from Medieval Academy News

The Birth of a Medieval Mystery

by Caroline Roe

I am becoming hardened to the accusation that I started writing the Isaac of Girona series purely as a tax avoidance scheme, allowing me to write off summers lounging on the beaches of the Costa Brava, drinking in quaint village tabernas, and eating at fashionable Barcelona restaurants. That is far from the truth. I never do research in the summer. Spanish beaches are too crowded and those fancy Barcelona restaurants too full of tourists. No, Remedy for Treason, the first of The Chronicles of Isaac of Girona, was born entirely out of a happy coincidence between economic opportunity and my own background and training.

When I first realized-as quite a small child-that the world contained languages other than the one I spoke, I was consumed with desire to learn them all. Being young and ignorant, I had no idea how many there were. I started gamely in on French, Latin and Spanish, adding more over the years until I reached modern Catalan. The more languages I struggled with, the further back in time I slipped, until by graduate school I was firmly embedded in the medieval period. Unfortunately, when I finished my doctorate, the Middle Ages had become a miserable place in which to earn a living, and I wandered away to become, among other things, a mystery writer.

Six modestly successful murder mysteries later and popular fiction went through a few bad years. The man who owned my publisher took a midnight swim off his yacht in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and was never heard from again, leaving loud curses and multiple bankruptcies behind him. My particular subgenre sank faster than Robert Maxwell.

Mysteries are subject to mysterious ups and downs in popularity. Readers might be faithful to authors and types of books they like, but publishers are always desperately seeking best-selling formulas-which is to say that the police procedural set in Canada became a temporary lost cause in U.S. publishing houses.

When an editor suggested that I survive the slump by changing my name-from Medora Sale to Caroline Roe-and use my medieval training to write a historical mystery, I objected. It wasn't that I had scruples on the score of prostituting art and learning, but because I knew exactly how much work I would have to put in to write with accuracy and assurance about an entire society in a single time and place. For example, I knew a lot about the growth and development of religious sects, but not much about what a moderately prosperous carpenter was likely to eat for breakfast. It took stark economic necessity to prod me back into the stacks to fill in those gaps.

My doctoral work had been on the Cathars and Waldensians in northern Italy, Catalonia, and France in the twelfth and thirteen centuries and the effect that the fear of heresy spreading had on the wider world around them and on its literature.

So naturally I started on a book set in England. I had achieved twenty forlornly miserable pages of a novel that took place in the West Midlands when a friend suggested that I try Catalonia as a setting, offering me the use of her raw data from the archives of Girona and Barcelona. I was enchanted by the traces of his character that Berenguer de Cruïlles, Bishop of Girona, had left behind him in the difficult years following the arrival of the Black Plague in 1348.

The Iberian peninsula was still divided into several Christian kingdoms and the Muslim emirate of Granada. It was still the nexus of Mediterranean cultures, with substantial populations of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. And medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and poetry of the Near East and North Africa still met and exerted a strong influence on western European culture and learning.

I wanted to write a trilogy that would deal with the relations between these three religious communities before the Iberian Peninsula was no longer the most tolerant of western European societies, before the terrible events of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries-religious riots, forced conversions, and finally the expulsion of Muslims and Jews. I also wanted to explore the question of how it all went wrong-for then, as now, just as we human beings think we are at the point of learning to live together to our mutual benefit, everything blows up in our faces.

The books are set in 1353-1358, five years after the first, devastating sweep of the Black Plague across the Iberian Peninsula. The plague left government, professions, and trades-all of them centered in the cities-in chaos. At the start of the series, there are still enormous problems. In 1348 and 1349, the Girona records are scanty, perhaps because too many scribes died. Financial records are in confusion. People have trouble proving they own their houses. Houses are left empty waiting for a rightful heir to be found-and some of the supposed heirs have very dubious claims in a world in which the notary who drafted the will is likely to be dead of the plague, as are the witnesses to it, and records of all kinds are in disarray.

Confusion like this is nectar and ambrosia to the mystery writer.

Although the political background for the first book, Remedy for Treason, comes to a fair extent from The Chronicle of Pere the Ceremonious, King of Aragon, its outline rose from the character of the Bishop of Girona, Berenguer de Cruïlles. Judging from church records-since conflicts between Christians and Jews were settled in the Bishop's court-he was shrewd and balanced in his legal decisions, including those involving the minority Jewish population. He himself had a Jewish doctor (as did the King, who had more than one), and it was a short step to making the next continuing character the Bishop's physician.

Almost instantly, Isaac was born, and then his family. Yusuf, his Muslim apprentice, reflects two historical realities. The king at one point had a Muslim page boy, son of an important member of the government in Granada, and in the kingdom of Aragon there were hordes of street children, plague orphans, many of them, and Muslims, casualties of the wars between the Christian and Muslim states.

I did not intend to include a Yusuf when I sketched out the series. I needed him briefly, because I needed someone to help Isaac when he was caught in the disturbances on the Eve of St. John the Baptist's day. He could have been an adult, perhaps one of Isaac's patients, but for no reason at all, on the spur of the moment, I made him a boy, intending to write him out of the book at once. But he refused to go, and so I gave up and let him stay. It seemed a good omen.

Editor's note. Caroline Roe's eighth and most recent volume in The Chronicles of Isaac of Girona is titled A Consolation for an Exile (2004).