Political intrigue in medieval Italy

LEAVE it to British author Barry Unsworth -- who has brought ancient Greece and the crumbling Ottoman Empire to life on a page -- to plunk readers nearly a thousand years in the past to vicariously experience the drama and political intrigue of the Middle Ages.

Pay no attention to the novel’s weird title, “The Ruby in Her Navel,” whose meaning becomes apparent only in the final pages (and still seems awkward). This is a tale that engages the reader from the get-go. And you needn’t be a history buff to be drawn in.

The story opens in northwestern Sicily in the year 1149, just after the end of the Second Crusade. Palermo is a thriving cosmopolitan region ruled by King Roger II -- a city where Christians, Jews, Arabs, Greeks and others live together, if not harmoniously then with a remarkable amount of tolerance in an uneasy peace. It can’t last.

Protagonist Thurstan Beauchamp -- a loyal staffer at the palace’s central finance office -- is caught between warring political factions as ethnic and religious tensions are rising to a dangerous level and threaten the king’s reign.

When Thurstan is accosted one day by a mysterious stranger, Maurice Beroul, he is informed that “the great threat to our Church is the existence among us of a militant faith hostile to our own,” Beroul says. “These Moslems are allowed to live and breed among us, and their blood is corrupted -- they will corrupt the blood of Holy Church, our blood.” Things are about to get very ugly, as pressure builds to create a Christian Sicily, one purged of Muslims and Jews alike.

Thurstan is a likable narrator for this exotic saga of political intrigue, revenge and clashing faiths. He’s a sort of James Bond of the Middle Ages, a droll outsider detached from his own life through no design of his own.

“I was distrusted as a man who belonged nowhere,” Thurstan tells us. “I worked for a Moslem lord, I was not a Norman of France, being born in northern England of a Saxon mother and a landless Norman knight.”

His boss, a brilliant Muslim Arab named Yusuf Ibn Mansur, enjoys teasing his subordinate about his “extravagance in dress.” (It seems that Thurstan is the 12th century version of a metrosexual.)

“I like to be clean and neat and make a good figure,” he explains, taking “much care with my appearance, shaving twice every week and spending a good part of my stipend on clothes and scent and oil for my hair, which is very light in color and reaches to my shoulders.”

Thurstan’s priorities change when Yusuf orders him on a mission, ostensibly to protect the king’s interests, and he discovers the darker side of otherwise mundane civil servant duties. It seems that the central finance office, though it mostly functions as an administrative center processing government documents and routine financial matters (including corrupt ones), “is also concerned with the more secret operations of money, the management of blackmail and bribes ... and the gathering of certain sorts of information, regularly reported by Yusuf in private audience with the King.”

Although Thurstan is about to be played as a pawn, he must obey Yusuf’s imperative. He knows that Yusuf is grooming him for a more ambitious career path, but he wants little part of the back-room jostling and international power struggles his mentor seems to savor. But as Thurstan embarks on his journey, he has an inchoate sense of dread: “I felt my life narrowing too, and the knowledge of loss constricted my heart.”

Meanwhile, other forces within the palace are trying to exploit the heightening tensions among Christians, Jews and Muslims, and to use Thurstan to betray Yusuf. That includes Thurstan’s first love, the beautiful Lady Alicia, who reappears in his life. This time around, the seduction is tainted, and Thurstan is pushed toward an act of betrayal.

His redemption may be the love of Nesrin, a stunning gypsy belly dancer with the jeweled navel of the title. (“She was so beautiful to me that I could barely sustain the light of it,” Thurstan says.)

What’s remarkable about “The Ruby in Her Navel” is not simply the ways in which it makes the sounds, textures and sights of the Middle Ages authentic. (At its most basic level, it’s hugely entertaining.) The author of “The Songs of the Kings,” “Pascali’s Island” and “Sacred Hunger,” a tale of the 18th century slave trade, makes this story resonate for our times. There’s the obvious religious conflicts (with their terrifying implications), but the crime, corruption and questionable political ethics Unsworth has set in the Middle Ages seem all too familiar.

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Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of six anthologies of poetry, including “Solitude” and “Motherhood.”