Power and Pilgrimage:The Restriction of Mudéjares' Pilgrimage in the Kingdom of Valencia Michael A. Ryan In 1977, John Boswell published The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century, his dissertation from Harvard University, in which he offered a detailed study of the situation of Muslim communities living under Christian rule during the later Middle Ages.1 After the conquest of the Iberian Muslim city of Valencia in 1238 by the forces of the Catalan countking Jaume I (d. 1276), whose sobriquet, El Conqueridor, or "The Conqueror," attested to his martial prowess, an immense Muslim populace found itself subject to a dominant Christian minority. The approximately 150,000 Muslims who had not fled the Kingdom of Valencia, the new Christian state established in the wake of this conquest, and who remained Muslim within this new arrangement under these Christian lords, became known as mudéjares.2 These subject mudéjares, which included slaves, semi-free agricultural laborers, and freemen, were crucial for the Christian rulers of the Kingdom of Valencia, a realm with its own institutions and laws, the furs, yet ruled over by the king of the Crown of Aragon, a kingdom located on the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, the capital of which was Barcelona. The Kingdom of Valencia was created to act as a buffer state between the Christian heart of the Crown of Aragon and the Muslim south, as well as to protect the Catalans' interests from the jealous designs of other Iberian Christian forces. Key to the economic and political survival of this new Christian state was the labor and population provided by the subject mudéjares.3 King Jaume's conquest of Valencia was a significant victory within the narrative of the Christian Reconquista, the seven hundred-year long push southward by northern Christian armies within the Iberian Peninsula. The Muslims who had been resident in Valencia at the time of its conquest by the forces of Jaume found themselves faced with a significant dilemma, if they chose to stay. They could either convert to the new faith of their lords or remain Muslim. Those Muslims [End Page 115] who maintained their old faith and who agreed to live under Christian dominion as mudéjares were considered vassals of the state, the "royal treasure" to which Boswell refers. Muslims who surrendered by treaty, rather than militarily resisting the Christian forces, were able to remain in their homes and work their former lands, although in a more subservient position. Those Muslims who initially had resisted the Christian advance and refused any terms of surrender, however, were usually expelled from the region and sought refuge in other parts of the Dar al-Islam, such as the Kingdom of Granada, located at the south of the Iberian Peninsula; North Africa; or the Mediterranean Levant.4 Some Muslims were permitted to emigrate freely immediately after the conquest of Valencia. After receiving the formal treaty of capitulation signed by the ruler of Valencia, Zayyan ibn Mardanish, Jaume was generous in conceding certain rights to the conquered Muslims. Anwar Chejne has demonstrated how Jaume, in his designs to conquer the majority of the eastern shore of the Iberian Peninsula, recognized the Valencian Muslims as crucial to his success, and was thus magnanimous to them, ensuring their personal safety, freedom of worship, protection of individual rights and, for the purposes of this present study, the freedom of movement.5 The conversion to Christianity of the previous Muslim governor of Valencia, Abu 'Zayd, who had been ousted by Zayyan ibn Mardanish in 1229 and who sought refuge with Jaume, under whom he already established a tributary relationship, may have contributed significantly to Jaume's generosity, since the erstwhile Muslim leader's conversion boded well for the possibility of future conversions.6 The language of the treaty evidences some of these concessions: "We, Jaume…promise to you Zayyan…that you and all your Muslims, men and women alike, who wish to leave from Valencia, may go and leave safe and secure with all their weapons and all their movable items that they wish to carry with them in our [good] faith…Meanwhile we wish and...