CHAPTER FIVE
In the summer of 1292, several men arrived at the houses of Muça Almentauri and Maymon Avenborayç, jenets in the service of the Crown of Aragon.1 They had come to settle a stunning debt of 900 solidi, money that their wives had borrowed with usurious interest, and an amount that each man might expect to earn as salary in half a year.2 The angry creditors threatened to seize what they could. A royal document listed some examples in passing: household utensils, wine jugs, oxen, horses, tack, weapons, and plows. The jenets were members of the king’s household, a fact that helps to account for the appearance of this incident in the chancery registers. But the list—household utensils, wine jugs, oxen, horses, tack, weapons, and plows—also paves another path of inquiry. It suggests a different story from that of privilege and exception, which was the perspective of power. While perhaps only a moment of scribal emphasis, this list of mundane items spiders outward to the mess of living: eating, drinking, and laboring. And the questions multiply: From whom did these Muslims buy wine? Indeed, did Muslims drink wine?3 Who tilled their fields? Who lent their wives money at exorbitant interest? And so on.
These small but significant questions highlight the limits not only of archival documents but also of an approach that overemphasizes sovereignty and therefore risks confusing a formal description of power with its performance and effects. The lives of the jenets were not neatly confined to the purview of the chancery registers or to their relationship with the Crown. So what were the experiences of the jenets in the lands of the Crown of Aragon beyond the royal court? How did these experiences shape the lives of the jenets in ways the Aragonese kings did not intend? Did these soldiers find a place, a sense of belonging on their own? What challenges did they face? If the gift helped to reveal the sovereign ambitions of the Aragonese kings, then the unpaid debt, the other half of the transaction, opens a door to the lives of the jenets in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon and the quotidian practices of royal power.
Life Is Elsewhere
The case of Muça Almentauri and Maymon Avenborayç reveals something simple but easily overlooked: the jenets did not come into the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon alone. Indeed, the Crown issued a safe-conduct in 1290 to three jenets, Muça Abenbeyet, Açe Parrello, and Yoniç, permitting them to enter Valencia with their “wives and families.”4 At the opposite end of their service, in 1286, five other jenets received permission to return home with their wives and children:
Because Giber, Jahia, Jucef, Hiahiaten, and Dapher, jenets, brothers, served us, therefore they may return [home] with their families, wives, and sons, in all forty-seven people. We order you [all officials], immediately, to put no impediment or obstacle in [the way of their] return but rather you should provide them safe passage.5
These jenets, five brothers, had lived in and departed these Christian lands with forty-seven members of their family. Between their arrival and departure, what did their families do? How did they survive in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon while these men served the king?
The Crown did, in fact, extend some of the same privileges and protections that jenets received to their wives.6 Luxurious gifts were rare. Exceptionally, for instance, the wife (referred to simply as “his wife”) of Çeyt Abdela received a gift of colored cloth “for clothing” alongside her husband.7 But by and large, soldiers’ families received basic provisions: plain cloth, clothes, and food.8 Some families were also provided with houses. Muça Hivanface and his wife, Axone, were given several houses in the morería, the Muslim quarter, of Valencia, a rather grand gesture but nevertheless one that parallels the equivocality of the aljuba, which is to say, if on the one hand, this gift signified privilege, the location of these houses nevertheless marked this jenet and his wife as non-Christians.9 The wives of the Almohad princes, perhaps less generously, received one “suitable” house also in Valencia.10 Other women appear to have traveled alongside their husbands, who received additional compensation for their expenses. Mahomet Abolxahe was granted 15 duplas to cover the cost of bringing his wife, Horo, and family to him.11 Although no evidence indicates such a thing, it is not unreasonable to imagine that some women accompanied their husbands to the battlefront.12 Ibn Khaldūn recorded the presence on the battlefield in North Africa of Berber women, who lifted their veils “to incite the men.”13 Regardless of whether they settled or followed their husbands, the wives of jenets received some financial support from the Crown.14
To conclude from these privileges and protections, however, that the lives of these women were privileged and protected—that they shared in their husbands’ exceptional status—would be to leave the curtain half drawn. The fact that the wives of Muça Almentauri and Maymon Avenborayç accrued significant debts may indicate that their stipends, of which little detail exists, were minimal.15 The challenge of making ends meet may have been compounded or perhaps caused by the difficulties some women encountered in obtaining disbursements from royal officials.16 In the case of Muça and Maymon, their wives sought help by turning to moneylenders, who lent them cash at precipitous interest.17 Their decision to take usurious loans underscores not only the depth of their crisis but also these women’s lack of real social protection.
What became of the wives of Muça and Maymon? Two documents, separated by over five hundred folios in the chancery registers, reveal that Muça and Maymon used their influence with the Crown to defer this debt and deter these creditors.18 On July 23, the jenets managed to appeal directly to King Jaume II in Barcelona. They arranged to have their salaries, two hundred solidi each, paid directly to their wives in Valencia.19 Just over a week later, on August 3, King Jaume wrote to the local justice to offer the jenets’ wives protection, arrange a six-month extension on the loan, and adjust its interest to a “more appropriate” amount, four denarii per libra.20 While these jenets of the royal household used their influence with the Aragonese king to solve this problem, it cannot be said that the problem was truly solved for their wives, who lived far from the court. Despite the king’s intervention, the unnamed wives of Muça and Maymon still had to face their creditors and the unpaid debt.
The Bestial Floor
Family, however, was not just a matter of what one might call private life for the jenets but rather overlapped with the history of their professional service. As in the documents above, passing remarks suggest that these mercenary companies were agnatic groups, extended families.21 Sons served alongside their fathers, and brothers appeared together to collect their salaries. They were familia in all senses of the Latin: army, servants, and family. All this, however, seemed to be of little concern to the Crown’s bureaucrats, who preserved almost no detail about the organization or composition of jenet companies. Should it have mattered? The jenets served, and the Crown paid them all the same.
At least on one occasion, the king’s failure to understand the structure of the companies under his command led to tense negotiations for service. To the scholar’s benefit, exasperated messengers had to shuttle back and forth between the king and the jenets, leaving a paper trail that offers a unique insight. In January 1304, Pere de Montagut, procurator of Murcia, and Ferrer des Cortey, bailiff of Murcia, wrote to Jaume II to acknowledge that they had received two letters of instruction with regards to incorporating the troops of al-‘Abbās b. Raḥḥū, a prominent Marīnid prince and member of the Ghuzāh.22 Before enlisting al-‘Abbās’ jenets, these two royal officials were meant to take hostages (rahenes) from among these soldiers.23 By taking hostages, Jaume intended to insure against the jenets’ disloyalty, but from the surviving documentation in the archives, it is unclear whether this was a customary practice with all the jenets, as it had been in Mudéjar surrender agreements decades earlier, or a special arrangement.24 In this case, Jaume had sent these two administrators a list of men to be taken, the sons of four leaders: Alabes Abarraho (al-‘Abbās b. Raḥḥū), Baratdin Abarraho (Badr al-Dīn b. Mūsā b. Raḥḥū), Greneladim Abarraho (Jamāl al-Dīn b. Mūsā b. Raḥḥū), and Jahia Abenmudahar. It is worth highlighting again that the first three names corresponded to leaders of the Ghuzāh.25 But the two administrators now responded to Jaume that al-‘Abbās refused to turn over the four men, his son and the sons of these three other men. Al-‘Abbās explained that these hostages represented only two of the four family lineages in his company of soldiers, and thus “it would be much more effective if each [family] provides its own hostage, because if he provided them all, the others would be free to leave whenever they want (valia molt mes que cascun linatge donas lo seu per ço con si ell ab son linatge donas tots les dites rahenes los altres tota ora ques vulgessen sen hieren).” Thus, the royal officials laid out the lineages of each family for the king, mentioning the tribes to which they belonged, adding, “Believe, my lord, that from what he says, al-‘Abbās and the others want to serve us and in this [respect], they are worth more than all other armed knights, and know, my lord, that throughout the frontier, your enemies tremble and have great fear of them.” Finally, the officials pleaded with the king for a quick response, explaining, “as you already know they make many excuses,” hinting at a tense relationship, which will be described in detail in the following chapter. A letter held in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, written in Arabic some six months later, likely by al-‘Abbās himself, confirms that these adjustments were ultimately made and the four hostages were handed over.26
Montagut and Ferrer’s letter to Jaume casts light on not only the process by which the jenets were integrated into the Crown’s service but also the dynamics of these companies themselves. Although the distant view of the chancery registers makes it rather easy to forget, the jenets were not homogeneous units but rather alliances of members of various tribes, a fact that opens up the possibility of competing loyalties within and between companies.27 However obvious this point seems, it only further underscores the significance of the king’s failure to recognize it. Put simply, in this case, Jaume presumed that authority resided solely in the figure of the captain, al-‘Abbās b. Raḥḥū, who in turn had the absolute fidelity of his troops. By contrast, Montagut and Ferrer’s negotiations reveal that the structure of these companies served to distribute authority and responsibility horizontally across the group. This misunderstanding highlights again that the convergence of the jenets and the Aragonese kings was not a seamless union, a moment of immediate and mutual recognition but rather one of competing, overlapping, and often incommensurate claims, values, and jurisdictions.
The Aragonese kings’ decision to recruit jenets grew out of a Mediterranean tradition that saw ethnic and religious others as slaves of emperors. But does this mean that the real lives of the jenets were of no concern to the Aragonese kings? This bleak vision of Aragonese sovereignty does not reflect the reality of the kings’ treatment the jenets. After all, the Aragonese kings listened and responded to the demands of the jenets. What is more, several particular incidents evidenced by the chancery registers suggest a deeper bond. For example, when several jenets along with their wives and children were captured by Castile in 1292, the Crown moved to secure the return of all of them rather than just the soldiers.28 In another instance, when two jenets retired, which is to say, when their martial utility came to an end, the Crown continued to extend their privileges.29 A jenet named Daut was given sufficient funds to live out his life in Valencia.30 And at the end of his career and “because of his many acts of service (propter plurima servicia),” Muça Almentauri received lands in Murcia, which, intriguingly, had been confiscated by the Crown from someone else.31 Were these selfless acts on the part of the Aragonese kings? Or were they merely efforts to play the part of the good employer, to ensure the jenets’ loyalty? To put the matter in different terms, did the king care for his jenets? Can one detect an intimacy between the Christian kings and their Muslim soldiers based on a shared sense of humanity?
Perhaps a final example will suffice to lay bare the problem of appealing to an essential and universal humanity as the basis for understanding the relationship between the Crown and its Muslim mercenaries. In 1289, King Alfons II intervened on behalf of the wife of Abdalla Abençiça, a jenet in his service. Alfons explained his actions in a promissory note directed to Arnaldus de Bastida, his royal treasurer:
Since Ali Amari bought at our command in Jaca the horse of Abdalla Abençiça, a certain jenet of ours, who died in Jaca, for the price of 55 duplas that we ordered him to give, we order you, immediately, to pay Ali [back] for the said duplas, which he gave to the wife of Abdalla.32
While still on the field of battle at Jaca, King Alfons had ordered a Muslim named Ali Amari to pay a fixed price for the horse of a jenet, Abdalla Abençiça, who had just died in battle, and give that money immediately to Abdalla’s widow. Was this command an act of compassion? Perhaps, in this moment, one can glimpse a connection between the Christian kings and their Muslim soldiers beyond religion or politics. If not grounded in a shared military ethos or even a shared understanding of family, then perhaps one can speak here of a genuine sense of human community grounded on a small outcrop of suffering. Then again, perhaps, it was nothing of the sort, merely an order to get on with the battle and put the horse back to use. For the historian holding this faded and age-worn document, it can only remain an open question.33
Lawless
The jenets were principally raiders and bandits both before and after they entered the service of the Crown. The Aragonese kings let these soldiers loose along the frontiers of their lands and turned them against their Christian enemies: the French, the Navarrese, the Castilians, and even their own rebellious noblemen. Raiding, occasionally alongside Christian soldiers, the jenets terrorized local populations, laying waste to their villages, and ransacking houses for everything of worth: goods, weapons, animals, and captives (fig. 5). But unlike Christian soldiers, many, if not all, jenets had the privilege of retaining their spoils without paying a customary fifth (quinta) to the Aragonese kings, a fact that highlighted the unique relationship between the Aragonese kings and the jenets.34 Paradoxically, the law permitted the jenets to remain lawless, to remain bandits. But just like the unpaid debt with which this chapter began, these spoils—household goods, weapons, animals, and captives—point to the material limits of this privilege of exception. Selling these goods meant finding markets and depending upon local Christians and royal officials. How did these kinds of men react to the arrival of the uniquely privileged jenets? And how did the jenets, in turn, deal with them?
FIGURE 5. Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Maria (no. 165) (ca. 1284) (detail, top-left panel). Muslim raiders with Christian captives, Syria. Monasterio-Biblioteca-Colección, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid. Photograph: Album / Art Resource, New York.
An episode from the career of Mahomet Abenadalil provides a dramatic example of what the privilege of raiding meant in practice. Abenadalil, the subject of a detailed study by Brian Catlos, entered the service of King Alfons II in February 1290, following the mission of the Jewish ambassador Abrahim Abennamies to Granada. The Crown awarded Abenadalil the highest honors and privileges. On August 10, 1290, Alfons made the jenet his vassal and commander of all jenets in his service. In addition, Abenadalil received a salary of almost twenty-four solidi per diem (six times the rate of other jenets) as well as the right to the king’s fifth share of spoils from raids.35 And in turn, the Aragonese king put his vassal to work. Alfons first sent Abenadalil and his troops to the French and Navarrese borders.36 Abenadalil spent the following months fighting along the Castilian border in various locations.37 Finally, in December 1290, after only ten months in the Aragonese king’s service, and back in the good graces of the Naṣrid sultan, Abenadalil and his troops returned home to Granada.38
In Abenadalil’s surprisingly brief career, the events that took place in villages in the region of Calatayud, along the Castilian border, demand deeper investigation (map 1). Although Abenadalil and his jenets held the right to maintain the king’s fifth of spoils, their desire to convert any spoils into profits presented them with significant challenges. In November 1290, King Alfons wrote to Petrus Sancii, the justice of Calatayud. He explained that after a raid into Soria, just across the Castilian border, Abenadalil and his soldiers had brought back certain goods (prede), worth 2,200 solidi, that the Christian inhabitants of Calatayud accepted and agreed to pay for on an appointed day.39 Apparently, as later correspondence revealed, these “goods” also included Castilian captives, for whom the locals had acted as guarantors.40 In any event, despite their initial promise, the villagers now refused to pay the jenets. King Alfons therefore ordered Petrus either to compel the villagers to pay the jenets or to confiscate their property and levy a fine of 2,200 solidi. A month later, however, the matter had grown worse. Several men from nearby Calatayud attacked Abenadalil’s jenets, making off with “horses, shields, and other things (roncincos, adargas, et alias res).”41 On December 13, frustrated with Petrus’ lack of response, Alfons addressed a letter to Calatayud’s council, indicating that none of the money or the fine against the villagers had been paid and asking them to determine whether the local justice, Petrus, was acting “maliciously (maliciose).”42 The king simultaneously wrote to the justice of Aragon, Petrus’ superior, and the justice of Valencia, asking them to take an interest in the matter.43 Finally, in the archival equivalent of raising his voice, the king also issued a circular to all royal officials in the kingdom of Aragon, reiterating the right of the jenets to raid from his lands and sell any captives or goods that they brought back from enemy territory, suggesting that he thought that the attacks were related to this privilege.44 Although nothing is known of what ultimately came of the captives, goods, or debt, the tension between the king, royal administrators, jenets, and the villagers of Calatayud is what concerns us.
What motivated the villagers’ attack on the jenets? Canon law, which is to say, the law of the Catholic Church, banned Muslims from buying or selling Christian captives. Thus, one could argue that in trying to sell their goods to villagers, the jenets were crossing a well-established legal boundary.45 This transgression, moreover, may have been felt less abstractly and more viscerally by Christian frontiersmen, who were themselves regularly victims—in person and property—of Ghuzāh raids from Granada. In addition, Soria was a short distance from Calatayud, meaning robbers and captives may have known one another and may have felt some sense of community on account of their shared suffering at the hands of the Muslim Ghuzāh. Should one say, then, that this transgression of religious law motivated these assaults? In his reading of the Calatayud episode, Catlos suggested that this motivation is “a convenient rationalization.”46 After all, Christian soldiers from Castile also raided these regions, taking their own captives and ransacking homes. What is more, Christian soldiers ran into similar problems in selling goods from raids. At the same time that Abenadalil complained of trouble, a Christian almogàver, Vincent de Sayona, informed the Crown that a villager from Calatayud, Johannes Petri, still owed him 50 solidi for a captive.47
For his part, Catlos attributed the attack on Abenadalil’s troops not to the privilege of raiding, as King Alfons had, or to religion but to the jenets’ own vulnerability as foreigners. In 1286, for instance, the king ordered Muçe de Portella, the Jewish bailiff of Aragon, to compensate a jenet named Abduahet for goods that were stolen from him by a Christian.48 Similarly, in 1290, the king ordered the arrest of Mosse Maymono, a Jew from Valencia, who had stolen (surripuit) promissory notes from some jenets.49 Catlos saw these incidents as evidence that the jenets were easy prey for petty criminals. Thus, the events at Calatayud, like frontier war in general, better reflected greed rather than grievance. They were the actions of men accustomed to “the misery and opportunity” of the frontier, something like what Hobbes saw as “the war of all against all.”50 And while the villagers’ decision to free the Castilian captives displayed a “spirit of confessional cohesion,” Catlos suggested that this, too, should ultimately be accounted for by self-interest rather than religious belief.51 If these Christian villagers, rescuers and captives, were on opposite sides of a political border, freeing each other’s captives of war served their local and financial interests in the long run.
Catlos’ reading of this episode offers an opportunity to consider his broader attempt to rethink the dynamics of religious interaction in medieval Iberia.52 Rather than a monolithic clash between religions, as historians of an earlier generation imagined, or a subtler process of acculturization, as more recent scholarship has envisioned, Catlos has contended that interaction between Christians, Jews, and Muslims followed a different logic. To his mind, religious abstractions like crusade and jihād were not determinants but rather later justifications for and explanations of events.53 Similarly, “confessional,” “sectarian,” or “ethno-religious identities” did not determine but were rather the consequences of interaction.54 In other words, religion, whether understood as ideology or identity, was an afterthought to practices on the ground. Catlos has suggested instead that interactions between Muslims, Jews, and Christians followed a social calculus, an equation of competing individual and communal interests. In a witty play on and criticism of convivencia, religious tolerance, Catlos calls this the principle of conveniencia, convenience.
Catlos is certainly right that an overemphasis on religion or identity risks dissolving agency and contingency, but he risks running too far in the opposite direction, sacrificing agency and contingency to another all-consuming principle: convenience. Again, my point is not to say that self-interest played no role in such interaction but to ask why this kind of reading presumes that religion is divorced from rational thoughts and practical motivations, to ask why religion can only be a dependent variable.55 Ultimately, the principle of convenience dismisses religion on precisely the same terms as liberal positivists and cultural theorists. It casts religion as either ideology or identity, as either political manipulation or reflexive adherence to community. If one starts with these familiar explanations of religion, then beliefs can never play a role in explaining events like those at Calatayud.
What is more, in the case of Abenadalil, convenience and rational self-interest fall short of fully explaining the villagers’ actions. While, as foreigners, the jenets may have appeared to be easy marks for rogues and grifters, the Calatayud villagers took enormous risks in attacking them. The jenets were not only well armed but also protected by the Crown. And, by targeting the jenets, these Calatayud villagers immediately incurred the wrath of the Aragonese king. Initially, they faced extraordinary fines, 2,200 solidi. Eventually, King Alfons ordered both the villagers’ arrest and the seizure of their property throughout all the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon.56 One can safely say then that the frontiersmen were not acting in their own best interest. So why would they take such individual risks and openly challenge the king?
The Calatayud villagers’ actions are better approached from the history of their previous encounters with these soldiers. Significantly, the earliest recorded appearance of Muslim jenets in the region dates to 1287, during the rebellion of the Aragonese Unions against the Crown. King Alfons employed the jenets to pacify the kingdom; thus, the residents of Calatayud would have known the jenets not only as foreign raiders but also as agents of royal repression.57 This ironic disjunction can only have resulted in confusion and tension. On October 14, 1287, for example, the justice of Calatayud—perhaps the same Petrus Sancii above—was reprimanded for seizing and ordered to return several Christian captives that jenets had brought back from a raid on the Aragonese village of Cutanda, near Teruel.58 Royal administrators, in other words, and not simply villagers found themselves in conflict with the jenets. Significantly, these officials’ caution and suspicion was not unjustified. Just over a week later, jenets operating from the villages of Alfamén and Almonacid were accused of raiding a Christian village, Aguaro, which was under the protection of the Crown of Aragon.59 In this case, the Crown ordered the jenets to return any goods or captives that they had seized, but otherwise, the soldiers went unpunished. Whether resulting from the complex and ambiguous political situation or the jenets’ obvious impunity, a climate of accusation and recrimination had reigned on the Aragonese frontier. Tensions remained high after the rebellion of the Unions. In October 1289, several villagers from Alfamén—the same village that hosted the Muslim raiders above—decided to take some jenets captive, marking a new boldness and daring in these villagers’ dealings with royal agents. King Alfons ordered the justice of Calatayud—in all likelihood, now Petrus Sancii—to free the jenets and to safeguard their journey out of the region.60 The fact that Alfons withdrew his jenets and insisted on their protection suggests that the Crown not only saw the villagers as dangerous and unpredictable but also the entire situation as untenable.
This pattern of conflict across various locations reveals two critical things about the encounter between Abenadalil’s jenets and the Calatayud villagers in 1290. First, these frontiersmen had challenged and attacked the jenets before and had been rebuked by the king, suggesting that they cannot have been innocent of the consequences of their assaults. These were not spontaneous acts of greed. Second, the justice of Calatayud was deeply involved in this resistance. He did not simply represent royal authority. He not only treated the jenets with some suspicion but also, given the raids on Aguaro, had good reason to do so. In this light, the fact that Petrus Sancii dragged his feet in implementing the Crown’s justice for Abenadalil in 1290 looks less like bureaucratic inefficiency and more like defiance of royal authority, a vestige of the anger that drove the Unions.61 One could therefore argue that the villagers who attacked Abenadalil’s jenets were not acting selfishly or blindly but rather with the knowledge that royal officials—if only tacitly—would support their actions.62 This kind of local and strategic solidarity in Calatayud suggests a more complex approach to the question of motive than self-interest. While these attacks appeared illegal in the eyes of the king, there is no reason to assume that the people of Calatayud saw them the same way. The tensions at Calatayud reflected competing ideas of law and legitimacy. Such competition rendered visible the obvious limits of the Crown of Aragon’s claim to absolute jurisdiction and sovereignty. More to the point, it undermined the value of the exceptional privilege of the jenets.
Although tensions in Calatayud appeared to be particularly high because they were particularly well recorded, it is worth mentioning that this was not the only region where the presence of jenets led to tension and conflict. In March 1290, for instance, royal officials from Játiva took captive several jenets serving in Villena, near Alicante. The king “angrily (irato)” rebuked them, his words indicating that he saw their actions as malicious and defiant.63 In November 1290, immediately before they arrived in Calatayud, Abenadalil’s also troops ran into problems on the Navarrese front. The troops of the Aragonese nobleman Lope Ferrench de Luna, who participated with the jenets in raids, despoiled Abenadalil’s soldiers after they returned from battle.64 The attack reveals that military cooperation between the jenets and Christian soldiers did not necessarily imply acceptance or equivalence. In brief, these conflicts demonstrate that Christian villagers, local administrators, and soldiers, all took issue with the jenets and their privilege. The incidents in Calatayud in 1290 were neither isolated nor passing.
In this context, one can ask again, why were the jenets attacked? To ask whether these attacks were religiously or politically motivated only begs the question. Religion was neither a thin mask for selfish desires, an ideology, nor a reflexive sense of communal belonging or identity. Rather than suggesting that the villagers were cold and calculating manipulators or blind to the reasons for their actions, the foregoing documents reveal many overlapping motivations: opportunism, revenge, criticism of royal power, and religious animus. The nature of these conflicts could have been simultaneously private, local, and public to varying degrees. One has no reason or means to discount any of these readings. Religion is not separable from other processes or from material circumstances. While complex matters resist systematization, the violence was also not arbitrary or chaotic. Just as King Alfons made clear in his circular to all royal official in Aragon, the jenets’ raiding—or more particularly, their taking and ransoming Christian captives—was the occasion and catalyst for the pattern of events above.65 In other words, it was the blatant transgression of a legal boundary—understood rationally and felt viscerally—that shaped and channeled the multiple motivations of the attackers, made them take excessive and bold risks, giving them a sense of legitimacy. By extension, moreover, beliefs and practices gained greater meaning and power through these local acts, through their iteration. A moment of boundary crossing became a moment of boundary making. For the case at hand, this understanding allows us to speak of the complex motivations for violence without reducing actors to ciphers and history to a painted backdrop.
Killed but Not Murdered
The vulnerability of the jenets derived not from their physical weakness but rather from the weakness of their claim to privileged exception. These attacks on the jenets also highlighted the impotence of the Aragonese kings, their inability to either enforce or realize their claims to absolute jurisdiction and sovereign authority. The story of Abenadalil and his troops in Calatayud holds a final chapter that suggests that the Aragonese kings both were well aware of these challenges to their authority and navigated them with canny ability. The practice of royal power differed sharply from its towering rhetoric.
This story begins with a murder. A month after the controversial raids into Soria and during the furious exchange of letters between King Alfons II and the various justices of Aragon, two curious attacks were recorded in the chancery registers. First, a group of Christian almogàvers—Paschasius Valentini, Matheus de Galera, Juanyes Bono, Raimundus Petri, Galmus Petri, and others—attacked and killed a man named Puçola, the “Big Flea,” who had raided alongside Abenadalil’s troops into Navarre.66 The local justice—Petrus Sancii—convicted Puçola’s murderers and seized their property.67 In the second attack, just a few days later, the same almogàvers turned their sights on three of Abenadalil’s jenets—Masset, Assager, and Alabes—attacking them and making off with their horses.68 Did anything link these two moments of violence?
If not for a letter, another complaint from King Alfons to Petrus Sancii, the fact that the same men perpetrated these attacks would only be a coincidence. Alfons explained that at the time of his death, Puçola owed a debt to Abenadalil. Puçola and his troops had agreed to pay Abenadalil in return for the privilege of raiding alongside his jenets. On the eve of the second attack on the jenets, Alfons had ordered Petrus Sancii to use Puçola’s goods to pay that debt “so that [Abenadalil] should not have to complain of defective justice.”69 In other words, the goods seized by Petrus Sancii from the almogàvers had made their way into the possession of Abenadalil’s jenets, providing a material link between the two episodes.
The Crown’s response to this outburst of violence is telling. While it appears that King Alfons supported the jenets, his privileged agents, against the almogàvers, he, in fact, played both sides. Indeed, after the initial attack on Puçola, Alfons wrote to the Petrus Sancii, insisting that the Christian almogàvers—however guilty—should have their goods returned and moreover, be sent back into service in Valencia, which is to say, to fight the Marīnid Ghuzāh, their traditional Muslim enemies, who were actively raiding the frontier at this moment.70 One could argue that Alfons’ decision to exculpate the almogàvers precipitated the second act, not only in giving them a sense of immunity but also legitimacy in attacking the jenets. Demonstrating that his response was not unique, Alfons responded to the second attack even more equivocally than the first. Caught between his jenets and almogàvers, he ordered Petrus Sancii to return the jenets’ horses but not to arrest the almogàvers.71
Perhaps then to call Puçola’s death a murder obscures more than it reveals. The Aragonese king let his almogàvers attack Abenadalil’s associate with impunity, which, to put it differently, is to say that Puçola was killed but not exactly murdered. The king, who embodied the law, was indifferent to the matter. Similarly, these Christian raiders received a slap on the wrist for attacking the jenets, making Alfons’ complaint against Petrus Sancii for “defective justice” appear absurd. Did Alfons, one must then ask, similarly abandon justice in the case of the Calatayud villagers once Abenadalil’s troops had moved on? Better yet, did these frontiersmen know that the king’s threats were only that, rhetoric and nothing more?
To say then that the jenets were above the law, exceptions to the law, means little in practice to the unfolding of the events above. Circumstance and practice brought the jenets into contact with royal officials, Christian soldiers, and Christian villagers, each of whom understood law and legitimacy in their own terms. In other words, this contested territory was a zone of overlapping and competing jurisdictions. But as the case above demonstrates, the Aragonese kings were able to turn these complications to their advantage. If, in the abstract, sovereignty is defined by coercion and decision, then in practice, Aragonese royal power succeeded through deflection and indecision. If the Crown permitted the Muslim jenets to stand outside the law, to be lawless, then it only partially enforced that privilege. It tacitly legitimated violent attacks against its disposable agents, the jenets. The overall effect of privileged exception and royal indecision were the same: the Aragonese kings profited from the violence of these soldiers while simultaneously disavowing them, marking them as outsiders and non-Christians.
Blood and Belonging
In November 1290, in the midst of Abenadalil’s struggles in Calatayud, King Alfons wrote the following letter to the Mudéjar çalmedine (ṣāḥib al-madīna), a community leader, of nearby Zaragoza:
We know that a certain Saracen named Mahumet Sugeray, a soldier of our esteemed nobleman, Abenadalil, captain of the jenets, very much loves (diligit multum) a certain Saracen woman of Zaragoza, named Fatima, daughter of Abdullasis, whom he wants to lead into marriage. Therefore, we tell and order you immediately to arrange that this Saracen man should have that Saracen woman in marriage.72
Set against the violent and exclusionary acts above, this document offers a way to imagine how and why the jenets remained and lived in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon. If marriage suggests affiliation, then perhaps one can argue that interactions between the Crown of Aragon’s Mudéjares and the jenets fostered a sense of brotherhood and community. What was the nature of this community? Was religion a sufficient condition for inclusion? How did the unique relationship that each of these groups had with the Crown shape and affect their bond? And finally, how did the Crown react to their association?
On closer inspection, this document—recording the marriage of a jenet to a Mudéjar woman—opens itself to many possible readings. One could read it as congratulatory, as a pure formality, which would suggest that the king was merely adding honor to the occasion. Thus, one could argue that the letter speaks of the Crown’s approval of interaction between the jenets and the Mudéjares. Sensitive to the dialogic quality of texts, one could read this document as a response. Did the Mudéjar çalmedine, who was technically in the king’s employ, first seek approval for the marriage, knowing that the king took a keen interest in the affairs of his Muslim subjects, his possessions, with these foreigners, who were servants and agents of his authority? In this scenario, the Mudéjares might have been taking tentative steps in their relationship with the jenets. Perhaps again, one could take a less subtle view of the king and see this document as a monologue, as the “order (mandatum)” that it claims to be and nothing more. This perspective might suggest that the king, an aspiring sovereign, was pressing his will on the Mudéjares, staving off any stated or potential objections to the marriage. Did Abdullasis or the local Muslim leader disapprove? This is all to say, given the fact of the relationship of the jenets to the Mudéjares, one must still ask whether theirs was a happy or unhappy marriage.
Arriving by land or sea, jenets entering the service of the Crown of Aragon found a world simultaneously familiar and strange. Like the five jenets with whom this book began, most entered through the kingdom of Valencia. Crossing over the rough and arid hills that surrounded this territory, they would have caught sight of an expansive green plain, covered with an arterial network of canals, all framed by the blue Mediterranean. Pope Gregory IX (d. 1241) once remarked upon this land’s wealth and beauty.73 But one might say that it was Valencia’s delicate nature, environmental and political, that lent its inhabitants an unusual mixture of ironic detachment and nostalgia. The Muslim poet Ibn Ḥarīq, Gregory’s contemporary, composed these lines on the eve of the kingdom’s fall to the Aragonese:
“Valencia is the dwelling of all beauty.”
This they say both in the East and the West.
If someone protests that prices there are high
And that the rain of battle falls upon it
Say: “It is a paradise surrounded by
Two misfortunes: famine and war!”74
After the conquest of Valencia, the remaining Muslims, now Mudéjares, maintained considerable military strength—castles and soldiers—that they alternately employed against and in aid of the Crown of Aragon.75 These Mudéjar strongholds also received support from the North African arrivistes and holy warriors, the Ghuzāh, whom the Aragonese called jenets. Nevertheless, the overall tendency in Valencia was toward disunion. Muslim resistance to the Aragonese peaked during the second revolt of al-Azraq, from 1275 to 1277, when Pere finally wrested control of the last independent Muslim castles and pushed the jenets from his territory.
This brief recapitulation of Islamic Valencia’s history was meant to say two prefatory things about the relationship of the jenets to the Mudéjares. First, these soldiers had surrendered Valencia less than a decade before Pere’s efforts to recruit them in 1285.76 Their arrival, in other words, was more properly a return. Second, at the time the jenets abandoned Valencia, they were still newcomers. Thus, while they were not outsiders, they were also not insiders—not interchangeable with the Mudéjares. Their return was not a homecoming, and their journey cannot be considered simply in terms of an encounter between Islam and Christianity.
Despite the loss of Muslim control, the Valencia to which the jenets returned would have appeared mostly unchanged. Muslims still dominated the landscape, above all, the agrarian landscape, and possessed a degree of autonomy.77 Indeed, throughout the lands of the Crown of Aragon, the Mudéjares maintained their own mosques,78 merchant hostels,79 community leaders,80 law,81 and language.82 The adhān, the call to prayer, could still be heard, marking not only a familiar time but also space.83 In these respects, as Burns has argued, the Mudéjares represented a “species of state within a state.”84 Muslim life was enfolded within a Christian kingdom—simultaneously included and excluded.
Earlier, it was demonstrated that the Mudéjares played a role in recruiting the jenets. They not only participated in negotiations but also helped to pay for the jenets who served in the defense of Valencia.85 But these groups were not simply connected through the questions of military service. Some jenets sought to live alongside the Mudéjares. For example, although operating in the Christian-dominated kingdom of Aragon, the jenets raiding from Alfamén and Almonacid in 1287 were in fact residing with local Mudéjares, not Christians.86 In addition to their taking up temporary residence, there is also evidence that jenets and their families settled permanently among Mudéjar communities. Muçe Hivanface, a jenet, and his wife Axone owned several houses in the morería of Valencia.87 When he retired from the king’s service, a jenet named Daut settled in the city of Valencia.88 And after more than a decade of service, Muça Almentauri, the indebted jenet with whom this chapter began, settled in Murcia.89 A great deal recommended these places. Among the Mudéjares, the jenets would have found speakers of Arabic, Islamic institutions, and people who adhered to the same or familiar customs, rituals, and practices. One might imagine that all this promoted a sense of belonging for the jenets and the potential for the uncomplicated marriage of these communities.
Islamic belief and practice, however, were not uniform. Indeed, it is worth recalling that the opinions of jurists varied widely on the status and requirements of Muslims living in non-Muslim territories. Mālikī jurists, jurists from the school of law that dominated Spain and North Africa, however, took a relatively consistent position on the matter.90 Most considered emigration (hijra) from conquered territories obligatory (farīḍa) upon all Muslims who were physically and economically capable. In failing to do so, Mudéjares had also failed in their religious duties.
Is it possible that the jenets, relative newcomers from North Africa, shared the Mālikī’s contempt for the Mudéjares and their leaders? From this perspective, one might read as significant the fact that the jenet Daut, who retired to Valencia, chose to reside in the city—that is, the Christian city—rather than in the nearby morería. Although the morería was by no means a ghetto—which is to say that there was no rigid line between dwellings of Muslims and those of Christians—the privilege of living within the city walls of Valencia specifically was unusual for a Muslim, shared only by the occasional visiting Muslim dignitary.91 By living near but nevertheless apart from the Mudéjares, was Daut asserting his superiority? In a similar vein, in December 1286, Çehit, a jenet—perhaps the same notorious Ghuzāh captain of the Miraculos romanzados (there called “Çahit”)—was accused of attacking a Mudéjar judicial official (alaminus) and his son.92 Although the cause of the conflict is unknown, the incident required the intervention of a royal bailiff, who stepped in to free the jenet and absolve him of any charges, circumventing Mudéjar leaders and perforating the illusion of communal autonomy. This kind of privilege was not occasional but rather continual and manifest: the jenets were exempted from the sumptuary laws that bound all but a few of the most privileged Mudéjares; they could ride horses and wear rich and colorful garments without fear of the law.93 The Crown, in other words, was an unavoidable presence in the relationship of the Mudéjares and the jenets, a third party to their marriage. And these privileges could only have driven a wedge between these Muslims.
Two seemingly contradictory examples from the Crown’s chancery registers will suffice to lay bare the problem of defining this community. Despite Jaume’s conquest of Mallorca in 1229, the smaller (as the name indicates) neighboring island of Minorca remained under Muslim control until 1287.94 After its conquest in that year by King Alfons II, those Muslims who could not buy their freedom made their way into the slave markets of Barcelona and Mallorca. And it is precisely in this unexpected and uninviting context—at the Muslim slave market—that several jenets appear, performing the rather curious act of buying slaves.95 Were they freeing their coreligionists? The fact that these soldiers exclusively chose “black Saracens” from among the captives from Mallorca troubles this suggestion, opening up the possibility that religious affiliation mattered less than other prejudices, needs, or calculations.96
Nevertheless, a poorly preserved chancery document at the mangled edge of a folio presents a different view of the jenets’ relationship with Muslim captives of war. In 1285, six Muslim prisoners—five men and a woman—fled from their Christian owners in Barcelona. Local officials were immediately informed of the escape but also warned, “Take sufficient care of Albohaya, Cassim, and Sahat, jenets, who by action or insinuation are said to have caused said Saracens to have fled.”97 These may once again have been the notorious jenets from the Miraculos romanzados. Nevertheless, the document paints a striking portrait, the image of jenets encountering and conspiring with Muslim captives in the city of Barcelona. Whereas before, the jenets seemed to be profiting from the capture of Minorca without care for religious affiliation, here they seem to have taken a personal risk—by deed or word—to help these six Muslim captives. Or was this the insinuation of the king’s royal administrator alone? The opposing events make only one thing clear: while shared beliefs and practices may have connected the jenets to the Mudéjares, they did not determine their relationship alone. Religion cannot be understood simply as community.
Conspiracy
In the prison break above, one also detects a whisper of fear in the king’s letter. Regardless of the jenets’ involvement, the king saw sufficient reason to suspect them: in what might be coincidence, he chose instead to see conspiracy. This attitude was not isolated. The Crown of Aragon saw all the Muslims living in its kingdoms as potential insurgents or worse, a fifth column for an invasion from Granada, a lesson it learned from the revolt of al-Azraq. All the same, throughout the period of sovereign crisis, the Aragonese kings continued to recruit jenets and allow their interaction with the Mudéjares. Why did the Mudéjares and the jenets, who had surrendered Valencia to the Crown in recent memory, not unite to seize the kingdom back? Why did a new al-Azraq not present himself in these moments? And why were the Aragonese kings so confident in their use of these foreign Muslim soldiers?
At the end of 1286, while his jenets were dispatched to Aragon to fight the Unions, King Alfons began to mobilize a mass of forces to send to the Valencian frontier. Among others, he called upon Templars, Hospitallers, the Knights of Calatrava, and almogàvers in order to prepare for a rumored attack of “jenets from Granada,” which is to say, of Ghuzāh.98 By the following April, the calls became more urgent as Granadan attacks began, threatening to overrun Valencia.99 Bishoprics were called upon to lend horses, and royal revenue from the kingdom was redirected to pay the salaries of troops on the frontier.100 The battle, which the Crown came to call the Guerra Jenetorum, the War of the Jenets, lasted only a few months.101
Given the fact that two decades earlier the jenets had been so integral to al-Azraq’s uprising against the Crown of Aragon, one might have expected the Valencian Mudéjares to embrace the Guerra Jenetorum as a new opportunity for rebellion.102 In this case, however, the threat seemed more contained, and the Mudéjar response, muted and uncertain. In April 1287, for example, the Mudéjares of Alhavir received permission to withdraw from service in the king’s army, citing their fear of both “the Moors entering Valencia” and the almogàvers.103 On the one hand, the Crown may have thought better of testing the Mudéjares’ allegiance. On the other hand, caught between warring armies, the Mudéjares may have recognized that they were in a vulnerable position and earnestly sought to stay out of the battle. Indeed, even the rumor of a jenet attack was fuel enough for local Christians, some “young men,” to attack the Valencian Muslim communities.104 In other words, the constant threat of jenet raids from Granada may have ironically promoted Mudéjar quietism and passivity. Some Muslims, to be sure, did choose to throw in their lot with the jenets, and in the wake of the war’s failure, they retreated into Granada alongside these soldiers. Despite this treason, the Crown of Aragon welcomed some of them back after the war’s cessation.105 Others chose to remain loyal to the Crown throughout: in his accounts for the war, for example, King Alfons recorded a payment to a “Saracen spy.”106 Thus, during the last two decades of the thirteenth century, the threat of another Mudéjar rebellion with the support of jenets remained no more than a rumor. In November 1294, for instance, several Granadan jenets were arrested carrying letters from the Naṣrid ruler urging the Mudéjares to revolt.107 Nothing, however, came of the proposal; Granada soon entered into another alliance with the Crown.108 Thus, a combination of canny royal policy, political circumstance, and conservative local dynamics stood in the way of uniting the jenets and Mudéjares and forged another surprising sort of exclusion.
Conclusion
The Aragonese kings alone did not define the jenets. If they granted these soldiers a privileged exception from the laws that bound the citizens and subjects of their kingdoms, then they could never in practice command those citizens and subjects to accept that privilege. The lives of the jenets in the lands of the Crown of Aragon were replete with challenges and opportunities beyond royal control. Nevertheless, the kings of the Crown of Aragon relied upon these soldiers with confidence to defend their authority against their external and internal enemies. This is nowhere clearer than in the fact that the Crown of Aragon maintained a defensive front against the Marīnid Ghuzāh during the Guerra Jenetorum while simultaneously employing jenets to suppress a rebellion of its own subjects. This confidence reflected a royal flexibility in practice, an ability to play and placate all sides at once. But if these kings used the jenets without hesitation, then it is also true that they did not test these soldiers’ loyalty. By keeping the jenets on the Castilian and French fronts or by deploying them in battles against their own Christian subjects, during the rebellion of the Unions, the Aragonese kings were not only defending their claims to sovereign authority but also respecting the terms of treaties that brought these soldiers into the lands of the Crown of Aragon. Precisely because and as long as France and Castile continued to threaten the Crown of Aragon, this circumscribed use of the jenets suited the Aragonese kings, and they felt no need to complicate it. What would happen if this balance shifted?