#infidel

I’m welcoming Nicola Harris to the blog with her new novel, Infidel Guest post by Nicola Harris My research for Infidel began long before I ever thought of writing a novel about Catherine of Aragón. It began on a beach in Tenerife, years before tourism transformed the island. To a child, it felt like another world. The light, the heat, the colours, the food, the rhythm of life.  I was fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time with a Spanish family who welcomed me into their home and their culture year after year. They taught me fragments of their language and, more importantly, the stories that shaped their history. Through them, I first encountered the world of Muslim Spain and the Catholic warrior monarchs who fought to reclaim it. It was impossible not to be fascinated. Catalina’s mother, Isabella of Castile, stood out immediately. She was disciplined, relentless, and utterly convinced of her divine purpose. She was also a mother raising her children in a kingdom defined by conflict. That tension between power and vulnerability became the foundation of my interest in Catalina’s early life. Before she was a queen, she was a child shaped by siege warfare, political ambition, and the expectations of a dynasty that demanded strength from its daughters. As I began to research more deeply, I found myself drawn to the wider world that touched Catalina’s childhood. I have always been captivated by the fall of Constantinople and the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II’s audacious plan to take the city.  On a trip to Turkey a few years ago, I spoke with a Turkish waiter about his view of the sultan. His pride and respect for Mehmed stayed with me. It reminded me that history is never simple. Every figure we study has another side, another story, another set of loyalties and beliefs.  That conversation helped me approach the period with a wider lens, aware that the Christian and Muslim worlds were not simply enemies but complex civilisations with their own brilliance and contradictions. Juana of Castile, Catalina’s older sister, became a vital part of the novel for this reason. She is often reduced to the label Juana the Mad, but she was far more than that. In Infidel, Juana allows me to explore the moral questions surrounding the Muslim wars and the Inquisition.  She is outspoken, intelligent, and unwilling to accept cruelty as the natural cost of faith. Through her, I could give voice to the discomfort a modern reader might feel when confronted with the punishments and persecutions of the age. Without revealing too much, Juana’s own journey takes her far from home, and the emotional cost of that distance shapes her view of the world. Her brother Juan was married to Margaret of Austria, who is frequently remembered for educating Anne Boleyn. What is less often acknowledged is that long before Anne ever entered Margaret’s household, Catalina was already connected to Margaret by family. In Infidel, those family connections matter. It reminds us that Catalina did not exist only in relation to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. She belonged to a wider European network of women whose lives, loyalties, and alliances shaped the courts that Anne would later enter. There is a great deal of sadness in this story, because there was a great deal of sadness in Catalina’s early life. She lost people she loved. She witnessed the brutality of war. She learned to read cyphers and how to read hearts. She watched her parents arguing over her father’s love affairs. She learned to stand firm even when everything around her was shifting.  Her childhood was not soft or sheltered. It was an ordeal. She came face to face with native Americans who were snatched from their land and brought to the palace. I wanted to understand what forged her, what hardened her, and what gave her the strength she carried into England. Her resilience did not appear by magic. It was earned. Infidel grew from all these threads: my early love of Spain, my fascination with the fall of Constantinople, my respect for the complexity of the period...