It is the tenth century, and crown prince Abd al-Aziz has headed the embassy which arrived in Cordoba, sent by his father, the emir of Crete Suhayb II. Upon finding himself before the razed suburb of Saqunda, from which his ancestors had been expelled a century earlier by al-Hakam I, he felt the weight of history and meditated: “I have never before been in Cordoba, so why do I feel as if I had never left?”The prince decided to return to Crete and take on his responsibilities after swearing on those sacred ruins that, on the painful day when he would take over the throne from his father, he would choose as his sobriquet “al-Qurtubi” (“the Cordovan”) so that his people would always bear in mind that forgetting their past would condemn them to lose Crete, just as one fateful day they lost Cordoba... In the meantime, Byzantium lurked nearby.

This novel, a sequel to La estirpe del arrabal (“The Arrabal Bloodline”), narrates the events of Abd al-Aziz I al-Qurtubi, the last Andalusian emir of Crete -his loves, his sorrows, his well-appointed justice, his revenge- and at the same time offers us the touching love stories of his son Al-Numan with Baha, and tales of his daughter Yanna with Karim al-Mundhir, the military hero whom even Byzantium admired under the Hellenized name of “Karamountes.”