The Mercenary Mediterranean

Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon

Hussein Fancy

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780226597898
  9780226329642
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226329789
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Sometime in April 1285, five Muslim horsemen crossed from the Islamic kingdom of Granada into the realms of the Christian Crown of Aragon to meet with the king of Aragon, who showered them with gifts, including sumptuous cloth and decorative saddles, for agreeing to enter the Crown's service.
           
They were not the first or only Muslim soldiers to do so. Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Christian kings of Aragon recruited thousands of foreign Muslim soldiers to serve in their armies and as members of their royal courts. Based on extensive research in Arabic, Latin, and Romance sources, The Mercenary Mediterranean explores this little-known and misunderstood history. Far from marking the triumph of toleration, Hussein Fancy argues, the alliance of Christian kings and Muslim soldiers depended on and reproduced ideas of religious difference. Their shared history represents a unique opportunity to reconsider the relation of medieval religion to politics, and to demonstrate how modern assumptions about this relationship have impeded our understanding of both past and present.

CHAPTER ONE

Etymologies and Etiologies

The scholar reading through the chancery registers in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, turning page after page of brittle paper, will find the Latin and Romance terms jenetus and genet (as well as a handful of other orthographic variants) scattered throughout the copious thirteenth- and fourteenth-century documentation, terms referring to certain but not all Muslim soldiers. By and large, historians have ignored these words in this context. In his handwritten, partial eighteenth-century catalog to the registers—the only such guide for contemporary researchers—the archivist Jeroni Alterachs y Avarilló mistakenly read jenet as a surname belonging to a Mudéjar, a subject Muslim.1 And thus, these soldiers have remained mostly buried in these paper books. Only four scholars have seen something more.2

In these four earlier studies, however, the identity of the jenets has been a matter of confusion. For Andrés Giménez Soler, writing in 1905, their origin seemed obvious: they were Zanāta Berbers from North Africa. He saw the word jenet as a Romanization of the name of the tribe.3 In 1927, when Faustino Gazulla wrote a second study of the jenets, he followed his predecessor on the matter of origin. A significant entanglement, however, arises from this etymological claim. To say that the jenets were Zanāta Berbers—a broad ethnic category—is only slightly more revealing than calling them North African. After all, from which Zanāta tribes did they come? And how, when, and why did they end up in the Iberian Peninsula?4 The two more recent studies have challenged this North African origin. In 1978, Elena Lourie suggested that the jenets were in fact Iberian Muslim cavalry soldiers, members of the Banū Ishqalyūla who had rebelled against the Naṣrid rulers of Muslim Granada and were therefore predisposed to trade allegiances.5 And in 2003, Brian Catlos suggested that although the word jenet derived from the name of the Berber tribe, by the thirteenth century it “became a generic term for all foreign Muslim soldiers.”6 Each of these possibilities would lead to drastically different readings of this history. Therefore, it is worth asking the deceptively simple question: Who were the jenets?

Jennets for Germans

The confusion surrounding and scant scholarly attention upon the jenets stands in sharp contrast to the wide diffusion of the term and its linguistic descendants across the early modern and modern periods.7 Tracing the word forward from the Middle Ages reveals a rapid dilation of its meaning and a web of significations. In thirteenth-century Iberian Latin and Romance sources, the first to use the term, jenet referred only to specific Muslim soldiers and their military accoutrements: jenet saddles, jenet stirrups, and jenet lances. However opaque to readers centuries later, the word had been precise in this context. By the early modern period, jenet had already expanded in meaning, referring to both Muslim and Christian cavalry, the so-called jinetes, who rode in the fashion of these earlier soldiers. According to Covarrubias in his 1611 dictionary, the Tesoro, it meant “a man on horseback, who fights with a spear and a leather shield, his feet gathered into short stirrups, which do not reach below the belly of the horse.”8 And by the time one reaches modern Castilian and Catalan, even this degree of specificity had dissolved. The linguistic descendants of jenet—the Castilian jinete and the Catalan genet—simply and generically mean “horseman,” a fact that might explain why so many scholars have passed over the term in earlier sources: it seemed unremarkable and obvious. Precisely because of this linguistic genericide, a steady semantic slippage toward generality, I have chosen to use the term jenet (a truncated form of the Latin jenetus) in order to refer to this particular thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Muslim cavalryman, to avoid confusion with these later variants.

Beyond the Iberian Peninsula, particularly in French and English, the term evolved differently, demonstrating again how “the words of things entangle and confuse.”9 From at least the early modern period, the term transferred its meaning from rider to mount: jennet refers to a diminutive and much prized horse or palfrey (roncino) of mixed Spanish and North African stock.10 That detail makes sense of Iago’s famous barb about Othello: “[Y]ou’ll have/coursers for cousins and jennets for germans!”11 The breeding of jennet horses made them a ready symbol of not only racial transgression but also sexual excess throughout early modern literature, propelling the semantic afterlife of the jenets forward in new ways: “A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud,” according to Venus and Adonis; “Glew’d like a neighing Gennet to her Stallion,” for salacious Massinger in Renegado; or in Fletcher’s Thierry and Theodoret, “power they may love, and like Spanish Jennetts Commit with such a gust.”12 It is worth mentioning that hippological metaphors for race were not an innovation of early modern literature. In late medieval Iberia, the Castilian word raza—from which the English “race” derives—referred first to the breeding of horses before it moved to men.13 But jennet horses were not only “good to think” in the early modern and modern periods.14 They also carried the Spanish conquistadors to the New World. Wealthy European gentlemen prized them for their speed and strength as well as their multitude of colors and patterns, their beauty, which made them a regular feature in eighteenth-century portraiture and literature. In Ivanhoe, for instance, one reads: “A lay brother, one of those who followed in the train, had, for his use upon other occasions, one of the most handsome Spanish jennets ever bred in Andalusia, which merchants used at that time to import, with great trouble and risk, for the use of persons of wealth and distinction.”15 And if only for the irrepressible pleasure of pulling a loose thread, even later in English, the word also attached itself to a mule, the modern jenny. Thus, from jenets riding mules, we come to jenets as mules.

FIGURE 1. Granello-Tavaron-Castello y Cambiasso, Battle of Higueruela (1431). Skirmish of the Jinetes. Monasterio-Pintura, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid. Photograph: Album / Art Resource, New York.

The contorted afterlife of the word jenet is rather like the scattershot cosmic microwave background, the remnants of an explosion, in this case, one that leads back to the medieval Iberian Peninsula. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Christian Iberian knights rode into battle in the manner of heavy cavalry. They sat low in their saddles, anchored with their legs outstretched—a style known as a la brida—in order to bear the weight of their armor and long lances.16 And while these soldiers were expensive and slow, like high-maintenance armored vehicles, they could deliver granite blows to their enemies. Although the cause of this transformation is not well understood, by the late medieval or early modern period in Iberia and Europe more widely, this style had shifted.17 The majority of Iberian Christian knights were now lightly armored. They rode smaller horses, bearing the so-called jineta saddle, with a low pommel and short stirrups, which allowed them to stand when in gallop. These saddles also gave cavalry soldiers the striking appearance of having their legs trussed beneath them, like chickens heading to the oven, making them readily identifiable and easily distinguishable from heavy cavalry in the famous sixteenth-century murals depicting the Battle of Higueruela (1431) in the Sala de Batallas of the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial (fig. 1). This new Spanish knight carried a short throwing lance, called a jineta, as well as small leather shield, called an adarga (derived from the Arabic daraqa, meaning “shield”).18 His military advantage l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• On Names, Places, Dates, and Transcriptions
• Introduction: A Mercenary Logic
• chapter 1. Etymologies and Etiologies
• chapter 2. A Sovereign Crisis
• chapter 3. Sovereigns and Slaves
• chapter 4. A Mercenary Economy
• chapter 5. The Unpaid Debt
• chapter 6. The Worst Men in the World
• Epilogue: Medievalism and Secularism
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index