I set out to write a different book.
Long before I stumbled across the jenets, I knew the kind of story I wanted to tell. In the light of events that seemed to defy human reason, the distant past provided a way to make sense of the present. The ragged history of religious coexistence in medieval Iberia lay somewhere between a clash of civilizations and a world of interfaith harmony, between the poles of blind intolerance and benign tolerance. The steady movement of men and women across boundaries demonstrated that religious beliefs were not fate, that religious identities were flexible, negotiable, and permeable—subject to circumstance and human agency. In short, I postulated that these interactions demonstrated that religion was as poor an explanation of events—both violent and peaceful—then as now.
That was not the book that I wrote.
At every turn, the history of the jenets said something else. Religion reasserted itself in unexpected ways and ran out of its bounds. The alliance of the Muslim jenets with the Christian Aragonese kings both depended upon and reproduced ideas of religious difference. Although the Aragonese kings first recruited the jenets, a motley band of holy warriors, out of practical necessity to fill the lines of its armies, mere pragmatism failed to explain the significance of their enduring alliance. While marking the jenets as Muslims and outsiders to the Crown’s laws and communities, the Aragonese kings nevertheless treated these soldiers as privileged agents, bringing them into their courts as members of their entourage, and parading with them as their personal protectors. Across this period and around the Mediterranean, the Muslim jenets fought in battles against the Crown’s Christian enemies. These soldiers were conspicuous symbols and expressions of royal authority. And at every level from the court to the village, this strange alliance had a powerful and polarizing social impact. The presence of these Muslim soldiers did not inspire interreligious harmony or lift the veil from people’s eyes but rather provoked deeper divisions and tensions between Christians and Muslims, a state of disorder that the Aragonese kings turned to their advantage, further entrenching their power.
What then was the logic that brought these Christian kings and Muslim holy warriors into an alliance? Neither high-minded tolerance nor simple indifference paved this path. The Aragonese kings’ decision to recruit the jenets emerged from their inextricably entwined ideas of religious and political authority. Drawing upon novel and casuistic readings of Roman law, as well as precedents by Christian and Islamic rulers, the Crown of Aragon enacted its claims to sovereignty through and upon the bodies of privileged ethnic and religious others whom they also considered their possessions and slaves. To put this differently, these aspirations were not only partly influenced by Islamic models—the tradition of military slavery—but also partly enacted through Muslim agents. Nevertheless, these claims to transcendent authority were just that: claims. They were met with resistance from every corner, including from the jenets themselves. Indeed, the jenets understood their service in terms that denied the king’s assertions of transcendent authority altogether and pursued their own agendas. For the jenets, service to the Aragonese kings was not a contradiction but rather a continuation of their role as al-Ghuzāh al-Mujāhidūn, the Holy Warriors.
What explains the disjunction between the book that I planned to write and the one that I eventually did? When religion was my central subject, why had I been inclined to minimize its effects, to see it as a minor variable?1 What invisible hands nudged me toward certain paths rather than others? I was not alone in this regard. Across deeply opposing methodological, political, and philosophical positions, every scholar who has studied the jenets or their Christian counterparts has come to the same conclusion about these figures. All have seen these soldiers as transgressors, as men driven by secular rather than religious motivations. All have seen this alliance as a product of rational and pragmatic needs. If this book aimed to demonstrate how this kind of reading concealed more than it revealed, then here I want to explore more fully the origins and consequences of this secular bias. What explains this broad agreement? Why has it endured? Why should it trouble us? These concerns are not confined to the study of medieval Iberia. They sit stubbornly at the center of ongoing debates about religion and politics. And although they remain too often on the margins, medievalists still have the most to gain from and contribute to these urgent and unresolved discussions.2
Beyond Convivencia
No scholar of religious interaction in medieval Iberia can avoid the legacy of the bitter convivencia debates, debates over the nature and significance of the coexistence of Christians, Muslims, and Jews.3 Across the twentieth century, these disputes pitted Spanish liberals against conservatives, each proposing a different understanding of the past and its consequences for the present. These debates about religion were constitutive of Iberian medievalism, and despite efforts to overcome them, they continue to set the terms in which religious interaction is studied.
Writing in 1905, Andrés Giménez Soler saw the jenets as evidence of the wider spirit of tolerance in medieval Iberia.4 Giménez Soler admired these mercenaries’ ability to place self-interest before religious commitment. This attitude, he argued, was exemplary of Muslims in general, who, since the earliest invasions, had been driven by material gain and martial glory rather than by eschatological fervor.5 As such, Islamic warfare and commerce had a “civilizing” effect on the western Mediterranean, encouraging diplomatic and economic exchange with Christian kingdoms.6 This admirable period of toleration, he concluded, lasted until the age of expulsions, the Inquisition, and the arrival of the Ottomans in North Africa.
Giménez Soler belonged to a wave of late nineteenth-century Spanish Arabists committed to the twinned ideals of positivism and liberalism.7 Rejecting the romantic embellishments of earlier historians and under the influence of neo-Kantian thought, these scholars sought to write history with scientific rigor—“as it really was.”8 Nevertheless, as John Tolan has put it, their confidence betrayed a “blend of melancholy and nostalgia.”9 Witnessing the decline of Spain’s imperial fortunes, its descent into religious and political extremes, liberals sought to revalorize and reorient modern Spain by casting medieval Iberia as the birthplace of the European Enlightenment. The invocation of tolerance was not an anodyne call for religious pluralism, as it is often meant today, but rather a rationalist critique of religion itself. Liberal Arabists dismissed religion as mere ideology, a thin veil for politics, and an archaic mode of thinking. To their minds, religion was a set of empty delusions employed by elites to manipulate credulous masses. In medieval mercenaries, Arabists like Giménez Soler saw men ahead of their times, secular and practical rationalists, individuals struggling to break free from religious bondage.
Catholics and conservatives met this skepticism of religion with strong resistance.10 In his La España del Cid (1929), Ramón Menéndez Pidal, a Romance philologist, presented a very different image of the quintessential medieval soldier-for-hire, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, more widely known as El Cid, who spent part of his career in the service of the Muslim ruler of Valencia.11 Challenging earlier studies that had portrayed El Cid as a faithless brigand, Menéndez Pidal recast him as a national and religious hero, as a champion of what he saw as an epic struggle between Christendom and Islam.12 Menéndez Pidal did not deny the existence of pacific interactions between Muslims and Christians. Indeed, he first coined the term convivencia, by which he meant an unqualified “living together,” to describe El Cid’s temporary service for the Muslim ruler. In this history, El Cid emerged as a loyal, noble, and democratic figure, not a religious fanatic. But for Menéndez Pidal, Islamic Spain’s tolerance of Christians, so admired by liberals, was also a sign of its fundamental weakness, of its dilution by rationalism.13 Thus, despite his alliance with Muslims, Menéndez Pidal’s El Cid remained a true believer who eventually rejected convivencia in order to become a passionate defender of the Castilian nation.
In his approach to this history, Menéndez Pidal mirrored other Romantic conservatives, who rejected what they saw as the shallow, cold, and foreign ideas of Spanish liberals.14 In the midst of crisis, conservatives called for the revival of Spain’s unique religious and national spirit. Adapting emerging theories of race, biology, and psychology, these traditionalists argued that religion was necessary for the health and function of society. These arguments shared the nostalgia that characterized postidealistic social thought from Herder’s national soul, Fourier’s theory of passionate attraction, Smith’s invisible hand, and Freud’s sublimation to Weber’s concept of disenchantment.15 Religious passions served as a salve for a modern sense of anomie.16 In medieval mercenaries, these conservatives saw traitors to the faith.
This academic sparring was not insular and otiose but rather represented the political fault lines of early twentieth-century Spain. Willingly or unwillingly, both liberal and conservative scholars found themselves pulled into the ideological positions of the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, General Francisco Franco’s regime enthusiastically drew upon Menéndez Pidal’s own work to cast its leader as a new El Cid, a new Catholic hero.17 And in precisely the same fashion as medieval Aragonese and Castilian kings, Franco employed an elite guard of Moroccan soldiers, reviving the curious tradition that this book has sought to unravel.18
The tension between liberal and conservative Spaniards continued well into the twentieth century, as epitomized by the prolonged polemic between two scholars living in exile from Franco’s Spain, Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz.19 These men reversed the methodological poles of the debate. Castro, a romance philologist and student of Menéndez Pidal, transformed the notion of convivencia into a liberal value—the positive association that has since prevailed. He argued that the history of interactions between Christians, Jews, and Muslims had produced Spain’s unique character, one that was grounded in pluralism and resistant to religious intolerance or what he called the “totalitarianism . . . of their belief.”20 Castro was challenged by the historian and positivist Sánchez Albornoz, who maintained the traditionalist argument. Sánchez Albornoz recapitulated the original, limited view of convivencia, seeing tolerance as a negative value, as a strategic and venal gesture by elites toward religious minorities. Like Menéndez Pidal before him, Sánchez Albornoz contended that medieval toleration had undermined “the vital passion” of Spanish Catholicism.21
These bitter and deadlocked debates continue to trouble the study of medieval Iberia. In the copious literature on convivencia, most contemporary scholars dismiss these positions as politically motivated distortions of the past.22 They argue that the extremes of tolerance and intolerance fail by empirical standards and that these perspectives paper over the interplay and interdependence of the peaceful and violent interactions that comprised everyday coexistence. Some scholars have called for a return to strict empiricism; others, particularly in the American academy, have sought refuge in the seemingly neutral terms of cultural theory.23 Neither response has managed to dislodge these debates or the question of religious tolerance from the center of public or scholarly discussion.24 If the polemical tone of the convivencia debates has diminished, its essential dichotomies continue to motivate and pattern scholarship.
Cultural approaches have failed to overcome the polemics between liberals and conservatives because these twentieth-century debates were never methodological in nature but rather moral. The convivencia debates truly belonged to the fin-de-siècle derangements and the “crisis of culture” that gripped Europe in the years before and after World War I, an event that shook liberal confidence to its core.25 To see the peninsular debates as part of wider disputes about the liberal values—above all, toleration—helps to bring the challenge of resolving them into full view.
Political Theology
The enemy of liberalism had another name: political theology. Although it has a longer history, this expression is now associated with Carl Schmitt’s slim and gnomic text, Politische Theologie, which claimed, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”26 In short, all politics derives from religion. A Catholic conservative and Nazi jurist, Schmitt believed that a liberal faith in secularism was flawed. Politics, he contended, can never divorce itself from religion, by which he meant its nonrational and transcendental foundation. Invoking the very same medieval legal traditions discussed in the chapters above, Schmitt argued that an authority that creates and sustains the law can never be fully included within the law; it logically stands prior to and outside of it. Political sovereignty, like divine sovereignty, he wrote, is fundamentally an exception to the order it creates. Thus, Schmitt saw the liberal ideal of separating religion from politics as impossible and naïve. Reviving the work of nineteenth-century Catholic counterrevolutionaries like Bonald and Maistre, he called for a redivinization of politics, a restoration of its religious and moral basis, and a return to an idealized synthesis of politics and theology, which he identified with the Catholic Middle Ages.27 It is significant to underscore that this definition of sovereignty depended upon a certain periodization, a claim about what came before “the modern.”
Schmitt’s secular and liberal opponents defended the “legitimacy of the modern age” against what they saw as the rising threat of political religion.28 Among them, it is worth highlighting the medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, whose King’s Two Bodies leaves a heavy impression on the pages above. Written after Kantorowicz’s emigration to the United States in 1957, this book should be read as an apology for his first, an eccentric biography of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II.29 In that earlier work, Kantorowicz emphasized the near messianic quality of the German ruler, who, like the myth of the Last World Emperor, had united political and spiritual authority in one figure. Göring, Goebbels, and Hitler lauded the work as a celebration of the German national spirit, prompting some to call the biography a “fascist classic.”30 In The King’s Two Bodies, however, Kantorowicz sought to place Frederick—or more precisely, the exceptional or dual nature of medieval kingship—within a longer narrative of the relationship between politics and religion:
Taken all by itself, this transference of definitions from one sphere to another, from theology to law, is anything but surprising or even remarkable. The quid pro quo method—the taking over of theological notions for defining the state—had been going on for many centuries, just as, vice versa, in the early centuries of the Christian era the imperial political terminology and the imperial ceremonial had been adapted to the needs of the Church.31
As Roman imperial metaphors informed early Christological debates—the problem of Christ’s humanity and divinity—so religious metaphors were in turn later adapted to answer political questions—the problem of the body politic. For Kantorowicz, this formal borrowing, a quid pro quo, did not reveal the religious origin of politics but rather the essential and necessary fiction at the heart of all politics.32 Politics and religion simply met in the Middle Ages, like two cars weaving at an interchange, sharing a path briefly before diverging again. The convergence, however, was serendipitous: the language used to solve the riddle of Christ’s two natures was also employed to justify representation, constitutionalism, and humanism. In this narration, secular liberalism proceeded from rather than against religion, as a fragile but admirable art of politics. The King’s Two Bodies was a defense of secular modernity against the Middle Ages.
Although Schmitt and Kantorowicz represent only two of the variety of positions taken during the political-theological debates by Protestant, Jewish, and Islamic thinkers, they demonstrate that the polemics over convivencia between Catholic conservatives and secular liberals in Spain were part of a larger contemporary discussion about the relationship of politics and religion that was mediated through the medieval past.33 Across Europe, liberals hoped to cure modernity of the ills of religion, and conservatives hoped to cure religion of the ills of modernity, understood as cold and excessive rationalism, a falling away from an idealized medieval past. These two essential positions were hopelessly locked.
Recently, Peter Eli Gordon has suggested that rather than seeing these debates as allegories of war and crisis, the political-theological debates should be seen as fundamentally philosophical disputes.34 For Gordon, these debates were reprisals of the deeper tension between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, which is to say, the tension between rationalism and irrationalism, universalism and relativism, transcendentalism and hermeneutics. These remain the essential debates of modern philosophy and to recognize them as such means also to recognize that they were and are insoluble. As Gordon has explained, relativism amounts to a universal and transcendental claim: if historians claim that all meaning derives from context, then they also generalize that claim across all contexts, as something universally true.35 This, in short, is the problem of self-defeating relativism. For Gordon, this insolubility, this nagging problem of transcendence, is an essential and inescapable feature of the post-Kantian intellectual tradition. From this perspective, the intellectual problem of sovereignty—what Schmitt identified as the exception and Kantorowicz as “the king’s two bodies”—can never be resolved. One cannot ultimately choose between religion and politics or, as Leo Strauss put it, between Jerusalem and Athens.36
I would, however, like to push Gordon’s insight further and contend that this insolubility—this haunting idea of transcendence—derives from a more fundamental agreement between the poles of these debates that is deeper than Kant. If liberals saw religious belief as an irrational and unnecessary delusion that impedes freedom, and conservatives saw it as a passionate and necessary force that binds community, then what is striking—but little mentioned—is that they both seem to be in agreement about the nature of religion and its relationship to politics.37 Both see religion as a set of nonrational and premodern beliefs that served to create social cohesion.38 Both find the meaning of religion in its extravert effects—in its worldly function.39 And both see religion as essentially incompatible with modernity. In other words, they share an essentially secular understanding of religion, one that sees it as a category of abstract beliefs and transcendent claims distinct from and opposed to rational thought. Where they differ is simply upon its value: one sees religion as an impediment and the other as a fundament without which politics cannot function. More than opposing empirical, methodological, or even philosophical positions, therefore, they are better understood as competing moral narratives of modernity.40
This shared secular horizon accounts for both the ferocity of the political-theological debates and the manner in which these debates continue to ramify and reverse.41 It explains how Giorgio Agamben has resuscitated Carl Schmitt or how Charles Taylor has revived Hans Blumenberg in order to act as a witness for the opposition.42 One extreme readily collapses into another because they share the same beating heart. Indeed, this internal agreement casts a dark shadow over the recent recrudescence the political-theological debates.
The contemporary cultural approach to religion, epitomized by the work of Clifford Geertz, rejects this reductive view.43 Geertz saw religion as an aspect of culture, as part of the webs of significance, the wider set of rules and norms that dynamically reflect and respond to the needs of individuals in a community. Balancing an appreciation of discourse and agency, he sought to find the reasons in and for religion. This pragmatic and culturally embedded understanding of religion promises to speak of belief as something other than blindness, as an expression of agency. To give one concrete example: to make sense of why medieval Christians attacked Jews, a cultural historian might argue that these Christians were expressing a criticism of royal power and fiscal policy. If this kind of reading offers a smart, satisfying, and coherent explanation for belief, then, as Steven Justice has recently argued, when taken as a full and systematic account, it offers a familiar picture of belief.44 By reducing religion to the play of interests, to its societal value, this approach can only understand belief as a propositional matter. If one says that believers were aware of these reasons, then they appear as people who never really believed at all. If, on the other hand, one argues that they really did believe, then they appear as people who were unaware of the reasons for their beliefs. In other words, the cultural account of religion views belief as either an ideological mask or communal delusion.45 Sincere belief, by extension, can only be a form of blind adherence, an irrational commitment. This coded but persistent attitude to belief helps to explain why cultural histories of religious interaction have done little to staunch the flow of liberal and conservative polemics. It explains why they continue to view religion with the same anticipatory nostalgia. Cultural history cannot overcome these polemics because it stands upon the same horizon.
The consequences of this agreement are acutely apparent in studies of religious interaction. Again, for the liberal neo-Kantian epigones, interaction provided evidence of man’s ability to cast off the chains of religious delusion, to act freely and independently; for Catholic conservatives, interaction occurred at the expense of religion, at the expense of community; and for contemporary cultural pragmatists, it demonstrated that religious boundaries were permeable and flexible. At the risk of putting this too simply, these points of view respectively conclude that interaction occurs in resistance to, in spite of, or regardless of religion. All of these paths arrive at the same curious conclusion: religious interaction has nothing to do with religion. Indeed, in the century of scholarship on Muslim and Christian mercenaries, every historian has argued that these soldiers were driven by politics rather than religion. Why? Because if one begins with the implicit understanding that religion amounts to blind adherence to community, then interaction can only provide evidence of transgression and resistance.46
To be clear, my argument is not that this reading of religious interaction is wrong. Rather, cultural theory underdescribes the possibilities of encounter because it is essentially a moral tale.47 However well-intending, the scholar who says that when Muslims and Christians interact they demonstrate an ability to act freely and rationally, comes dangerously close to the polemicist, who asserts that religion inhibits freedom and reason, that religion is inherently violent and intolerant.48 But why couldn’t religious beliefs have motivated pacific interactions? To ignore this possibility not only paints belief in a dull grisaille, in shades of black and white; it also reduces history to the terms and trajectory of a moral narrative of modernity that can only see the Middle Ages as a period of either serene faith or frustrated secularism.49
History from Theology
If this secular bias threatens to narrow the possibilities of medievalism, then medievalists have also been and remain best placed to challenge it. Sitting in the audience at the debate between Heidegger and Cassirer in Davos—the quintessential moment of the “crisis of culture”—Hans Blumenberg wrote perhaps facetiously that this was a reprisal of the debate at Marburg 400 years earlier between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli over the nature of the Eucharist.50 The connection is more than fanciful. Rather than a parochial discourse, theology was and remains an important source of philosophical and political commentary.51 To see these debates as a continuation of theological ones helps to give us a grasp of the secular distinction between religion and politics that underwrites these competing perspectives on interaction.52
As Philippe Buc has argued, both liberal and conservative accounts of religion were heirs of the theological tradition.53 Both perspectives developed as responses to the nineteenth-century Protestant-liberal synthesis—an attempt to reconcile religious belief with the liberal Enlightenment. For Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834), religion and politics, belief and reason, were fully compatible because they were also radically different.54 While belief was grounded in man’s subjective, emotional, and nonrational experience of a transcendent divinity, politics was the public and rational unfolding of God’s worldly plan. To save religion, Schleiermacher privatized and encastellated belief, removing it from the play of temporal concerns and concealing it from what Geertz called “the bitch-goddess seductions of secular life.”55 But the Protestant-liberal synthesis did not hold. Secular liberals drew upon Schleiermacher’s basic distinction between religion and politics to dismiss religion as pure unreason.56 Catholic conservatives like Bonald and Maistre rejected the Protestant solution and called for a reintegration of religion with politics, a return to what they imagined was the medieval Catholic synthesis, political theology.57 Significantly, these conservative arguments for the necessity of religion to politics profoundly influenced the secular sociological tradition.58 Catholic antimodernism and modern philosophy similarly went hand in hand. As Robert Nisbet demonstrated decades ago, while exchanging an emphasis on veracity for function, Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, Weber’s charisma, and Simmel’s piety openly drew upon conservative theology.59 In order to explain belief’s social effect, its ability to create community, these ideas also openly accepted that belief was something fundamentally spontaneous and irrational. From here, it is a short step to the cultural theory of Geertz.
Schleiermacher’s distinction between religion and politics does lead back to Protestant debates of the sort Blumenberg imagined. In their assaults upon Catholics as well as Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians, Protestant theologians drew sharp distinctions between true belief and mindless ritual, between spirit and flesh, between ancient and modern religion.60 True religion oriented men consciously toward inward belief, while false religions were merely political (politia), forms of primitive idolatry. To be sure, this distinction between religion and politics does not begin with or belong only to Protestantism. Medieval Catholics made it when they looked on China and the Islamic world with simultaneous admiration, for their political skill, and horror, for their false beliefs.61 It can be found in medieval Islamic and Jewish theology, some of the very same ideas that shaped Mediterranean notions of imperial authority.62 It can also be found in the writings of Augustine, the Gnostics, Paul, and even the Stoics. If anything, what distinguishes Protestant polemics from earlier ones is the fact that they circulated globally through modern imperialism.63 But my central point is this: the rigid distinction between religion and politics, from which the secular critique of religion proceeds, is a polemical one. The radical purification of belief from practice, of being from substance, of unreason from reason, and of God from man was and remains disciplinary and hortatory.64 It belongs to the language of disputation, not description. Yet this polemical ideal has enshrined itself at the core of the social sciences as the category of religion.65
When I first set out to write this book, I was also following the well-worn tracks of a long and unresolved intellectual tradition. Far from finding the past, I was seeking a version of it that satisfied a certain moral understanding of the present. My intention here is neither to mount a criticism or a defense of secularism as an ideal, nor is it to enter into the ongoing debates across the spectrum about the relationship of religion to politics. Instead, my intention is to question the value of these terms for scholars of religious interaction and scholars of religion more widely.66 If a secular understanding of religion and politics depends upon a certain view of the medieval past, then medieval history also holds the key to shifting that understanding and reorienting these tired debates. Those medievalists that have questioned the seemingly natural distinction between religion and politics, body and spirit, matter and meaning have not impoverished the study of the past but enabled richer versions of it.67 In the same fashion, abandoning these strict distinctions has brought and will bring new perspectives to urgent contemporary debates. Rather than seeking a transcendent definition, new scholarship must embrace religion as what Bruno Latour has called a “specific order of difficulty.” 68
To ask if the Aragonese kings and the jenets were motivated by religion or politics only beggars the past. It measures history according to its progress away from or toward a secular ideal. The sovereign ambitions of the Aragonese kings were grounded in tightly imbricated and impartible ideas of law and theology. The strategic choices of the jenets were also not beyond belief. For both, collaboration was neither opposed to something called religion nor reducible to it. Their alliance emerged within a context of evolving, competing, and overlapping claims to imperial authority across the medieval Mediterranean. It was grounded in mutual distrust and exception rather than agreement. While this kind of history cannot fully satisfy the needs of the present, it can help to direct it toward new futures.