b. Raḥḥū would later serve the Aragonese kings as commanders of their jenets.81 In other words, from the outset, Conrad and Samuel aimed to recruit the Marīnid Ghuzāh, a band of holy warriors who only a few months earlier had served alongside the armies of Abū Yūsuf’s fourth and final jihād against Castile and the Crown of Aragon.
The Arrivals
Conrad received his final letters of introduction to three jenet corporals (cabos) named “Çahit Azanach, Çahim Abebaguen, and Tunart.” While of lower rank than Mūsā b. Raḥḥū, they nevertheless found themselves in the company of rather prominent men. Their names appear on a short list of dignitaries whom Conrad and Samuel met, including two Marīnid princes and the chief minister (wazīr) of Granada. None of these three names—muddled in transliteration to Romance—are identifiable in Arabic sources. By chance, however, these soldiers left an imprint elsewhere, confirming once again the origin of the soldiers whom Pere had chosen to recruit.
Sometime after the arrival of the Ghuzāh in 1262, a monk named Pero Marín at the monastery of St. Dominic of Silos near Burgos began to record the testimonies of Christian villagers, who claimed to have escaped from the hands of these North African raiders.82 His Miraculos romanzados provides important evidence about captivity and slave markets, as well as the effects of Ghuzāh raids on the Murcian frontier. The economy and demography of regions like Lorca, for example, would not recover for more than a century.83 But miraculously for the historian, across several of these accounts, we hear of two captains, named “Zahem and Zahet Azenet,” who in 1283 raided the Murcian frontier with 1,000 jenet soldiers, killing 200 men and taking many captives.84 If these were the same men as Çahim and Çahit, then within a year, the Crown was aiming to recruit these notorious Ghuzāh leaders.
The name Çahim Abebaguen also provides us with proof that Conrad and Samuel’s recruitment effort ended in success. The five horsemen, with whom this book began, riding mules borrowed from a Jew in Granada, were in fact the representatives of “Çahim Abennaquem.” Several months after meeting Conrad Lancia and Samuel Abenmenassé in Granada, these horsemen, among the first to respond to the call, crossed into the lands of the Crown of Aragon. At the border of Valencia, after examining their letters of introduction, royal officials impounded the jenets’ swords, indicating a well-earned distrust of these raiders.85 The soldiers next appeared in the city of Valencia, where they met with the local Muslim leader, Abrahim Abençumada, who had helped to finance Conrad’s mission, suggesting that the Mudéjares, who once sought aid from these soldiers against the Crown, were now supporting their recruitment for the Crown.86 Some days later, the jenets stayed in the Christian town of Vilafranca, some one hundred miles north of Valencia, after which a royal official wrote a letter to the king, complaining that these Muslim travelers had borrowed fifteen solidi from him and failed to repay him.87 These soldiers then passed into and through the kingdom of Catalonia, but we learn nothing more of their journey through this predominantly Christian kingdom. Finally, having crossed the length of the realms of the Crown of Aragon, they arrived at the base of the Pyrenees, at Coll de Panissars, where they received an audience with King Pere, who was preparing for battle against the French crusaders.
Some months later, King Pere would write a letter to Samuel, who had apparently remained in Muslim Granada, to announce the success of his negotiations at Coll de Panissars.88 He ordered that Abrahim Abençumada should cease interfering “because we [the king] got along well with them [the jenets],” confirming the Mudéjar governor’s role in the recruitment.89 But Pere’s insistence on dealing directly with the jenets hints at a certain wariness of interactions between the Mudéjares and the jenets that is borne out by later history.90 This letter also solves a more mundane mystery when Pere explains that he has decided to give these soldiers Samuel’s mules, items of great value, as a gift.91 The royal physician, in other words, was the Jew who lent the jenets the mules that they rode the long distance from Granada.
Having successfully completed the negotiations, Pere paid for the expenses of the five jenets in traveling to the Crown and returned their swords.92 He further issued an expense account (expensarium) to cover the costs of Çahim and the rest of his troops in coming to Coll de Panissars.93 As he would on later occasions with other soldiers, he showered the jenets with gifts. All five received “Saracen” tunics and stirrups, but he singled out three.94 Alaçen, “Saracen soldier and representative to Çahim, son of Abennaquem,” was given a tunic (aliuba) of multicolored cloth and red Parisian silk shoes; Hamet Abenobrut received a tunic from the city of Jalón and shoes of colored cloth; and Mahomet de Villena accepted clothes of plain cloth and shoes from Narbonne.95 Alaçen and Hamet also received saddles and horse bridles. Alaçen was given a “good bridle,” whereas Hamet was given “one of lesser price,” a distinction that indicates that Alaçen was the mission’s leader.96 And while it appears that Çahim’s company of jenets agreed to enter into the service of the king, after this moment, definitive evidence of these five soldiers disappears from the royal records.
All the same, Pere’s decision to recruit Muslim soldiers to aid in the defense against a French invasion led to a successful outcome. During the siege of Gerona, the chronicler Bernat Desclot recorded that over six hundred Mudéjar crossbowmen valiantly defended the city alongside Count Ramon Folch.97 The city would eventually fall, but in the meantime, Roger de Lauria’s fleet returned from Sicily. Lauria destroyed Philip III’s ships in the Bay of Roses in September 1285, cutting off the French forward position in Gerona and sending their armies into retreat. The arrival of ten thousand jenets (deu milia Serrayns ginets), according to Desclot, pushed the French back toward Perpignan, where King Philip died at the beginning of October.98 While the number of jenets is suspect, it nonetheless suggests that Desclot considered Muslim support essential to this victory. The papal legate, who had preached the French crusade against the Crown of Aragon, agreed that the Crown’s reliance upon Muslim soldiers was not only decisive but also, for that very reason, damning: “He [King Pere] has joined with himself Saracens to destroy the Christian faith, and with their aid he strives to withstand us, for by his own strength, which is naught, he could not stand alone.”99 Although Pere hoped to press on from this victory and punish his uncle, Jaume of Mallorca, for insubordination, the king died a month later on November 11, 1285. The success of the jenets, however, would fix their place in the lands of the Crown of Aragon for decades to come.