The Saracen

Land of the Infidel/The Holy War

Author	Robert Shea
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	The Saracen
Genre	Historical novel
Publisher	Ballantine
Publication date	April/March 1989
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	468/357 pp (Paperback edition)
ISBN
OCLC	19407905
LC Class	CPB Box no. 1757 vol. 12
Preceded by	All Things Are Lights

The Saracen is a two-part novel written by Robert Shea. The two separate portions, The Land of the Infidel and The Holy War are a continuous tale.

Basically ignored during its publication - and subsequently out of print, although still enjoying strong reviews and a cult following by those who have read it - the novel is the portrayal of an English-born man named David, who is captured as a very young child and sold into slavery to Baibars, a Mamluk officer. He becomes a devout believer in Islam and takes the Arabic form of his name and the surname of a convert, Daoud ibn Abdullah. He develops into a gifted warrior and assassin. He is sent to the Papal Court in Orvieto in the 13th century as a spy, in order to foil an alliance between the Christian West and the Mongolian descendants of Genghis Khan to exterminate the Muslim faith and capture the Holy Land.

Daoud was also trained by the Hashishyya, a heretical Islamic order. One of the many spellings of their name, Hashshashin, is where we derive the modern word "assassin". Shea spends considerable time discussing their techniques and philosophy, and it is a major theme of the book.

Many of the characters in the novel, such as Thomas Aquinas, Baibars, King Manfred of Sicily, Louis IX, and Charles of Anjou are historical figures, woven into the fictional canvas Shea invented. Some historians believe that an alliance was attempted by the Papal Court (with Louis IX's backing) with the Mongols against the Muslim world, which ultimately failed. Shea has created a fictional scenario to explain this failure, and his firmly historical figures (such as Aquinas) are set side-by-side with wholly fictional characters and semi-legendary figures such as the Italian poet Sordello, who appears in Dante's Purgatorio and with whom Shea has also taken considerable poetic license.