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The Swords OF Faith
Trilogy
Originally, my novel The Swords of Faith (originally titled Richard and Saladin) was one project. But after absorbing over forty books, and countless other bits of information about this period of history, I realized there are more compelling storytelling opportunities.
As I read about “The Crusades” (never called “The Crusades” by their contemporaries), I discovered the decisive Battle of Ayn Jalut. This may be the most important battle in world history that no one has heard of. Mongols had taken over most of the Muslim world, and much of eastern Europe. Central Asia was significantly depopulated by Genghis Khan and his sons and grandsons, with great medieval cities like Bukhara, Samarkand and Herat devastated to the extent that they never returned to their previous glory. Kiev, the rising city in the emerging eastern state of the Rus, suffered the same fate. It can be argued that Mongol domination of Russia for two-and-a-half centuries left them permanently behind western Europe in terms of political and economic development, arguably still playing catch-up to this day. So how would world history have evolved if the Mongols had taken Egypt, and moved across North Africa, up through Spain, into western Europe? At the battle of Ayn Julat, Muslim forces, with a vanguard commanded by future slave-soldier Sultan Baybars, stood as the last credible threat to Hulegu Khan’s advance further into the western world. The result of that battle changed history.
Like the story told in Richard and Saladin, two towering personalities, lesser-known, but no less influential during their times, had a huge role in the resolution. But in a number of ways, this story of The Sultan and the Khan will be a more brutal story, populated by more brutal men, shaped by times that make the events of the “Third Crusade” seem tame.
The Sultan and the Khan, starts with Hulegu Khan’s siege of Baghdad. Yes, this was the same Baghdad that American forces recently moved into, to overthrow a despicable dictator, and to sponsor a government worthy of this region with long, proud contributions to the history of the civilized world. And part of that contribution was the city of Baghdad during the golden age of Islam, a time and place where scholarship was honored, great western intellectual achievements were preserved and improved on, and a thirst for knowledge and learning drove advances in the human condition. Those ghosts have been silent too long. I will give them a novelist’s opportunity to speak again in The Ghosts of Baghdad.