The Mud Prince

Jerusalem, 1187. Saladin has just taken the city.

Beneath his window a friar in a brown habit buys the freedom of fifty beggars with a purse of gold no friar should own. When the sultan asks where that gold came from, the answer is a name the poor of the city have passed down for forty years: the Mud Prince.

Forty years earlier, in Aragon. Gabriel de la Fuente is a second son, and second sons inherit nothing - not the land, not the title, not a wife. They get the monastery. But he was raised on his father's stories of Antioch and Jerusalem, of walls taken at dawn and gold divided among the victors. When Europe calls a new crusade, Gabriel runs from the cloister to claim the same glory.

He will find a storm that drowns half the fleet before anyone has sighted the enemy. An army that marches on an allied city because two kings cannot think what else to do with themselves. And the survivors of his father's campaigns begging in a street where they are herded so as not to trouble the merchants.

All he has left is Cesar, the squire who left three children behind to follow him, and the memory of Eméline, promised to his brother. When the war has taken everything else, Gabriel will hear of a treasure buried in a cave no one has ever walked out of. And he will go.

A historical novel about the distance between the war we are told about and the one we find - and about a man who sets out to take and ends by giving.

Set during the Second Crusade (1147-1148) and in Saladin's Jerusalem. The campaigns, sieges and equipment are drawn from the sources; the last part of the novel steps beyond documented history.

Winner of the 2017 Wattys award, italian edition.