Margaret Murray asked Geoffrey E. Fox:

Dear Geoffrey, I just finished reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th century, which leads me to want to reread your fascinating novel, A Gift for the Sultan. I'm thinking of the horrifying wars between Turks and Christians which predominate by the end of the 14th Century. What are your thoughts? Thank you, Margaret C. Murray

Geoffrey E. Fox Thanks for asking, Margaret. I haven't yet read A Distant Mirror, thanks for the suggestion. My great interest in the Turk-Christian relations in the 14th and especially 15th centuries (my story takes place in 1402, the taking of Constantinople by Mehmet II in 1453) was in the wide area of collaboration between two supposedly irreconcilable ideologies. Lots of trade and political compromises between them, and very frequently their warriors would be fighting on the same side. Real life is always more complicated than ideology.

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