Harry, listening patiently while sipping cold pomegranate juice, found it hard to believe that this elegant seafaring Muslim could be any sort of relation. And yet it was true.

Geoffrey Cotesford had discovered this branch of Harry’s extended family, which for two centuries had been living in Granada. The first of them had been another Ibrahim. He had fled here from Seville when that city fell to the Christians. He had married a woman called Obona, adopting her child from a previous relationship. In Granada, Ibrahim and Obona lived to old age in peace, raising many children, and the family had prospered ever since. Abdul said the family still remembered Ibrahim. Abdul hoped his own patient service for his emir matched that offered by Ibrahim during the last days of Moorish Seville.

For Ibrahim and Obona, it turned out to be a good time to have come to Granada. The last great wave of Reconquest broke with the fall of Seville. In the natural shelter of the mountains, with support from the Islamic nations of the Maghrib, the wily emirs of Granada had been able to play off one Christian leader against another, and the terrible calamity of the Great Mortality had sapped the Christians’ will to expand. Even the fall of the Baghdad caliphate to the Mongols had not harmed al-Andalus, which had gained a further measure of independence. It had been a period of uneasy truce - a peace that had lasted centuries.

But the truth was the emirs of Granada had always been vassals of the Christian kings. In return for security they paid heavy tributes in African gold, a steady bleeding.

And since the time of the Great Mortality, which the Moors called the Annihilation, Granada had slowly declined. It was all because of trade, Abdul told Harry. The strait to Africa had fallen into Christian hands, and Italian merchants monopolised the fruit trade, a vital component of Granada’s economy, and drove prices down. But the Christian tribute still had to be paid, the defences maintained. Abdul said, ‘I pay my taxes at three times the level of a Castilian. No wonder the emirs are unpopular!

‘Still, the long truce endured. But it has all changed under our latest emir. The Christians call him Muley Hacen; his name is Abu al-Hasan Ali. He grew up seeing his father bowing before Christians, and he loathed it. About twenty years ago he refused to pay the tribute to Castile, and hasn’t since. And three years ago Muley became aggressive, riding out to assault a fortified Christian town. It was a grave miscalculation. These new monarchs, Isabel and Fernando, are united and purposeful.