The Land Beyond the Sea

I love Sharon Kay Penman's sprawling novels which combine medieval politics with the love stories between intelligent and strong willed characters. She was meticulous in her research, but the dearth of personal history (and for women, even royal women, sparse records in general) gave her the freedom to create complex and believable personal interactions.

The Land Beyond the Sea refers to Jerusalem in the late 12th Century. The novel opens with Almaric rejecting his wife Agnes in order to succeed his brother as King of Jerusalem and barring her from contact with their two children. Almaric's reign is short and he's soon succeeded by his 13-year-old son Baldwin, known as the Leper King.

Today, leprosy is a treatable bacterial infection but 900 years ago, it was a certain death, so we know Baldwin's life will be short (he died at age 24) and Penman doesn't shy away from showing his physical decline. Intelligent and strong willed, he learns to fight left handed (his right arm experiencing the earliest nerve damage) and control horses with his legs alone and he surrounds himself with good advisors. Still, he knows that as he becomes more infirm his kingdom will dissolve into chaos. He's right, and I found the hundred or so pages after Baldwin's death to be less compelling than the story of his reign. Penman shifts focus to his stepmother Maria and her second husband Balian (the main romance in the novel) and her daughter/Baldwin's half-sister Isabella and their attempts to stabilize the kingdom. Without Baldwin there's no heart and Penman probably should have ended the book with his funeral.