The Saracen Blade

by Frank Yerby

First published 1952

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3.8(443)

Pietro di Donati is born into poverty in thirteenth-century Sicily at almost the same moment as Frederick II, and the lives of peasant adventurer and emperor repeatedly intersect as Pietro fights his way upward through a world of feudal obligation, private war and crusading. Travel and violence carry him beyond Sicily while ambition and competing loves continually complicate his pursuit of status.
Yerby uses Frederick II’s Mediterranean empire and the religious conflicts of the age to frame Pietro’s career, with the Children’s Crusade and Albigensian Crusade among the upheavals surrounding him. The novel’s Sicily is a meeting place of Latin, Greek, Muslim and imperial traditions, and Pietro’s mobility makes the wider Holy Roman Empire visible from below as well as through the emperor’s politics.