The Almohad lord let out a cry then of such pain that Arnau almost felt a pang of sympathy. The Lion of Alarcos stared at his ruined arm, his other one also broken and useless, still tucked into his belt. He was done for, and everyone now knew it. The old Moor’s eyes narrowed, filled still with hate and violent intent despite his predicament.
Balthesar let his sword fall to the stone floor and staggered for a moment, threatening to collapse in exhaustion. Then, summoning a reserve of energy from somewhere, he simply walked forward and lifted his arms, pushing the glaring Almohad, tipping him back over the battlements to fall out into the air, where he plummeted without a cry three storeys down to the stone flags of the courtyard. Arnau did not see him land, but he heard the wet crunch, and then the mixed din of moaning and relief from the men of both forces down below.
Balthesar dropped to his knees, and Arnau wondered for a moment whether the knight was so weak and tired that he might faint, but noted with pride and respect that the old man was, in fact, praying. Odd words drifted back to him; it surprised him that the old Templar was speaking Arabic. Praying for the soul of the Lion of Alarcos, Arnau realised. Just as Ramon had administered the viaticum to the men he shot from the tower during the siege of Rourell, so Balthesar gave his fallen foe the respect of praying for his soul in his own custom and language. Pious as he was, and despite his months of becoming used to the ways of the Temple, Arnau wondered then if he would ever be as noble in spirit as the three old knights of Rourell.
New sounds insisted themselves upon him now, and he turned to see that the courtiers and guards had stepped aside and footsteps were echoing up the stairs beyond the door. Despite his lack of command of the Arabic tongue, Arnau could still tell voices apart in it, and he recognised with relief the silken steel tone of the emir.
A thought occurred to him, and he scrambled across to the site of the Lion’s demise just as the emir appeared in the doorway behind them, his taifa safe once more, and his throne secure.
Epilogue
Sunday, 13 June 1199
10 a.m.
Balthesar frowned sceptically at the object in Arnau’s hands.
‘A falsehood is a falsehood, no matter how you frame it, Vallbona.’
Arnau shook his head as he lifted the ornate silver box. The cross upon the lid had been a nice touch, and he could imagine how the Moorish craftsman had felt being asked to fashion it, but it was as good a reliquary as Arnau had seen in his limited years. The forearm inside might not be from the blessed Stephen, the first martyr of the Church, but only he, Balthesar, the emir and half a dozen Moorish lackeys and craftsmen knew that.
‘Faith is the thing,’ he said. ‘Having faith is what’s important, remember, not necessarily the physical focus of it. We have faith in the Lord God, but we cannot see or touch him. Besides, I would not be at all surprised to learn that the relics of Saint Stephen which are kept in Rome contain both arms.’
Balthesar shot him a fierce look, but Arnau weathered it with aplomb. ‘I say here is the arm of Saint Stephen, a thing of miracles, which was brought to the islands by Bishop Orosius half a millennium ago, which survived centuries of Moorish rule because they respected the relic, and kept it from harm. And now we return it to Christian lands at Rourell, where it will make the house important and will draw funds and manpower that we sorely need. That is what I say and only one man in all of Aragon and Catalunya will be able to truly deny it. Will you deny it, Brother?’
Balthesar remained silent for some time, looking at the fake relic uneasily. Finally, he straightened and sighed. ‘I suppose it is fitting that Abd al-Azīz do something good, even if it is in death. We shall call it payment for the fact that I prayed for him.’
They turned at a ligneous scraping to see the ramp being pulled aboard. The Moorish trader was preparing to put to sea on the short voyage to Tarragona, where he would sell his goods and deliver the two Templars back to their own lands. Arnau’s eyes rose from the deck, past the walls of Madina Mayūrqa to the towers of the Al-Mudaina beyond. He could see small, gleaming figures upon them, and it felt good to know that they were the emir’s men, for the last of the Almohad soldiers had been released to depart the previous day.
It had surprised Arnau at first that the emir was letting them leave and not simply doing away with the force that had sought to depose and replace him, but the emir had explained that the death of one lord of the Almohads might be too small a matter to start a full-scale war, while the imprisonment or execution of an entire Almohad force would be another thing entirely. And so the black-and-white-clad soldiers of the Lion’s army had been escorted back to their ships in the harbour and ordered to depart the island and not to return.
‘Do you think it will last?’ he asked.
‘Hmm?’ Balthesar turned to him. ‘What?’
‘The emir. The taifa. The independence of this place. I was extremely nervous of coming here, and I’ve been quite nervous while we’ve been here, but now that we’re leaving I find that I’ve become unexpectedly and oddly fond of the place. But clouds are gathering, aren’t they? Will it last?’
‘Nothing made by man lasts, Vallbona,’ sighed the older knight. ‘But this place? No. Sadly not. The emir has bought himself time, but without a strong military ally, that is all he can do: put off the inevitable. This place has been too out of the way to be a focus for the wars that rage in Iberia, but it is becoming more central now, and with the last taifa and the last emir, it is becoming a prize for everyone.’
‘That saddens me.’
‘Me also. But the caliph will not rest. The Almohads will come again, and next time in greater force, for now they know that only a full invasion will deliver Mayūrqa to them. And when they do it will be the end of the era of taifas, and the end of the world in which I grew up. And if the Almohads do not come soon, then Pedro of Aragon, or Alfonso of Provence, or even a force gathered by the Pope, will do so, seeking to add the islands to the Christian world as part of their ongoing war with the Moors. No, I fear the emir’s time is almost up.’
The ship lurched for a moment as it jerked away from the jetty and prepared to make for the mouth of the port and the open sea beyond. Arnau felt in some ways sad to be leaving this place, but in other, and more important, ways relieved to be returning home, where he could once more don the black robe and the red cross of the Temple.
‘What next?’ he asked idly, tearing his gaze from the towers of the palace and turning to look ahead, out to sea.
‘Next? Back to the preceptory. To finish the rebuilding and to return it to strength, for the time of peace is passing. The aftermath of Alarcos brought a lull in the wars, but things are building once more, Vallbona. The great powers manoeuvre and prepare. Soon the order will be called to war, and your training is far from complete. But for now, we go home.’
Historical Note
With Daughter of War I sought to find a new angle to the story of the Knights Templar, and did so purely through chance. In my research, trying to find an angle, I happened across two women who are recorded in historical texts as female Templars. Not just associates either, but full sisters, even a preceptrix running a house. I sought to build a story that explored more than just the martial arm of the order and the supposed heresies that were cited in their downfall. In essence I wanted to use the fascinating story of the Templar sisters, as well as spinning a great yarn, to explore more of the nature of the Templars, who they were (particularly in Spain) and what they did. And the more I read, the more I realised that Templar history in Iberia went far deeper than the Reconquista – Christian against Muslim. In fact, that was to some extent peripheral to the order’s time in Iberia. And so, in fact, the Moors played a very small part in the book, with the good guys and the bad all being Christian.
As that book neared a close, I already knew what I wanted to look into in the second book. I wanted the reader to experience Moorish Iberia. As such I sowed the seed at the end of the first book that would send intrepid
Templars behind enemy lines in the search for one of the many relics that must have been lost when the Moors swarmed across Iberia from the eighth century onwards. Again, my story fell together quite by chance. I did some research into the relics of pre-Muslim Iberia, and stumbled across a fairly obscure reference that formed the basis of the plot for me. I won’t go over it again in much detail as you’ve just read it in the book, but essentially there are references to Bishop Orosius delivering the relics of Saint Stephen, protomartyr, to Menorca and not then on to Braga, whence they were meant to be bound. There are several vague and conflicting stories about this, including the forced conversion of Jews on the island using the relic’s power. I might cite Elizabeth A. Clark and Peter Van Nuffelen as two of my principal sources there.
Of course, there is always the irritating fact that the relics are also supposed to then appear in Africa at El Alia, and that recognised relics of that same man are kept in his church in Rome. Some might find uncomfortable conflicts in this. I know I do. In the medieval era this does not seem to have been the case, with all acknowledged relics being worshipped, even if a saint somehow appeared to have two skulls. In fact, claims of the validity of such relics seems to have sparked some competition. My perhaps inelegant solution was to have the Menorca relic be simply a forearm of the saint, allowing for the rest of him to be elsewhere, which also played well to my plot. Mea culpa.
But I digress. The fact was that, for me, I had a relic appearing on an island that then became Moorish territory, and which never left, disappearing from the record. This was perfect for my tale. Better still was the realisation that in 1199, Mallorca (Moorish Mayūrqa) was the very last independent taifa kingdom in Iberia, and this was a particularly fraught time in its history, where its ruler actually had more in common with the Christian kings of Aragon and Castile than with the Islamic caliphate of Cordoba under the Almohads. Just the briefest glance told me how much material I had to work with here. I will hold my hands up. I try not to rely on Google or Wikipedia at any level of research, but my poor Spanish and complete lack of Arabic made delving into records of the era and location somewhat troublesome. To quote the (translated) Catalan Wikipedia site, though, with reference to that last emir: ‘In 1199 he launched an attack on Ibiza, which, defended by Abd al-Wahid and Abu-Abd-allāh ibn Maymun, failed. During his rule the Almohads tried again to conquer the taifa until finally, in 1203 under the caliphate of Muhàmmad an-Nàssir, [he] was defeated and executed.’
Initially this second book was planned as a tale of the retrieval of the relic and an exploration of what Moorish Iberia was like for a Christian, but that simple line that the Almohads tried to conquer the place changed things for me. Suddenly I also had political and military elements involved. Thus were the Almohads introduced to the plot. And with their introduction, I had the opportunity to tell Balthesar’s tale (hinted at in book one). A chance discussion about Palma city (Madina Mayūrqa) with the amazing Isabel Picornell Garcia of the Alderney Literary Trust led to the discovery that her ancestor Guillem had been involved in the conquest of the island in 1229 and received lands there from the Count of Roussillon for his part. Knowing now that I had local independent Moors, Almohad zealots and two undercover Templars on the island, I simply could not help adding an Aragonese party to the mix, including a young Guillem, some thirty years before he would be back, conquering the island.
Essentially, politically, Mallorca was a mess, or at least is to look back on. Simply pinning down which ruler of the island was in power and by whose leave at any given time is difficult. But in a world where I knew that the emir was nominally independent, yet was reaching out to Christian monarchs for aid against the growing power of the caliphate, finding out that there was an attempt at seizing control by the Almohads was enough to build my plot. Thus what began as a quest for bones, single-minded and driven by Balthesar, gradually twisted to become a struggle of faith and reason against blind zealotry and hate.
This is, as anyone who knows me will attest, quite close to my heart. Such unthinking ire is at the heart of much of the world’s evil, and could be overcome if people only thought and reasoned more. And that is something that I have tried very hard to put over in the book. This is not a case of ‘Christians good, Muslims bad’. It never was. There were good and bad Christians (as we saw in book one) and also good and bad Muslims (as I showed here). The Almohads seem to have been almost universally despised, and not only by their enemies, but also by their subjugated lands, which were largely Muslim. These were the Da’esh, or ISIS, of their time. As such, I cannot find it in myself to portray them as anything but villains. And where the Almohads are Da’esh, the Emir of Mayūrqa and his people are those beleaguered Islamic populations who have been systematically brutalised by ISIS. I hope here that I have been able to show that the Moors of Mayūrqa, just as the Muslims of today’s societies, are often quite pleasant, peaceable and reasonable people, and that we cannot judge a whole religion and way of life because of a band of zealots. I condemn men such as ISIS and the Almohads. And similarly I laud the Muslim lands who defy them as I do the taifa of Mayūrqa.
The language barrier in the story could have been insurmountable, but I have found ways around it, not least in having Balthesar, raised within the Muslim world, speak Arabic fluently. I had trouble locating information on the languages of the time, but it seemed to me likely that religious minorities like the Christians and Jews would have probably adopted Arabic for day-to-day speech. They lived among the Moors and had to buy food from them, trade, work, pay taxes, etc. They must have spoken the Moorish tongue. Indeed, in the most informative thesis by Martin Sebastian Goffriller, he quotes archaeological evidence that supports a gradual ‘Islamicisation’ of non-Christian Iberians, in that they seem to have gradually adopted the ways of their rulers probably through simple expedience, even when they retained their own religious beliefs. A man had to be able to understand his tax official, even if he was a Christian, after all. I have probably downplayed the number of these people living under Moorish rule on the island, since such religious minorities do not play a large role in the tale. Perhaps there were many more large neighbourhoods, but I have kept their appearance in the tale minimal for two reasons.
Firstly, the history of Moorish Mallorca is very poorly recorded, even in Arabic texts, some of which I have dipped into in translation. The physical evidence is minimal, the written more so. Thus details about the Moorish era on the island are scant compared with records after the Christian conquest, and so I did not want to explore too much detail without any real grounding in it. Secondly, less than half a century before this there had been Christian revolts against the new Almoravid ruler Muhàmmad. In fact, Ramón Rosselló notes one of only two mentions of the Al-Mudaina in medieval sources being the Kitab Takmila which tells of Christian slaves besieging the palace in 1184. As such it seems likely that many Christians would have fled, ostensibly converted, or hidden from potential danger in the following years of the same dynasty, and our tale takes place only fifteen years after that insurrection. This, by the way, is something to note: there is a tendency among students of the region and era to think of the time of the taifa as halcyon days of togetherness and understanding. At some times and in part, that was certainly the case, but at other times it was far from true. Like all changing political and religious landscapes, from one decade to the next attitudes changed. That being said, under the taifa at least there was room for that attitude to change. The caliphate would not allow for such deviation. Da’esh again.
Balthesar’s history might seem outlandish, but there are parallels to be seen in medieval Iberia. The great Rodrigo Diaz (El Cid) himself actually spent more time fighting for Moors as a mercenary than he did for Christians. And with the fluid situation on the peninsula men such as he could fight with Christian against Moor or vice versa, but also for Moor against Moor or Christian against Christian. This is one aspect of this time and place that draws me, rather than the zealous focus of the H
oly Land. Balthesar is in fact highly plausible as a character of that time. To have him involved in the fall of the taifa of Valencia, a land that had once been in El Cid’s grasp, and which would become a foreshadow of Mayūrqa was too tempting to avoid.
Arnau you’ll know if you’ve read book one, so I won’t go into his history. And I’ve mentioned Picornell, who would eventually be involved in the island falling to the Christians. That leaves only two characters to discuss. The emir himself is largely my own creation, based upon the simple shape of a historical figure. Abd al-azīz, however, is entirely my own creation. I did toy with using in his role one of the more dangerous and brutal warlords of the time, but none fitted into the timeline the way I needed it, and so I created someone from scratch. He is, however, partially based on a number of characters of the era, including Abu Yahya, who was one of the main contenders for the role and who would become the Almohad governor of Mayūrqa after the emir’s demise and until the Christian conquest.
Locations are hard to pin down in Moorish Mallorca. On the Christian reconquest the obliteration of all things Moorish was so thorough that all that now remains to be seen in Palma are:
An arch over a street that had been a gate in the Moorish walls.
Part of a bathhouse that had been used as garden sheds for centuries.
The ‘emir’s Arch’ over the palace’s private dock.
Fragments of the Al-Mudaina palace, visible amid later Christian work.
The gatehouse of the Gumāra fortress, which later became a Templar preceptory.
The rest of the island fared little better. Of the house and garden at Al-Fabia, which was indeed the emir’s country retreat, little remains from Moorish days other than a coffered ceiling, two inscriptions, and gardens that have been liberally replanted and redesigned by later owners. Al-Bulānsa (Pollença) remains, including its Roman bridge over which our heroes fled, but the town was rebuilt and redesigned after the reconquest when it had, ironically, been gifted to the Templars in its entirety. In my story I needed the bones of the saint to disappear and I had that happen on a mountain road across which I journeyed when researching on the island, and which impressed me with its bleak and rocky glory. Halfway along it is the monastery of Lluc, the island’s most sacred site. In my tale the priest carrying the bones ends up here. It seemed a fitting continuity to name him Father Lucas and have him in some way become the progenitor of Lluc. The half-built sanctuary is fictional, but the nod to the wooden statue of the Madonna that would in coming years be the miraculous find that led to the settling of Lluc was self-indulgence. My understanding and portrayal of such ancient Romano-Christian shrines and reliquaries was partially informed by a visit to the ruins of the basilica of Son Pereto near Manacor, and to the museum in that latter town, where a relic-containing altar can be found.
The Last Emir Page 31