The Black Sheep

Name: The Black Sheep
Rating: 4.4 (1218 reviews)

by Peter Darman Book 1 in the Catalan Chronicles series.

First published 2019

Amazon

4.4(1,218)

Set in Constantinople and western Anatolia from 1302, as the Catalan Company enters Byzantine service, constantinople 1302.
Luca Baldi, a young shepherd, is catapulted into the violent world of mercenary warfare when he is forced to flee his native Sicily. He falls in with the Almogavars – ruthless mercenaries from the Catalonia region of Spain who have just finished butchering the French during a 20-year war on the island. He and they take ship to Constantinople when they are hired by the Byzantine emperor, whose empire is disintegrating in the face of remorseless Muslim advances.
Alone and marooned amid danger and violence and surrounded by enemy forces, Luca must master the Almogavar way of war to survive. Plunged into the brutal world of Medieval warfare when the mercenaries take the fight to the emperor’s many enemies, can Luca live through fighting impossible odds as he battles to preserve a crumbling empire that has stood for a thousand years?

The Catalan Company was formed from Almogavar veterans left unemployed after the wars in Sicily. Byzantine emperor Andronikos II hired them against Turkish forces in Anatolia, where their hard campaigning initially made them valuable allies. Their numbers, independence and appetite for plunder soon made them a political problem as well as a military solution, giving Luca's new life a setting in which employment and betrayal are never far apart.