Heart of the World

When Hulagu Khan’s army breaks into Baghdad in 1258, Rikart al-Shah’b—an estranged Templar known as Rikart the Ghost—tries to escape the collapsing city with Daud, an Arab boy, and Dinah, the teenage daughter of a Jewish scholar. The three are separated amid siege, fire and mass killing. Each must survive among soldiers, refugees and communities whose old protections have vanished with the Abbasid government.

Their separate journeys reveal the consequences of the conquest beyond the fall of the caliph al-Musta’sim. Rikart’s military past, Daud’s adaptability and Dinah’s education offer different means of endurance but cannot restore the world destroyed around them. The novel treats the sack of Baghdad as a shared catastrophe experienced across religious boundaries, combining the scale of Mongol expansion with closely observed stories of displacement, captivity and moral choice.