9th century Iberian Peninsula - an age of brutal battles to the death and dungeons equipped with thumbscrews and spiked boots. An age of perfumed harems where acts of love were spiced with the erotic mysteries of the Orient. a time when merchants, princes, thieves and whores, Christians, Islamic Arabs, Berbers, Yemenites, Greeks and Jews were trapped in an inferno of embattled peoples and faiths.