When he walked through the streets he found a mood of anger and disbelief about the evacuation. He was shown around houses and gardens, still grand even after the siege, where patios shone and rusted fountains had once bubbled water; he was shown shops and offices and businesses, carefully built up over generations. How could all this be given up for ignorant Christian barbarians to despoil? Some people wouldn’t move for sheer stubbornness. And others hoped, no matter how sternly Ibrahim spoke of the Christians’ ruthless determination. Perhaps you could find some way to accommodate under the Christians. Or perhaps you could simply hide in your home behind a locked door, and somehow everything would turn out all right. Ibrahim knew this was fantasy. He encouraged people to take away the deeds of their houses, to lock the doors, to carry off the keys. This was enough to allow at least some of these desperate new paupers to walk out proudly, bundles on their heads, the deeds tucked carefully inside their djellabas expressing their intention to return. But others were determined to stay, defying the Christians come what may. Often Ibrahim could only walk away.

If there were some who wouldn’t leave, there were many more who couldn’t, for they were too ill or too young or too old, or damaged by the long siege. So Ibrahim organised parties of refugees who might be able to carry a few of the vulnerable with them. He tried, too, to gather people into groups large enough to resist the predations of the bandits in the country.

And while all this went on, Ibrahim still had a city to run. Even in this last month people still had to eat and drink, sewage had to be taken away, fires controlled, outbreaks of disease contained. Ibn Shaprut told him that it was like tending a dying man, all mundane detail and a steady decline, and an awful knowledge that an utter termination was near.

In the end, as Fernando’s deadline neared, the people of the city simply began walking out of the gates to the south and east. These were urban folk, not used even to walking far, and many of them overloaded themselves at the start of their flight. Some even tried to carry out precious bits of furniture, even carpets. You would see these bundles dumped after a few hundred paces, as the harsh landscape quickly took its toll.

Ten thousand people drained out of the city, to vanish into the plains of the south. At the peak of the flight it was an astonishing sight; they turned the roads to the south black.