Colin Falconer's Blog

The journey made by Valerius from far western China to Rome was around 25,000km and took him almost two years. For those readers who are interested, I’ve marked it on an ancient map.

Researching this journey made Ends of the Earth the most challenging novel I've ever written. The Roman Empire and the events of 53 to 44 BC are well documented. So is the battle of Carrhae, in what is now southeastern Turkey.

From there it was a little trickier.

The 10,000 Romans who were taken prisoner at Carrhae were probably sent to the eastern borderlands of Parthia. It would have been quite a march, and many of them wouldn’t have made it, despite Roman legionaries being renowned for their ability to cover massive distances on foot. If they were wounded and force marched during the summer, the casualty rate would have been very high.

It is possible they got as far as China. After researching the possible scenarios, I imagined two stages. First, plying their trade as mercenaries for the Xiongnu, and then being conscripted again into the Han forces in the ‘Western Protectorate’ in what is now Xiangjang, far western China.

In my novel, Valerius and his cohort escape. This is my dramatisation, since the real-life legionaries were never heard of again.

Obviously, they couldn’t retrace their steps, so I researched other possible escape routes. There were two: the shorter way was with one of the Sogdian caravans that traded between the Han Empire and the shores of the Caspian Sea. There was a Roman fort on the western side of the Caspian.

But I decided it would be more interesting if they travelled the maritime silk route: east, halfway down the Yellow River, south to what is now Hangzhou, and then to a port city known as Zaytun (now Quangzhou). From there, they would cross five of the legendary Seven Seas.

I learned that, although contentious, some historians believe there was an established maritime route between China and the west before Christ, and that the Nabateans may have got that far. The Nabateans were remarkable navigators. Their lateen-rigged dhows were durable and able to use the trade winds to cross not only the Arabian Sea but the Indian Ocean as well.

The Nabatean Kingdom was a powerful Arab state, centred on what is now Jordan. It was at the far reaches of the Roman Empire and its capital was at Petra. Aila (Aqaba) was its major port.

There was another, thriving port on the Mekong delta called Óc Eo, known to the Greeks and Romans as Kattigara. (The Cattigara marked on this map is, I believe, incorrect.) Óc Eo was part of the Kingdom of Funan to the south of the Han Empire. My conjecture is that Arab traders got at least as far as here.

So, following this route, Valerius got home.

It was ambitious research and has led to some fascinating back stories. More about them soon!

NEW RELEASE: From the bestselling author of Silk Road comes a brand-new sweeping action epic about the lost legion of Carrhae. Set against a sprawling canvas of Parthia, the Han dynasty, the Seven Seas of ancient Arab traders, and Rome in the last days of the republic, Ends of the Earth is historical adventure on a breathtaking scale.

53BC: In the wake of catastrophic defeat at the battle of Carrhae, Roman tribune, Valerius, is taken prisoner at the far reaches of the Parthian Empire. It is the ends of the earth, and he vows to somehow find a way home.

In Rome, Pompey and Caesar battle for absolute power in the last days of the Republic, and senators plot to take sides as the city convulses into riot and civil war. No one is safe.

Valerius soon realises that if he ever does find his way back, his problems will be far from over. Dark secrets will not stay buried. Politics and intrigue bend to no man. And standing between him and his wife is the man who abandoned him to die on the battlefield.

‘There was a dream that was Rome. It shall be realised.’

You might remember these as the last words spoken by Russell Crowe when he lay dying in the sands of the Coliseum in Ridley Scott’s classic Roman epic, Gladiator.

Crowe was playing the part of gladiator and disgraced general, Decimus Maximus. He had just killed Emperor Commodus in single combat, to avenge the death of his wife and save Rome from the emperor’s oppression.

Now I have some bad news, and I’d rather you heard this first from a friend. Russell Crowe didn’t save Rome. No one did. Though the real-life Commodus did fight in the arena as a gladiator quite regularly, he didn’t die in a combat with one of his former generals. He was strangled in his bath by Narcissus, his wrestling partner.

And his death didn’t save the Empire. In fact, his assassination marked the beginning of its long but certain decline.

That is what most historians thought, anyway.

A recent Tik Tok trend indicates that the dream of Rome is still very much alive in the west. If Tik Tok can be believed - and who doesn't believe in the absolute veracity of social media - men in the western world think about the Roman Empire a lot. At least two or three times a day in fact.

How can this be? What is it that they think about? In the movie, Maximus was fighting for the pure ideals of democracy. Despite massacring a poorly armed indigenous population in the opening credits, he was philosophically opposed to violent suppression and authoritarian rule.

But no, a love of democracy isn’t forefront in the minds of the contemporary male population.

It seems the reason the Roman Empire continues to fascinate is its association with raw masculinity and power, especially the elite male code of violent gladiatorial combat. Fight Club with sandals.

I’m not a Tik Tok user, but I also spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the Roman Empire. A lot more than the socially acceptable two or three times a day.

My fascination is professional. The stories of Ancient Rome are a rich vein to mine for any writer. From the hubris of Julius Caesar to the vainglory of Gnaeus Pompey and the insatiable greed of Marcus Crassus, Roman history reads like a Greek myth.

It's the story of the rise and fall of an empire that once encompassed a third of the world’s population. Rome's iron grip on the politics of the western world was once unrivalled, yet it eventually imploded because of the corruption and incompetence of its political structures and the megalomania of its leaders. It has resonance for us today.

One story, that has kept me totally absorbed for the last year, involves Crassus and a battle that proved to be one of the greatest disasters in the Empire's history. Twenty thousand men died. Ten thousand were taken prisoner and were never heard from again.

But it wasn't Crassus that interested me. It was one of the ten thousand who were taken prisoner; a man called Lucius Severus Valerius. One of those men who lived by that ancient male code of honour and courage.

How far would he have gone to try to find his way home again?

NEW RELEASE: From the bestselling author of Silk Road comes a brand-new sweeping action epic about the lost legion of Carrhae. Set against a sprawling canvas of Parthia, the Han dynasty, the Seven Seas of ancient Arab traders, and Rome in the last days of the republic, Ends of the Earth is historical adventure on a breathtaking scale.

53BC: In the wake of catastrophic defeat at the battle of Carrhae, Roman tribune, Valerius, is taken prisoner at the far reaches of the Parthian Empire. It is the ends of the earth, and he vows to somehow find a way home.

In Rome, Pompey and Caesar battle for absolute power in the last days of the Republic, and senators plot to take sides as the city convulses into riot and civil war. No one is safe.

Valerius soon realises that if he ever does find his way back, his problems will be far from over. Dark secrets will not stay buried. Politics and intrigue bend to no man. And standing between him and his wife is the man who abandoned him to die on the battlefield.

The girl is young and beautiful. She has grown up as a nomad on the wild steppes of the Caucasus. The only walls she has ever known are the animal hides of her family’s tent.

All that is about to change.

One day, some Turkish soldiers appear and order her to go with them. She will never see her family or her clan again.

She is terrified that she is going to be raped and murdered. But her captors treat her well, fearsome as they look. They take her to a vast city called Stamboul, a place so huge and so crowded it is beyond her imagination. There she is imprisoned in a gloomy, wooden palace.

She aches to go home. She yearns for the wide-open spaces and people who speak her language. Instead, she is put into a tiny room and forced to sew clothes. She is taught Arabic and the words of the Koran. She realises she is a slave. Any small infraction of the palace rules is met with brutal punishment.

Such is the life of any girl unlucky enough to be chosen for the sultan's harem.

Contrary to common belief, a harem was not a paradise of baths and murmuring fountains. Quite the opposite. It was a snake pit of jealousy and intrigue. The only way out was to attract the sultan’s eye, not an easy thing to do in a palace of three hundred concubines. But it was essential to find some way into his bed. Those girls who didn't were neglected and forgotten.

Whoever the sultan chose had a chance.

Her preparation for this night of nights was elaborate. First, she was bathed by the Keeper of the Baths in water scented with jasmine and orange. Slaves shampooed her hair with henna and coated her body with a mixture of warm rice flour and oil. She was dressed in clothes of incredible richness. Then the chief black eunuch escorted her to the sultan's bedchamber.

If she pleased him, he might invite her to his bed again. If the invitations became frequent, she become a favourite. She was given her own apartments, slaves, even an allowance.

Should she give birth to a male child, then she became a kadin, one of the sultan's four wives. A kadin was a breath away from power. She was also in extreme danger because only one wife could become the mother of the next sultan, the sultan valide.

To become valide was the pinnacle of achievement for a harem girl. Achieve that, and her power inside the palace and within the empire became absolute. She would rule the harem, while her son would reign supreme over the people who had made her a slave.

The other three wives? Often, they would end up at the bottom of the Bosporus, drowned in a sack.

This was a deadly game of thrones. A slave concubine had to be at all times clever, charming, beautiful, and utterly ruthless if she was to succeed.

These were the choices. This was the game.

This is the story of Harem.

In the harem you love, you rule… or you die.

Istanbul, 1520: Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman’s greatest sultan, must protect his legacy at all costs. On the battlefields and behind the doors of the forbidden palace, his sons and viziers engage in a game of deadly intrigue for absolute power. And his concubines vie for his favour, whatever the cost.One of them is Hurrem. She knows there is only one way out of the sultan’s gilded prison – catch his eye and bear him a son.In Venice, Abbas is the impetuous and headstrong son of the city’s military commander. He embarks on an ill-advised romantic adventure with horrific and unthinkable consequences.A twist of fate throws Abbas and Hurrem together inside the byzantine world of the Ottoman court. Their intrigues threaten the future of the Ottoman throne – but a terrible death awaits if they are discovered.

From medieval Venice to the slave markets of Algiers, from the mountains of Persia to the Topkapi palace of Istanbul, this is a gripping tale of betrayal, revenge and murder spanning four decades.

Harem has been translated into 15 languages, and on release sold 150,000 copies in Germany. ‘A page-turner. . . This peek behind the walls of the seraglio will seduce lovers of large-scale historical fiction.' Booklist. ‘A great read.' Martina Cole Recommends. ‘A spectacular, haunting tale of malice, obsession and zeal.' Historical Novel Review.

‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree…’

The opening lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem Kubla Khan have led some to believe that Xanadu was an imaginary place, like Springfield or Hogwarts or Gotham City. Coleridge himself said that the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream.

But there really was a place called Xanadu. More correctly known as Shang-tu, it was once the summer capital of the Great Khan of the Mongols.

We know this because westerners had been visiting Mongolia since 1246, when Pope Innocent IV dispatched one of his priests on what was surely the longest and most difficult embassy any diplomat has ever made.

At the time, the whole of Europe feared it would be overrun by the ‘Golden Horde’. The Khan’s terrifying army had ravaged through Asia and the Middle East to even threaten Vienna. When King Wenceslas of Bohemia looked out, he didn’t see snow lying all about, he saw Mongol cavalry.

Meanwhile, the Crusaders in the Holy Land were in disarray after two centuries of infighting. And raids by Mongol horsemen had reached the gates of Jerusalem itself.

Desperate, the pope wondered if he might form an unholy alliance with the chieftain of these barbarians and not only stem the tide in Europe, but have the Khan defeat his other ungodly Muslim enemies at the same time.

He sent a Franciscan friar, John of Plana, to travel the Silk Road to what is now Mongolia, to put his bold plan to the test. The friar rode an astonishing three thousand miles in just over a hundred days to complete his mission.

It was an incredible feat – and he did it twenty-five years before the much more celebrated Marco Polo.

The fabled Silk Road isn’t one single road. It is a spiderweb of paths and tracks – sometimes not even that – and no one back then had ever travelled the whole length of it. It was far too difficult and dangerous. Trade goods passed hands dozens of times along the way, trader to trader. It was like a game of pass the parcel, only with camels and bandits.

But somehow, John of Plana managed it. He must have been brave, tough and very resourceful.

He was the inspiration for my own fictional Dominican monk, William, and his Templar bodyguard, Josseran Sarrazini. Like John of Plana, when they set out from the Kingdom of Jerusalem on their own great journey eastwards, they firmly believed they weren’t coming back.

Their odyssey to Xanadu began on the Mediterranean coast and led them across the Middle East, through Persia, still desolate from the scorched earth invasion of Genghis Khan forty years before, then on foot over the mountains of the Hindu Kush – ‘the Roof of the World’.

After that, they faced the notorious desert of the Taklamakan, which means literally ‘go in and you won’t come out’. Camels were known to die of thirst on the crossing. The desert was also feared for its black hurricanes, towering tornadoes of grit and pebbles that could swallow up whole caravans.

Even after crossing the Taklamakan, their troubles weren’t over. The stories that travellers brought back from the East would have made Bear Grylls think twice.

‘Some say that in the land of Cathay there are creatures with heads like dogs who bark and speak at the same time. Others say there are ants as big as cattle. They burrow in the earth for gold and tear anyone who comes across them to pieces with their pincers.'

There were more surprises. In the west, women were still considered the private property of their fathers or husbands. So, the ways of the warrior nomads of the high steppes were a shock. Tatar women had the right to choose their husbands and had vigorous ways of enforcing those rights.

A marriage suitor would ride bare-chested around his chosen bride, who was handed a rawhide whip. If she liked him and favoured the match, he might get a few light strokes across his back to test him out before she assented. But if she wasn’t keen, she would beat him bloody until he’d had enough and went home.

Josseran and William’s journey led them at last to Kublai Khan’s capital Shang-tu, Coleridge’s legendary Xanadu. There, they faced the most herculean task of all: try to convince the Great Khan of the Golden Horde to agree to an alliance.

William would have been shocked to discover that there were already Christian churches in Cathay. The greatest objection to an accord with the pope came not from the Khan, but from the local archbishop.

Sadly, the fabled city of Xanadu is today just a pile of old stones on an empty plain in Inner Mongolia, and its founder, Kublai Khan, is long gone.

You can visit Machu Picchu and Stonehenge and Delhi's Red Fiort, but today the only way you can experience Shang-tu is between the pages of a book.

From October 1-11 Silk Road is in a 99c Kindle deal in the USA and Canada.

Bestselling historical adventure thriller, Silk Road, paints a captivating story of courage, daring and human frailty onto the grand canvas of the medieval East.

The Holy Land, 1260: Josseran Sarrazini is a Templar Knight, trained for war. But as the Christian garrisons in the Holy Land begin to fall to the Saracen, he is sent on a mission of peace. Haunted by the things he has done, he sees it as a way to escape his past.His task is formidable. To forge an alliance with Kublai Khan, ruler of the greatest empire in history and commander of the invincible Mongol horde. To ride the treacherous Silk Road to the edge of the known world. To cheat hunger, thirst and death. And to put his trust in a people who do not believe in his cause or his god.This new world ultimately brings Josseran face to face with a stark choice: keep his Templar oath or follow the longings of his soul.

Learn more: https://geni.us/silkroad

It’s one of the most iconic images from HBO’s Game of Thrones. Daenerys Targaryen, ‘Khaleesi’, being lauded by the slaves she has freed outside the gates of the fictional city of Yunkai. But after the production crew and digital enhancers went home, it remained a real place.

Built entirely from reddish-brown earth, the actual town is called Aït-Ben-Haddou, and it dominates the Tizi n’Tichka pass, near the Atlas mountains in southern Morocco. It sits astride one of the ancient trans-Saharan trade routes between Marrakesh and the Dra’a valley, on the edge of the Sahara.

It was chosen because the nearby town, Ouarzazate (pronounced Wa-za-zat), is home to Atlas Studios, one of the largest film studios in the world. It opened in 1983 to host the Michael Douglas classic The Jewel of the Nile. Since then, around two hundred TV shows and films have been shot there, including The Mummy and Babel.

Russell Crowe’s Maximus went through gladiator training school not far from where Khaleesi defeated the Second Sons and freed their slaves.

Atlas and another studio, CLA, are known as ‘Ouallywood,’ as all the major Hollywood and Bollywood studios come here to shoot their desert epics. They come because Morocco is both safe and cheap. The studios can provide everything from Styrofoam Egyptian temples to plaster-cast Tibetan Palaces, as well as naturally authentic locations such as Aït-Ben-Haddou.

Filmmakers can also find experienced local crews, such as builders, painters and electricians at half the cost of Europe or the United States.

Ouarzazate is poor, and many of the 100,000 residents rely on the cinema industry for employment. Eighty per cent of movie staff on location are Moroccan. When NBC’s marathon A.D. The Bible Continues filmed here, it employed some 600 local artisans for six months.

Making stories of epic proportion requires hundreds of extras, and many locals have appeared in some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, moonlighting from their jobs for $25 a day plus meals.

Atlas Studios also holds a government license allowing them to draft in the Moroccan army. For Kingdom of Heaven, they equipped three thousand Moroccan regular army soldiers with spears and sandals for a running battle scene across an imaginary Palestine.

Need a horse? Khaleesi’s famous albino stallion is actually called Spirit, and she is stabled at Atlas’ animal training centre with two dozen camels and donkeys who also hope one day to become stars.

The day I visited Aït-Ben-Haddou, I climbed to the kasbah overlooking the town while a local guide described all of this.

Looking down at the famous gates from Game of Thrones, he reminded me that the town had seen enough drama of its own in its three-hundred-year history.

He pointed south to the Sahara and told me about the caravans that came from Timbuktu, loaded with gold, ivory and slaves. They sheltered overnight at Aït-Ben-Haddou as protection from bandits.

He described a time when Morocco had no hotels, no tourists, no spa resorts: when it was wild, dangerous and saw few foreign visitors.

Berber warlords controlled the trade routes from their mountain eyries. He told me about their intrigues, their wars with the Sultan and about the European mercenaries who came to fight.

When I finally walked back down through the ancient town, through Daenerys’ gate, and past Russel Crowe’s gladiator school, I had the entire plot and characters for Lord of the Atlas in my head.

It is an evocative place.

Who knows. Perhaps they’ll shoot some scenes for the film of my novel there one day.

A proper adventure. Fast paced, brutal and captivating.

Marrakesh, 1893: After leaving his military career in disgrace, Harry Delhaze turns to a life of drink and gambling. But then he’s offered a way out – a small fortune to help the Sultan of Morocco quell a rebel uprising. It sounds like easy money and Harry thinks his luck has turned.

But he soon learns that nothing in life comes easy. He is forced to battle the wild bandit armies of ruthless prophet-warlord, Bou Hamra, through the snows of the Atlas Mountains and the baking deserts of the Sahara. And he suddenly finds himself in the fight of his life.

With everything on the line, Harry must search his soul. When you make war for money, does it matter whose coin it is – or do loyalty and justice still mean something?

From the backstreets of Victorian London, to the kasbahs of Marrakesh, this historical thriller is a gripping tale of intrigue, loyalty and courage, evoking the beautiful and the barbaric of nineteenth-century Morocco. https://geni.us/lordoftheatlas

His name is synonymous with brutality and ruthlessness. He was responsible for more deaths than Stalin and Hitler combined. His military campaigns sometimes involved eliminating an entire civilian population. 40 million people died because of him. Over two decades, that's one person killed every twenty seconds. He hardly had time for lunch.

His empire was twice the size of Rome’s and included large parts of modern-day China, Mongolia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, South Korea, North Korea and Kuwait. All the Stans and then some.

His real name was Temujin; Genghis Khan is an honorific meaning ‘Universal Ruler’, and he took that on when he united the fractious Mongolian tribes at his coronation in 1206. Other titles included Lord of the Four Colors and Five Tongues, Lord of Life, and Emperor of all Men. He was also known as Mighty Manslayer and Scourge of God. And that was on a good day.

One of his most famous campaigns came in 1219, after the Shah of the Khwarezmid Empire of Persia broke a treaty with him. Genghis responded by unleashing the full force of his Mongol horde on the Shah. The subsequent war left three quarters of the Persian population dead and the Shah’s empire in utter ruin. Some historians estimate Genghis massacred so many Persians that Iran's population did not reach its pre-Mongol levels again until the mid-20th century.

Genghis already had form. For twenty years he led his armies on a whirlwind of rape and slaughter, unmatched before or since. Censuses from the Middle Ages show that the population of China plummeted by tens of millions during his lifetime. He may have reduced the entire world population of his day by ten percent.

He once even diverted a river to erase a rival emperor’s birthplace from the map. No act of spite or sadism was too much trouble.

“The greatest pleasure in life is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."

To his credit, Genghis attempted to be a self-sustaining mass murderer. He had thousands of women in his harem and fathered so many children it is estimated that half of one per cent of the world’s population has his DNA. For every two people he killed, he created one.

In 2007 researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences analyzed tissue samples from those areas approximating Genghis’ ancient empire. They found an identical Y-chromosomal lineage was present in about 8% of the men. Apparently, this spread is inconsistent with the theory of genetic drift, and the most likely scenario is that all these people are male line descendants of the Manslayer.

But he wasn’t all bad. Unusually for his day – for any day – he promoted religious tolerance and studied Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity. He instituted a system of meritocracy in his government at a time when the West was still largely feudal. He also supported ethnic diversity.

In bringing much of central Asia under his direct control, he allowed trade and exploration along the Silk Road to flourish. Which was why, in 1260, the Pope was able to send an emissary to China to try to broker a peace deal with him.

But that’s another story. I tell it in my novel Silk Road.

From October 1-11, Silk Road is in a 99c Kindle deal in the USA and Canada.

Bestselling historical adventure thriller, Silk Road, paints a captivating story of courage, daring and human frailty onto the grand canvas of the medieval East.

The Holy Land, 1260: Josseran Sarrazini is a Templar Knight, trained for war. But as the Christian garrisons in the Holy Land begin to fall to the Saracen, he is sent on a mission of peace. Haunted by the things he has done, he sees it as a way to escape his past.His task is formidable. To forge an alliance with Kublai Khan, ruler of the greatest empire in history and commander of the invincible Mongol horde. To ride the treacherous Silk Road to the edge of the known world. To cheat hunger, thirst and death. And to put his trust in a people who do not believe in his cause or his god.This new world ultimately brings Josseran face to face with a stark choice: keep his Templar oath or follow the longings of his soul.

Get Silk Road for 99c or learn more: https://geni.us/silkroad