Gegna: Coastal Mooring in Crusader Valencia

King Jaume the Conqueror promoted post-crusade technology in reorganizing his conquest of the thirteenth-century kingdom of Valencia along the Mediterranean coast. The massive use of paper inaugurated by his archives—Europe's "Paper Revolution"—recorded among his franchises a maritime docking machine called a gegnum, deployed along the Valencian beaches. The term does not yield its mysteries to exhaustive linguistic parsing or to reconstruction of its actual operations, once so common. What does gegnum mean in any language? What can be gleaned from archival descriptions? Can previous Muslim usage offer bicultural enlightenment? Colleagues, especially Professor Paul E. Chevedden, contribute to the debate and propose theories.