#spania

Synopsis

Egilona, the last queen of Hispania, a powerful woman between two cultures, between two eras, the Gothic and the Arab, fascinates us in this memorable historical novel.

Don Rodrigo, Duke of Bética, returns to his lands after being forced to pay homage to the new king of Hispania, Witiza, the murderer of his brother Favila. Now the smart thing is to lower his head; There will be time for revenge. Near Córdoba, he stops to rest in a noble house and there he sees for the first time Egilona, a fifteen-year-old girl with reddish hair, white skin and amber eyes, who that same night will become his wife.

Nine years later, in 711, near Tarifa, the hosts of the now king Rodrigo prepared to prevent the entry into Hispania of the new conqueror of the world: the Umayyad empire. In command of his army is Tariq ibn Ziyad, a freedman whom his patron Musa ibn Nusayr, vali of Africa in the new order of the caliphate, has sent on a raid. With this old soldier, ugly, cross-eyed and red-haired, hardened in a thousand battles, travels his concubine, Umm Hakim, a fascinating young woman, with doe eyes and magical knowledge, and Abd al-Aziz, one of Musa's sons. In and out, that's the order. But, in the heat of battle, Abd al-Aziz kills Rodrigo and sets his sights on Egilona, the most beautiful and haughty woman he has ever seen.

Woe to his eyes! They have just begun a story in which the sorceress and the queen will cross paths to end an empire, and for which Egilona, queen of Hispania, will be remembered "as the hand, the mind, the powerful spirit that sowed the "seed of a new era."

Some comments from the author of the novel about the historical figure of Egilona, the historical setting, the conquest and her marriage to Abd al-Aziz, from this interview:

"Events that have usually been told very poorly"

"She was a transitional character who was everything with the Visigoths and is everything again in the new world of the Muslims, but a lot of nonsense has been written about her"

"I have opted for an intermediate solution in the novel"

"After Rodrigo's death it stands as a symbol of resistance, but after the second defeat of the Visigoths in Écija I made Al-Aziz capture it. Let's think about Aztec Mexico: the Spanish were a very small force and they relied on the nobility. The Arabs did the same. This marriage was not the exception, but the norm, and there are the examples of Teodomiro's daughter or Witiza's granddaughters. It was a time when collaboration was needed"

"If I put on my historian's suit and limit myself to what the sources say, I am tied hand and foot. Now, a novelist does have licenses and I imagine that story of hate and love with Al-Aziz" "But I think the result is very coherent: it is a novel by a historian who specializes in the period and which, literary speaking, proposes psychological solutions to the 8th century."

"For me, her forgetfulness is intentional from her own time: for those who resisted in Asturias she was a traitor; for the Arabs, she was responsible for the perfect Muslim warrior falling into the conspiracy. She was guilty for going over to the enemy or subverting the order, and this has greatly influenced nineteenth-century and current Spanish historiography"

"This novel, at the level of people who seek to learn history with fiction, is the story of the Islamic conquest of Hispania based on what we really know, which has changed a lot in the last twenty years"

Spania GTA Spano

Rosalía for W Magazine (2019)