CHAPTER THREE
The Crown of Aragon’s decision to recruit large numbers of Muslim jenets initially emerged out of extreme circumstances—an existential threat. In 1284, facing a French invasion and the rebellion of his own noblemen, King Pere II could only muster a handful of men to his defense. Thus, at some level, his alliance with his former enemies, the Marīnid Ghuzāh, reflected practical necessity—the desire for professional soldiers, at any cost, who would answer his commands. Nevertheless, for decades to come, until the dissolution of the Ghuzāh at the end of the fourteenth century, Aragonese kings continued to recruit and employ jenets across their far-flung empire, in their armies and courts, against their enemies and their own rebellious subjects. What began as an emergency measure, in other words, became a permanent one, a fixed feature of royal power. Why did these rulers continue to rely on their former enemies? Did anything more than practical necessity bind these Christian kings to these Muslim soldiers? And what does this alliance reveal about the nature of Aragonese kingship?
Salary
The jenets were mercenaries. They were soldiers-for-hire, men who received payments from the Crown of Aragon for the services that they offered. Indeed, the vast majority of the records in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon concerning the jenets deal with the disbursement of salaries. Seen from the perspective of these receipts, piles of medieval pay stubs, the Aragonese kings’ relationship with these soldiers seems decidedly professional and uncomplicated. This was a clean and clear financial transaction: the kings paid, and these soldiers fought their wars.
It was pecuniary nature of the professional or contractual bond, however, that led Machiavelli to warn rulers against relying upon mercenaries. Nothing binds the soldier-for-hire, he said, nothing, that is, but greed.1 Mercenaries are faithless (infedeli). In the case of the jenets, they were rather literally infidels. So why did the Aragonese kings then put their faith in the hands of non-Christians?
The arrival of the jenets in the armies of the Crown of Aragon coincided with and accelerated the decline of the feudal army. In principle, the Aragonese king could expect all his subjects to contribute to the defense of his kingdoms without remuneration.2 This obligation had been enshrined, for instance, in the article “Princeps namque” of the twelfth-century Usatges de Barcelona, the basic customs of Catalonia.3 In this law code, war was a matter of custom—grounded in rituals, in which vassals kneeled and kissed, exchanged sweet words and signs, and swore allegiance to their lords—not business. Over the course of the late thirteenth century, however, as the Aragonese kings embarked on a new path of sovereign self-fashioning, bureaucratic centralization, and aggressive expansion, this feudal system came under stress. Cash-starved kings replaced feudal duties with war taxes and increasingly relied on salaried soldiers, whom they could manage directly, resulting in a move toward smaller armies and new military strategies.4 Alongside and in parallel with the royal administration, the military was professionalized in the service of an emerging ideal of authority. Under these pressures, by the end of the thirteenth century, the demise of the feudal army seemed all but inevitable. Joseph Strayer understood the emergence of professionals and bureaucrats as part of the broader “laicization” of Europe, that is, the transfer of power from the hands of religious clerics to educated laymen.5
These laicizing trends were evident in the fact that upon arriving for service in the lands of the Crown of Aragon, the jenets first met with royal bureaucrats. Generally, they encountered the royal treasurer or in later periods, the king’s master of accounts (maestre racional) from whom they gathered a series of official documents—expenses, requisitions, promissory notes, and marching orders—that may have been issued in both Latin and Arabic.6 At first irregularly but later more systematically, these slips were then copied into the chancery registers or account books, where the historian can now find them. What one discovers is that King Pere’s treasurer, Arnaldus de Bastida, interacted almost exclusively with the jenets through 1294.7 After this period, Guillelmus Dufort, who was master of accounts after Conrad Lancia, played this central role for a while.8 Only a handful of other men, also royal administrators, dealt with the jenets. The Crown’s grip on these soldiers, in other words, was relatively direct and tight.
Despite obvious differences in language, the encounter with elite Aragonese bureaucrats may have been familiar to the jenets. As a centralized system for dealing with royal correspondence, land tenure, taxation, and the military, the Crown’s nascent chancery mirrored the Marīnid dīwān al-inshā’, with which the jenets would have been familiar.9 The Crown’s key legal instrument, the albaranum—a promissory note used to pay jenets—derived its name and function from the Arabic al-barā’a, meaning the same.10 The jenets may have also seen something familiar and not strange in the Crown’s reliance upon Jewish bureaucrats. Jewish administrators served at both the Marīnid and Naṣrid courts.11 What is more, Jews like Samuel Abenmenassé, who spoke Arabic fluently, likely served under the Almohads before serving the Aragonese, making them perfect interlocutors and intermediaries. Finally, it should be added that even Christian bureaucrats like Pere’s treasurer Arnaldus de Bastida would have been very familiar with Muslim foreigners. Arnaldus dealt regularly not only with the jenets but also with Muslim diplomats, captives, and slaves across his career.12 In short, the arrival of the jenets may have been a matter of business as usual.
As members of a professional army, all jenets received a salary that was managed centrally, as it would have been in the Marīnid dīwān. During the late thirteenth century, Arnaldus de Bastida personally handled the vast majority of disbursements, paying the soldiers directly or, occasionally, authorizing local officials to do so if time was limited.13 Soldiers or their companies were paid upon receipt of a promissory note (albaranum). Determining the average monthly salary of a jenet based upon these documents, however, poses several problems.14 Not all promissory notes given to jenets specify the number of months’ service or the number of soldiers being compensated, and as the case of one jenet named Muçe demonstrates, payments were occasionally made in installments.15 To add further confusion to the matter, the Crown of Aragon relied upon several standards of currency.16 In general, coinage followed the Carolingian system: librae, solidi, and denarii.17 However, each kingdom employed a different standard: that of Jaca, Barcelona, or Valencia.18 In addition, gold coins, the Castilian dobla and Islamic dīnār, circulated and were used to pay jenets on occasion.19 Setting aside equivocal data, however, the handful of remaining documents indicates that a jenet earned approximately four solidi per diem.20 The Crown paid the same to Christian light cavalry during the conquest of Sardinia, suggesting that the Aragonese kings valued their jenets no more or less than their Christian counterparts.21 In addition, Christian militias operating in Muslim lands during King Alfons II’s reign received roughly the same compensation, three to six solidi.22 In assigning these wages, the Crown of Aragon may have been adhering to the unspoken professional standards of a broader mercenary economy. All this is to say that the Aragonese kings did see it necessary to offer the jenets, their former enemies, exceptional remuneration in order to ensure their loyalty. They seemed to compensate them just like other soldiers.
Profession
From the perspective of the Crown of Aragon, the jenets were not simply bodies to add to its armies, cannon fodder: these horsemen also brought with them a military innovation. Despite being less well armed, or precisely because they were, the jenets had an advantage over the traditional heavy cavalry that dominated Muslim and Christian Iberia. These light cavalry soldiers specialized in small, rapid, and organized incursions that the Crown’s records refer to as “jenet raids.”23 They employed a tactic of attacking and fleeing, which allowed them to harass heavy cavalry, with the aim of drawing them away from the protection of archers and infantry.24 With a mixture of horror and admiration, Don Juan Manuel (1282–1348), the prolific writer and nephew of the Castilian king Alfonso X, said, “The war of the Moors is not like that of the Christians. . . . In every way, it is very different.”25 If hyperbolic, the Castilian prince was correct in this respect: the military advantage offered by the jenets and sought by the Christian kings was not their strength but rather their difference from other types of soldiers. The same desire for strategic difference, Ibn Khaldūn noted, inspired Muslim rulers to recruit Christian heavy cavalry (fig. 3).26
FIGURE 3. Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Maria (no. 181) (ca. 1284) (detail, middle-left and -right panels). Christian militias, Marrakesh, North Africa. Monasterio-Biblioteca-Colección, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid. Photograph: Album / Art Resource, New York.
While the jenets differed from other soldiers in the Aragonese armies in terms of language, religion, and style, they were not isolated from them. During the many wars against France and Castile, these horsemen found themselves fighting shoulder to shoulder with a variety of Christian troops, both professional and feudal.27 Indeed, the extent of this collaboration is occasionally surprising. In 1289, for example, King Alfons issued the following order protecting a company of jenets and their Christian associates, departing for raiding activities together:
To all men of whatever frontier location of our land: Because Mahomet el Viello, our jenet, and others, both Christian and Saracen associates of the aforementioned Mahomet, have gone to conduct jenet raids (vadunt ad jenetiam) by our mandate, they must travel to frontier regions in order to defend our land and also inflict damage on our enemies.28
Mahomet el Viello was not unique in this regard. For their part, the jenet commanders Mahomet Abenadalil and al-‘Abbās b. Raḥḥū both either led or fought alongside Christian soldiers, including, in the latter case, heavily armed Templar knights: men who, like the Ghuzāh, were devoted to holy war.29 Another captain, Moxarref Abenhalbet, who came from Castile, brought Christian troops with him, suggesting not only that the jenets collaborated with Christian soldiers of their own accord but also that these interreligious mercenary associations existed independently of the Christian and Muslim rulers of the Iberian Peninsula.30 We also know that two jenets, who operated alongside Christian soldiers in the Aragonese navy, named Machamet Almenochoxi and Athame Benbrahi, also went by the names George (Georgius) and Peter (Petrus).31 Nothing indicates that George and Peter were converts. Thus, perhaps, these names give us a glimpse at the sorts of accommodations, camaraderie, or even good humor that resided among these companies as they fought side by side.
Finally, one also finds the jenets fighting alongside almogàvers and adalids, lightly armored Catalan and Aragonese foot soldiers who specialized in cross-border raids against Muslim Granada, soldiers who were in some sense a mirror image of the Ghuzāh.32 Desclot described these soldiers vividly:
These men, called almogàvers, live only by their weapons. They do not live in villages or cities but rather in the mountains and forests. They fight every day with the Saracens, entering into their lands for a day or two, raiding and seizing many people and goods, and that is how they live. They endure many terrible things that other men cannot: they go many days without eating, and survive on grass at no harm to themselves. The adalids who guide them know the lands and the paths. They wear no more than a tunic (gonella) and a shirt in summer or winter. On their legs, they wear leather pants; and on their feet, leather sandals. They carry a good knife and scabbard, strapped to their belts. Each one has a javelin, two arrows, and a leather purse to carry food. They are very strong and very fast to flee and chase.33
Despite being raiders against Muslims but as the Arabic origin of their names hints—mughāwir (raider) and dalīl (guide)—these soldiers likely had their genesis in the Islamic armies that swept through Iberia centuries earlier.34 All the same, like the jenets, these raiders of obscure origin and composition increasingly moved from the political and social margins into the bureaucratic control of the Crown in the thirteenth century.
The extent of these collaborations raises a critical question: Did an emerging military profession override religious profession in medieval Iberia? If one takes into account the long-standing use of Christian soldiers by Muslim rulers, then it would seem that men on both sides of the Mediterranean seemed to value good soldiers and good salaries above religion. Did these fighters cast aside their beliefs for money? Did they rise above their differences?
These were precisely the questions that most concerned the first studies of these soldiers. For Giménez Soler, the first to write about the jenets, this history evinced a wider spirit of tolerance.35 In this context, tolerance did not signify religious openness but rather, in the vein of classical liberalism, signaled a criticism of religion itself. At the turn of the twentieth century, Spanish liberals like Giménez Soler saw religion as a primitive form of politics, as a cunning ideology used to manipulate credulous masses.36 They saw religious beliefs as delusions that stifled free and rational thought and, as such, promoted violence. In short, they dismissed belief as blind adherence. Thus, in the alliance of the Crown of Aragon with the Muslim jenets, Giménez Soler saw a welcome turn toward political secularization, away from superstition and toward self-interest, away from medieval ways of thinking and toward modern ones.37 Not surprisingly, Spanish Catholics vigorously objected to these interpretations. They saw these kings and soldiers as traitors and transgressors, as men whose greed had undermined the authentic religious and national spirit of the Spanish people.38 They saw religion as an absolute and necessary commitment without which community could not survive. These competing interpretations of mercenaries were part of the bitter and deadlocked twentieth-century convivencia debates, debates between Spanish liberals and conservative Catholics about the nature of religious coexistence in Spain’s medieval past and the value of secular tolerance for the present.
Medievalists now view these disputes as a scholarly embarrassment.39 They have criticized both the liberals and the conservatives for distorting the past in the service of the political extremes that provoked the bloody Spanish Civil War. They have challenged the empirical value of tolerance for understanding religious interaction.40 And most assuredly, they have rejected the essential contention, shared by both liberals and conservatives, that religious beliefs were inflexible commitments which impeded and opposed peaceful interaction. But how have they made sense of figures like the jenets?
Privilege
The relationship of the Crown to the jenets was not limited to a financial transaction. In addition to regular salaries, the Crown also conferred upon the jenets numerous gifts and privileges—small and large—that, in fact, distinguished them from other soldiers on the battlefield and thus offer a different perspective on how the Aragonese kings might have viewed these foreign Muslim soldiers.
To begin with the smallest and least significant of such privileges, all jenets regularly received basic clothes (vestes) and cloth (pannus) for making clothes.41 In 1290, for example, King Alfons II reminded his tax collectors not to assess a port duty (lezda) on cloth destined for his army of jenets in Valencia precisely because it was a privilege and not a sale.42 Nothing indicates that the jenets wore or were made to wear uniforms or distinguishing marks like the Christian soldiers of North Africa.43 For instance, Alfons offered to provide the troops of the captain Mohamet Abenadalil with either clothing or money to buy their own clothing, suggesting it did not matter much to him how they dressed.44 In addition to basic clothing, jenets also received compensation for all travel related to their duties, both within and beyond the king’s territories, a privilege not granted to feudal troops.45 Moreover, unlike Aragonese feudatories—but like the Marīnid Ghuzāh—jenets received horses and military equipment.46 In some cases, money was disbursed for a jenet to purchase these items;47 in other cases, horses, mules, or equipment were distributed directly by royal officials;48 and in yet other cases, jenets commandeered horses, whose owners were later reimbursed.49 It should be added that the Crown also insured these animals and goods against loss or harm.50 In one of many such instances, in July 1289, Arnaldus de Bastida compensated Hahen Abenhali 500 solidi for “a certain horse of his that he lost in our service.”51 This privilege was broadly and generously applied: for example, Arnaldus de Bastida paid a jenet named Maymon 400 solidi to recover a horse that he had pawned in Valencia to cover a debt.52 Similarly, in 1310, King Jaume II paid a Christian nobleman 180 solidi in compensation for a mule taken by a jenet when he departed the lands of the Crown of Aragon.53 The Crown also extended these indemnities to the bodies of the jenets themselves. The captain, Abduluahet (‘Abd al-Wāḥid), who served at Albarracín, received compensation rather matter-of-factly for “two animals and two soldiers” that he lost in battle.54 Similarly, the Crown intervened to redeem jenets from captivity. In 1290, for example, King Jaume II demanded the release of jenets held prisoner by his own subjects.55 And in 1292, Jaume also reimbursed Paschasius Dominici for paying the ransom for several jenets held captive in Castile.56 In short, the Crown provided for these soldiers in all aspects of their service, from stipends to sustenance, whatever they might need while in its lands. The fact that other soldiers in battle did not receive these same privileges suggests that the king valued his Muslim jenets differently and, perhaps, more than the rest.
The Aragonese kings heaped even more privilege, honor, and one might say, affection upon jenet captains and commanders.57 For instance, in February 1290, King Alfons issued three letters, each to a captain of jenets residing in the kingdom of Granada, inviting them to enter his service:
Don Alfons, by the grace of God, king of Aragon, Mallorca, Valencia, and Count of Barcelona, to you, Don Iuceff Abenzubayba, greeting and good will. We have understood from Adabub Adalil that you with a company of jenets wish to enter into our service, which pleases us greatly. And we hope that after seeing this letter, you will come to Valencia, where we have ordered our faithful scribe, Raimund Escorne, to collect from us your salary (quitacio) and whatever you require. And we promise you that when we have won with the aid of God a settlement to the war, if you have not returned to the land of the King of Granada, that as long as you wish to stay in our land you will lack nothing (no vos faleçremos de lo que ayades menester) until you win the love of the king of Granada, because we know that every man who serves us, serves the king of Granada (tot homne qui a nos sierva, sierve al Rey de Granada). Dated Zaragoza, 24 February.
Likewise to Don Mahomet al Granadaxi.
Likewise to Don Mahomet Abenadalil.58
In this invitation, Alfons not only expressed great pleasure at the possibility of the service of these three new captains of jenets but also revealed the context for their arrival, namely, that they have had a falling out with the sultan of Granada, Muḥammad II (r. 1273–1302). One can only speculate about the cause of this rift, but what is significant to note is the nature of Alfons’ entreaty. In a rather ecumenical tone, Alfons appealed to these exiles by invoking both the divine (“with the aid of God”) and political justness (“every man who serves us, serves the king of Granada”) of his impending war, which to say that although these soldiers were seeking refuge, he nevertheless hoped to dissuade them from seeing their crossing as a transgression.
Some jenet leaders received elevated positions at the Aragonese royal court. Mahomet Abenadalil, from the letter above, and al-‘Abbās b. Raḥḥū, whom King Jaume II referred to as “beloved (amado),” became vassals of the Crown.59 Both of these men as well as several other jenets were also members of the king’s household (de domo regis), where they joined his entourage and served as his guardsmen.60 It is worth adding that they would not have been the only Muslims in court: the Crown’s chief veterinarian and horse smith, known as the menescallus, was typically a Mudéjar.61 Given the presence of jenets in the royal entourage, perhaps, it is also no coincidence that the modern Castilian jinetear, another relative of the word jenet, signifies to ride in a public procession, a meaning suggestive of the kind of public and performative role that the jenets might have once played.
Several of the jenets in the king’s entourage also served as ambassadors to and from Muslim courts. Both Mahomet Abenadalil and al-‘Abbās b. Raḥḥū visited the Aragonese court from Granada and Fez, respectively, after their tenures of service had ended.62 In 1290, when King Alfons II was facing a combined French and Castilian threat, three jenets of his household traveled to Granada “at the king’s wish.”63 And in 1295, during another crisis over Sicily and an impending war between Morocco and Castile, Jaume II dispatched the jenet Muça Almentauri, perhaps the longest standing member of this royal guard, to Sicily and Ḥafṣid Tunis for negotiations.64 The Aragonese kings thus not only trusted the jenets in this intimate context but also saw value in the fact that the jenets could serve as intermediaries with Islamic courts.
It is also as a member of the king’s household that one finds the sole instance of a Jewish jenet, Abrahim el Jenet.65 Elena Lourie, who first mentioned Abrahim, unearthed much of the evidence related to him in the chancery registers. She suggested that Abrahim might have come from either Granada or North Africa alongside the Muslim jenets.66 She concluded that he reflected the essentially pluralist character of the jenet military bands.67 It may go too far to call Abrahim a soldier. Although we see Abrahim with the jenets at court, receiving privileges and salaries parallel to those of other jenets of the king’s household, we have no evidence that he fought alongside them.68 Thus, it was more likely that Abrahim was a jenet in name only, someone who held an honorary association with these soldiers. But even an honorary association speaks to a surprising pluralism.
In addition to welcoming the leaders of the jenets into their entourage, the Aragonese kings also presented lavish gifts to them. Some of what the kings gave could be considered martial frippery. For instance, in 1291, King Alfons II honored Abutçeyt Asseyt with a beige horse, three silver bridles, three pairs of jenet spurs, and a saddle embossed with lions that was in the possession of a Mudéjar.69 It should be added that specialized jenet horses, jenet saddles, jenet bridles, and jenet weapons are mentioned throughout these archival records as gifts given to both Muslim and non-Muslim elites, indicating not only an admiration for but also a steady diffusion of the style of riding a la jineta.70 For example, the Jewish physician, Samuel Abenmenassé, who served in King Pere II’s mission to recruit jenets from Granada, owned a jenet saddle, jenet sword, and jenet shield.71
FIGURE 4. Juego de Cañas in Valladolid (1506). Bibliothèque Royale Albert I, Brussels. Photograph: Album / Art Resource, New York.
The circulation of these gifts among Aragonese elites suggests that the jenets were not only an object of military but also aesthetic fascination. Some of this fascination is reflected in the fact that the jenets became a form of courtly entertainment. On two occasions, the registers make mention of jenets participating in games or tournaments (ludere ad jenetiam), perhaps precursors to the early modern juego de cañas, an equestrian game in which participants dressed as “Moors,” or the moros y cristianos festivals, mock battles between light cavalry, dressed as Muslims and Christians (fig. 4).72 A jenet named Gaylen, for example, was compensated the remarkable sum of 500 solidi for wounds that he sustained during one such event at the pleasure of the king.73 In other words, well before early modern Spanish noblemen and princes rode a la jineta as a matter of taste and social distinction, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Aragonese elites—both Christian and Jewish—already considered this style worthy of admiration and imitation. This fascination may have also spread further afield. In 1356, King Pere III (r. 1336–1387) arranged to have a small contingent of Muslim knights sent to the French court.74 This ability to translate from one context to another is what Georg Simmel had in mind when he said that “style is always something general.”75
Prominent jenets also received other valuable gifts. The Crown presented a handful of jenets with falcons.76 Over the course of his career, for instance, the jenet captain Mahomet Abendalil received five falcons, including a goshawk (austurcus), which was a rarity in North Africa.77 The most common gift given to these soldiers, however, was sumptuous cloth. At first blush, these rich cloths seem fancy but rather utilitarian: capes, shoes, bolts of cloth, and tunics. Among numerous other examples, two jenets, Muçe and Çahit, received leather-lined capes made with Parisian chiffon as well as tunics and boots made from colored cloth.78 The representatives of Çahim Abennaquem received colored tunics and shoes made with silks imported from France and the Levant.79 Other sumptuous cloths mentioned include vermillion presset and colored chiffon from Saint Denis, the cult center of the Capetian kings.80 These cloths may have been used to make tunics or tie turbans.
What do all these lavish gifts tell us about the Aragonese kings’ understanding of the jenets? Far from an empty ritual, gift giving holds deep social significance.81 Gifts materialize bonds and obligations between men, and thus they might also help to reveal an unspoken but shared symbolic vocabulary between the Aragonese kings and their Muslim soldiers. The falcons they gave, for instance, were admired throughout Spain and North Africa.82 Red cloth was favored by both Aragonese and Naṣrid knights.83 What is more, honorific gifts (tashrīfāt), including robes (khila‘), featured regularly in ceremonies (marāsim) at Islamic courts.84 Strong parallels between Christian ideas of chivalry and the Islamic concept of murū’a may have further strengthened these connections. For both parties, the significance of these martial and vestiary trifles was familiar. These gifts formed part of a common cultural ground and a shared script. More precisely, they were elements of both Christian and Islamic courtly rituals, rituals that bound kings and elite soldiers. In other words, not only salaries but also gifts tied kings to these elite soldiers. Thus, these gift-giving rituals offer us another way to understand the authority of the Aragonese kings. As opposed to purely bureaucratic rationalism, these gifts point to the continuing charismatic power of Aragonese kingship in this period.85
This shared sense of style and mutual esteem speaks to a bond between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish elites that transcended religious difference. It suggests, as Robert Ignatius Burns and others have argued, the existence of a common “military-aristocratic” culture, a set of values—above all, wealth and honor—that bridged elite men.86 This shared culture allowed them to see each other as equals, as members of the same community. And it suggests despite the claims of earlier liberals and conservatives, that religion was ultimately no impediment, that the Aragonese kings and Muslim jenets were capable of seeing themselves and each other as something more than merely Christians and Muslims.
Exception
While this cultural reading is satisfying, there are other ways to make sense of these privileges and gifts. If the privileges that the Aragonese kings conferred upon the jenets could be read as evidence of honor and esteem, then they might also be read as evidence of caution and unease. As in the case of jenets captured by Aragonese villagers in 1290, mentioned above, the Crown was fully aware of the threats and challenges that these soldiers faced when traveling around Christian territory.87 Christian villagers regularly barred these soldiers from entering towns and violently attacked them, sometimes raiding their camps in the middle of the night.88 Thus, perhaps in granting these soldiers basic military and nonmilitary necessities, the Aragonese kings may have hoped to minimize encounters between its Christian subjects and the jenets.89 From this perspective, such privileges served to isolate these soldiers and made them dependent on royal administrators.90 In short, they did not mark the jenets as favorites but rather exceptions.
This sense that the jenets were exceptional is further underscored by the fact that the Crown also granted them the privilege of keeping the king’s customary fifth or quinta of all war spoils.91 Whereas other soldiers were required to share their spoils with the king, the jenets were not. What is more, Christians who raided alongside the jenets were required to give a fifth of their spoils to the jenets, a fact that occasionally led to violent confrontation within mixed companies, complicating any claim that these were easy collaborations.92 It is worth adding that this privilege was not an Aragonese innovation but rather the customary right of the Marīnid Ghuzāh. The Naṣrid rulers had always granted these soldiers their fifth (khums) of all war spoils (ghanīma).93 Thus, whereas salaries and other privileges kept the jenets tightly bound to royal administrators, the fifth share marked the jenets’ independence from them. By surrendering its fifth of spoils, the Crown permitted the jenets to operate outside of its purview and more problematically for the historian, outside of the view of the chancery registers. Moreover, since these spoils may have outweighed salaries, it could be argued that raiding rather than salaried service was the principal motivation for jenets in entering the lands of the Crown of Aragon. In other words, rather than as professional soldiers, who traded their roles in the Granadan army for ones in the Aragonese army, jenets might be seen as raiders and bandits, who belonged to neither kingdom. Despite their crossing into the lands of the Crown of Aragon, they essentially remained Ghuzāh.
Can one say, at least, that the jenets found some common ground at the Aragonese court among elites of similar tastes and values? To see the gifts of cloth that the jenets received as style as opposed to substance, as objects that could freely move from Christian to Muslim bodies, overlooks the fact that clothing was freighted with spiritual and moral danger in the medieval Crown of Aragon. Indeed, clothing was deeply bound up in social and religious 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-mawshiyya—were long tunics worn over clothing, to mark the Mudéjar population as distinct and to prevent miscegenation.98 Subject Muslims were required to make these tunics from plain cloth, underscoring their abject and inferior status.99 Christians, 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 application 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 Aragonese kings presented elite jenets with not simply tunics but also rich and colorful aljubas or what they sometimes called “Saracen” tunics is ambiguous at best. If, on the one hand, the sumptuous cloth implied the jenets’ freedom from the discriminatory laws that threatened non-Christian subjects, 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 emphasized 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 examining 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 of Moorish knights as their personal guard, who appeared in parades alongside them, physically marking out the space of the sovereign. And as Ana Echevarría has shown, despite the fact that many of these soldiers had converted to Christianity, the Castilian kings continued to dress them lavishly as “Moors”—adorned in turquoise tunics, sheepskin garments, doublets, and laced boots. To put this clearly, the Castilian kings continued to dress their soldiers as Muslims even after they had become Christians. And although the practice of recruiting and hiring Muslim soldiers had disappeared in this period, the spectacle and indeed, more precisely, the display of Muslim soldiers continued to have importance to Christian kings.105 What was the relationship of these kings to these ersatz jenets? What notion of authority was being performed in these processions?
The challenge of reading these tunics reveals the limit of recent approaches to religious interaction in medieval Iberia. In step with the wider historical discipline, many medievalists have come to see religion as an aspect of culture, which is to say that they see religion as part of a broader set of norms and rules that clothe individuals in identity and dress their choices in a deep sense of pragmatism, purpose, and order.106 They see religion as a lived, pragmatic, and flexible system that responds to the needs of individuals in community.107 Thus, rather than stifling agency, religion can express agency. Rather than inevitably leading to collision or transgression, religious interaction becomes a process of encounter and acculturation.108
Although I am not alone in making this critique but precisely because this cultural approach continues to hold power among scholars of medieval Iberia, I want to suggest that the time has come to shift the furniture piled up in the lumber room once again.109 As Steven Justice has recently argued, in a quest to provide rational and coherent explanations for religious belief, the cultural account of religion has provided a familiar understanding of religious belief.110 If one contends that believers were aware of the underlying reasons for their beliefs, then they also held a curious detachment from them. If one contends they were unaware of those reasons, then they appear to be in bondage to their beliefs. In other words, one must either see believers as cunning manipulators, who secretly disbelieved, or delusional fools, who believed unblinkingly.111 Sincere belief remains, as it had for Spanish liberals and conservatives, a form of blind adherence and constraint. As such, the cultural theory of religious identity can not provide a genuine alternative to views it seeks to overcome.112 If one begins with the understanding that religious belief is a form of community, then religious interaction can only be read as transgression.
Indeed, recent accounts of Muslim and Christian mercenaries in the medieval Mediterranean have come to the same understanding of them as their liberal and conservative predecessors. If for an earlier generation, these soldiers crossed lines in spite of religion, in either heroic or treasonous transgression of it, then for contemporary scholars, they crossed regardless of their religious beliefs. In spite of religion or regardless of it, the conclusion is the same: this religious encounter curiously has nothing to do with religion. In the century of scholarship on Christian and Muslim mercenaries, every historian has concluded that social and economic interests, secular and pragmatic motivations, drove these kings and soldiers.113
My argument is not that this reading of the jenets is wrong but rather that it underdescribes their relationship to the Crown of Aragon. To imagine the Aragonese kings’ employment of the jenets solely as a matter of rational pragmatism or cultural accommodation not only excludes the question of religion from the outset but also, as a result of that exclusion, reproduces an enduring historiographical bias that sees the Middle Ages as a period of incomplete secularism, a way station on the road to a disenchanted modernity. What then would it mean to write the history of the Crown of Aragon’s reliance upon the jenets beyond secular terms that oppose political and religious impulses?
Law and Theology
Given the sustained efforts of the Aragonese kings to style themselves the heirs of Frederick II, which is to say, as the heirs to the most successful thirteenth-century Holy Roman emperor, it is necessary to consider the model of authority that Frederick himself embodied.114 Armed with his own professional bureaucrats and lawyers, Frederick II had transformed his court at Sicily into a miracle of fiscality and centralized authority. This change bore the influence of two overlapping traditions. First, from North Africa, the rationalist political philosophy of the Almohads entered Sicily through translations of the works of Ibn Tūmart and Ibn Rushd, known more famously as Averroes, the Arabic commentator on Aristotle. The Almohads had imagined their ruler, the caliph, as a supreme lawmaker, a “lamp of reason,” and an earthly reflection of the divine sovereign, who they understood as radically distant and utterly inscrutable, unique and transcendent.115 Second, Frederick’s court was a center for the revival of Roman law. In this regard, beginning with the argument that “every king is an emperor in his own domain (rex est imperator in regno suo),” jurists sought to ground royal authority and legitimacy upon the Roman idea of royal law (lex regia), which is to say upon the exclusive power of the emperor to make law—upon his sovereignty, his absolute jurisdiction (merum imperium).116 For scholars like Joseph Strayer and Ernst Kantorowicz, the intellectual work of these jurists marked a turning away from theological towards legal, rational, and secular justifications for political authority across thirteenth-century Europe.117
From the perspective of medieval jurists, the glossators who read and commented on Roman law, however, the line between law and theology was not so clean and clear. For instance, in reading the Digest, the sixth-century law code of the Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565), these glossators recognized something exceptional in the twin adages, “whatever pleases the Prince has the force of law (quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem)” and “the Prince is free from the laws (princeps legibus solutus est).”118 If the sovereign was the source of law, then it followed that his authority could never fully be contained within or restrained by law.119 Conservative and liberal historians, political philosophers, and legal theorists from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben, John Austin to Hans Kelsen, have recognized an absolutist streak in these ideas—an arbitrary and violent potential in the notion of the sovereign exception that posits an absent foundation of the law.120 Nevertheless, as Brian Tierney has argued, for influential medieval glossators such as Accursius (ca. 1182–1263), sovereignty was not ungrounded or unbound.121 Although the king could not be forced to obey the law, Accursius nevertheless expected him to respect it voluntarily because law was a gift from God.122 That is, if the king stood above human or positive law, then he also lay beneath and subject to divine or natural law.123 In other words, political ideas were inextricable from theological ones precisely because earthly order mirrored divine order. The Accursian gloss of legibus solutus est depended upon a particular theology and understanding of nature. Following but also responding to Schmitt, Kantorowicz borrowed the mixed expression “political theology” to describe this medieval juridical discourse. Although Kantorowicz saw the connection between theological and legal concepts as purely formal, a matter of borrowing, I employ the expression here to emphasize the continual and dynamic exchange between legal and theological ideas.124
If one accepts that law and theology were interrelated in this period, then it also follows that ideas about political sovereignty both shaped and were shaped by ongoing debates about God’s sovereignty, about the nature of divinity and its relationship to man. It mattered deeply, for instance, whether God’s will was bound (potestas ordinata) or unbound (potestas absoluta) by reason and good.125 If bound, then it seemed, as Accursius argued, that the king’s, too, must be restrained. But it is significant that over the course of the later Middle Ages, the balance of opinion on such matters tipped. As the early medieval realism that characterized Accursius’ solution increasingly gave way to late medieval nominalism and Averroism—which is to say, as a God approachable through and limited by reason (logos) became a distant and inscrutable will (voluntas), as Aquinas turned into Ockham—so the meaning of earthly sovereignty shifted towards a greater emphasis on absolute and unpredictable will; towards a more extreme sense of exception, free from any impediment.126 It is in this evolving theological context that one should understand Frederick II’s claim that he was the lex animata, the living law, and his dramatic self-coronation in Jerusalem in 1229.127 Thus, rather than ushering in secularism, as Kantorowicz argued, the language of law—jurisdiction—was infused with theological assumptions that allowed medieval kings and royal jurists to make arguments about political sovereignty that ranged from minimalist and restrained to radical and unbound.128 The potential for both was embedded in the late medieval theological tradition. To put this differently, political sovereignty is not the secularization of theology but rather an extension of it.129
Before the arrival of the Hohenstaufen exiles at Pere’s court, Romanist legal traditions had already taken root in the lands of the Crown of Aragon.130 In part because of proximity, in part because of a powerful and aspiring merchant class, significant numbers of Catalan students attended the schools of Roman law at Bologna and Montpellier.131 Among those educated at Bologna, for instance, were the jurists and royal advisors Ramon de Penyafort, Vidal de Canyelles, Pere Albert, and Guillem Çassala. By the thirteenth century, Romanist legal concepts had penetrated both local custom and new legislation.132 Well before its official approbation in the sixteenth century, Roman law had in practice steadily replaced customary law as the common law (ius commune) of the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon.133
For their part, the Aragonese kings clearly understood that they could employ novel ideas of royal jurisdiction to extend their authority.134 King Jaume I, for instance, invoked merum imperium in his newly conquered kingdom of Valencia.135 But when he made the same claim in the Aragonese heartland, he faced challenges. The well-established nobility, some of whom commanded more wealth and arms than the king himself, balked. They complained of “innovations,” of the intrusion of foreign law.136 They blamed the preponderance of “legists” and “decretalists,” by which they meant men trained in Roman law, at the king’s court.137 These pretensions to absolute sovereignty and royal jurisdiction as well as conflicts with the nobility peaked again during the time of King Pere II. Both Sicily and North Africa became zones in which the king hoped to free himself from the grip of his noblemen and express a new independence, a full sovereignty. Indeed, there may be some truth to the Franciscan writer Francesc Eiximenis’ (d. 1409) record of Pere’s fondness for the radical and voluntaristic expression “the law goes wherever the king wills (lla va la llei on vol lo rei).”138 These pretensions to imperial authority were challenged not only at home but also abroad. The French and Castilian kings competed to cast themselves as the heirs of the Holy Roman emperor, as universal sovereigns.139
In addition to sharing its extreme political theology, the Aragonese court took on the appearance of Frederick’s, adapting its institutions, habits, and rituals in order to elevate the image of the king. Among these, as I have argued, was the tradition of maintaining Muslim guardsmen. Beginning with the reign of Alfons III, it should be added, the fourteenth-century Aragonese kings also adopted the tradition of self-coronation, mirroring the brashness of Frederick’s own act at Jerusalem in 1229.140
What, however, did these performances and ideologies of omnipotence have to do with the employment of Muslim soldiers? Importantly, just as enthusiastic new readings of Roman law elevated the king to near divine status, they had profound but opposite implications for non-Christians, stripping them of all rights. And precisely for this reason, like the Sicilians before them, the Aragonese kings found in religious others not only skilled agents but also symbolic expressions of their own power.
As John Boswell has explained, from the twelfth century, religious minorities—Muslims and Jews—enjoyed a consistent if ambiguous legal status in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon. The Aragonese kings first referred to Jews and, later, Muslims as well as “their property” or “servants of the royal chamber (servi camerae regis).”141 These ideas placed Jews and Muslims at the whim of kings.142 Nevertheless, despite this rhetoric, and as has been noted before, in the early years of the reign of King Pere II the political status of Jews in particular appeared to improve dramatically. Several highly educated and influential Jewish families—including that of Samuel Abenmenassé—came to hold elite positions in the royal administration.143 Against a backdrop of new efforts to convert, expel, and demonize Jews throughout thirteenth-century Europe, the rise of these Jewish royal administrators has led some historians to speak of a “Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry”—a period of toleration and intellectual creativity that belied the language of servitude.144
Rather than measuring religious interaction in terms of tolerance and intolerance—which is to say, in modern liberal terms—it might be better to ask what, if anything, drew together slavery and privilege in this period. For instance, while speaking of his Muslim soldiers as servi camerae regis, Frederick granted them exceptional privileges such as knighthoods.145 David Abulafia has suggested that this notion of Jewish and Muslim servitude in fact reflected the conflation of two traditions: first, a more ancient Augustinian tradition that emphasized the debased status of Jews on account of their rejection and murder of Christ; and second, a German and Sicilian tradition of privileged Jewish and Muslim cameral servitude, regularized by Frederick II. Frederick’s use of the ambiguous term servus, Abulafia has further contended, also reflected a shift away from a sense of the word as “servant” and toward “slave” or “possessed,” as it had signified in Roman law.146 As a whole, the expression servi camerae regis marked Frederick’s attempt to assert exclusive jurisdiction over non-Christians, a pointed challenge to the counterclaims of the Church and the nobility. By this logic, these soldiers’ increased privilege derived from rather than stood in opposition to their enslavement by the king.
In precisely the same fashion as Frederick II, the Aragonese kings used non-Christians to challenge the authority of the Church and nobility as well as assert their exclusive and exceptional right of jurisdiction.147 Pere relied upon Jewish administrators to lessen his dependence on the nobility, to create a body of bureaucrats who were personally dependent upon him.148 Similarly, he turned to the Muslim jenets to serve as his personal protectors and fill his armies. In brief, he used Jews and Muslims not only to defend but also to articulate his claims to absolute authority.
While this relationship may seem counterintuitive to modern sensibilities, in the wake of his conquest of Sicily in 1282, Pere’s own noblemen recognized this pattern and connection. Rising up in rebellion, a large coalition of Aragonese noblemen, calling themselves the Unions, explicitly challenged the king’s claim to sovereignty (merum imperium).149 They called for a reduction of royal jurisdiction and a return to respect for customary law, rejecting “the imperium . . . which was never known in the kingdom . . . and other new things without following the custom.”150 More significantly, they demanded that Pere dismiss “the Jews and foreigners” in his administration, indicating their awareness of the relationship between non-Christians, Sicilian exiles, and the new imperial pretension. Under threat on all sides, Pere was forced to compromise. On October 3, 1283, he approved the Privilegio General in Aragon, agreeing to dismiss all his Jewish bailiffs.151 The same concession was granted to the kingdoms of Valencia and Catalonia a few months later.152
The rebellions, however, continued, and Pere and his successors continued to maintain the practice of relying on privileged non-Christians.153 Local Jewish bailiffs indeed disappeared, but the Crown’s use of Jews as privileged agents of the royal court continued unabated. The recruitment of the jenets was an expansion of this system. And significantly, in this context, rather than referring to his Jewish and Muslim agents as servi, as he had in the past, Pere now prevaricated, speaking of them obliquely and innocuously as “our faithful (fidelis noster)” and “of our household (de domo nostra).”154 Abrahim el Jenet, for instance, was simply “our Jew.”155 In other words, these expressions and others like them did not suggest equality, community, or even affection—an ability to see these men as something other or more than Muslims and Jews—but rather were an ambage that masked ideas of possession and ownership.
In all but name, the Aragonese practice of using Jewish and Muslim servi remained the same. King Alfons II used the jenets to attack the Unions. From 1285 to 1287, the jenets were operating not only in foreign theaters but also in the Aragonese towns of Cutanda, Alfamén, and Calatayud, centers of rebellion.156 The Crown’s dependence on these soldiers is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that they actively prevented others from recruiting them. In 1293, Artal de Alagón, one of the leaders of the Unions, sent representatives to Granada—including a jenet already in his service—to request the support of the Ghuzāh for his rebellion against King Jaume II. Learning of this mission, Jaume moved immediately to block the alliance:
We have learned for certain that some Aragonese noblemen have recently sent representatives to the king of Granada, asking for and seeking assistance from him. . . . We have also learned that the nobleman Artal de Alagón sent his majordomo to said king as well as a certain Saracen jenet to request an army of jenets to do us harm, and we plan to resist these efforts so that no one can inflict harm or injury on our land and people.157
If the jenets were an extension of the royal body, an expression of its power, then they could only belong to the king.
Thus, in employing the Muslim jenets, King Pere and his successors were not merely acquiring skilled soldiers but also satisfying a certain vision of imperial power, an extreme political theology. They were not recruiting men that they saw as equals or boon companions but rather men that they saw as wholly dependent upon them—as their slaves. The privileges that they heaped upon these warriors, in other words, also symbolized their perfect submission. “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” Thoreau wrote.158 Indeed, the sumptuous clothes granted to the jenets were freighted with danger. These new clothes indexed the king’s claim to transcendence, his desire to stand apart from and above the law, to be sovereign. By putting on these rich silks, the jenets risked becoming embodiments of the king’s assertions of exceptional authority and extensions of the king’s body. To state this more provocatively, rather than religious indifference or cultural accommodation, the Crown’s relationship with the Muslim jenets both depended upon and reinscribed the fact that these men were non-Christians.