Castilian Knight

by Griff Hosker Book 1 in the Reconquista Chronicles series.

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Rodrigo de Vivar comes of age in an eleventh-century Iberia divided among Christian kingdoms and Muslim taifa states, where political alliances rarely follow a simple religious frontier. The death of King Fernando intensifies rivalry among his heirs and turns Castile, León and neighbouring realms into a landscape of shifting loyalties and civil conflict.

Rodrigo’s reputation as a formidable knight grows through that instability. Respected by men on both sides of the religious divide, he must serve rulers whose interests can change faster than his own sense of honour. The novel traces the historical world from which the legend of El Cid emerges, concentrating on warfare, exile, service and the difficult distinction between loyalty to a king and loyalty to one’s own name.