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This chapter details the lives of the jenets beyond the royal court. How did the Aragonese kings use these soldiers in practice? How did Christians view Muslim soldiers in the service of their kings? And how did the jenets, in turn, make their way through these foreign lands? It begins with the jenets’ families, the women and children who accompanied them into the lands of the Crown of Aragon, and then examines the jenets’ encounters with local Christian officials and villagers. It turns finally to the relationship between the jenets, as foreign Muslims, and the Mudéjares, the subject Muslim population of the Crown of Aragon. This evidence points to the numerous challenges and threats to the kings’ and jenets’ claims to power and privilege. It reveals an irreducible context of indeterminacy, one of competing claims to law and legitimacy. On a local level, the effect of the Crown’s alliance with the jenets was to heighten violent tensions between Christians and Muslims. Far from being unaware of these challenges, the Aragonese kings turned this competition and disorder to their advantage.

This chapter explores the various dynamics of the interaction between Christendom and Islam during the High Middle Ages and addresses three interrelated questions: 1) what did Christians know about Islam? 2) how did their thinking about Islam affect the formation of the concept of Christendom itself? and 3) how did Islam experience Christendom? Covering a period from the earliest Christian responses to the Arab conquests in the seventh century through the more specific Christian-Muslim interactions in late fifteenth-century Iberia, it underscores the diversity of Christendom’s approaches to Islam and Muslims, showing how the idea of Christian war against Islam developed during the early crusades, giving medieval Europe a much more unified and self-conscious sense of historical mission. It also demonstrates that Christian ideas about Islam were as much the product of the Christian theological imagination as they were of any knowledge of “real” Islam. Nor were these ideas necessarily made more accurate by Christian contact with or knowledge of living adherents to Islam. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Muslims living under Christian rule in Iberia as a specific example of how Christian ideas about Islam and the presence of living Muslims interacted to produce particular possibilities for co-existence.

Starting with disputes over interfaith adultery, conversion, and marriage, this chapter expands to a broader discussion of Muslim-Jewish relations in late medieval Iberia, exploring issues such as theoretical restrictions in Jewish and Muslim law and the reality of sexual interaction between these communities, tracing the development of the relationship between the two communities in Christian Spain through the lens of love. Before 1400, Muslim and Jewish communities appear to have been comparatively free to compete in love, mediated by Christian fiscal rather than spiritual interests, the outcome generally dependent on the relative economic and political power of the two communities. For a number of reasons, that balance of power initially favored Jewish access to Muslim women rather than vice versa. But by ca. 1450, the tables had turned dramatically, with Christian authorities strongly supporting Muslims over Jews. The changed possibilities for Muslim-Jewish love, conversion, and marriage were not primarily a product of a shift in the relative power of Muslims and Jews; they reflected changes in the role these two religious communities (and the theological categories they represented) played in the Christian theological imagination, and the increasing importance of these theological considerations in the Christian mediation of Jewish-Muslim relations.

This chapter looks at how the 1391 massacres/mass conversions of 1391 affected the ways diverse communities of Christians, Muslims, and Jews imagined themselves in terms of each other through interfaith sexual relations, outlining the common logics and enduring metaphors of sex that medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities used to help define/identify themselves as a collective and heighten the barriers of honor (with which that collective surrounded itself), and discussing the various ways the 1391 conversions of Jewish communities affected Christian anxieties about sexual boundaries. Conversions provoked a Christian “identity crisis” that sharply constricted available space for religious diversity in the Peninsula. It was a very different crisis from the later ones that would transform Iberia into a land of inquisitors and pure-blood statutes, with Christians in the years immediately after 1391 concerned not that religious identity was unchanging but rather the opposite--that the disappearance of the Jews and the emergence of the conversos would undermine the distinctive value/meaning of Christian identity. Correspondingly, their attention was not focused on the religious practices of the converts or on establishing differences between Old Christian and New, but on reinforcing what they took to be the more fundamental Christian/Jewish sexual boundaries.

This introductory chapter opens with the case study of the amendments that the historian Ambrosio de Morales introduced in the manuscript version of his core book Las Antigüedades de las ciudades de España (1575) before sending it to print. The changes in the description of Córdoba Mosque reveal the conflictive status of Islamic architecture in the Spanish historical writing of the time. Upon this example the subject of Admiration and Awe is introduced through three angles: the connection of the topic of the interpretation of Islamic monuments to sixteenth and seventeenth historiographical building of Spanish national identity; a review of recent academic literature on the subject as well as on its possible connection to postcolonial theory; and a survey in the early modern historiographical distinction among medieval Islamic buildings and contemporary uses of Islamic architecture.