Malta, 24 September 2022 — Feast of Our Lady of Mercy and Redemption
“The Umurbrogal was the Pacific’s masterpiece of defensive engineering, and it was going to be manned by a new Japanese warrior. For Lieutenant General Inoue’s training plan instructions had also killed the banzai. Inoue had agreed that “We are ready to die honorably,” but he had also gone on to suggest, in that imprecise language which was as great a military drawback as the banzai itself, that mere dying was not enough. It had to have that exotic Western thing: purpose.” — Robert Leckie, Strong men armed: the United States Marines against Japan (1962)
The Sicilian Dragons, 1582 the Battles of Cagayan and the Rise of the Planetary Era is an epistolary chivalric novel that brings to life our ancestral mind at the time of the world’s transition from the Medieval Era to the Modern Era. It is a time of passage, the dawn of our current Planetary Era, a time when the lives of every human being begun becoming interconnected with that of every other human being living on our planet. The story is set in the second half of the 16th Century. It starts in Malta with the Great Siege and follows the mission of the battle-hardened Tercio Viejo de Sicilia that the Catholic Monarch Philip II recalls to Spain after the Battle of Lepanto, and is sent to quell Portuguese orchestrated pirate raids in the Spanish East Indies, passing through Nueva Hispania, modern day Mexico. The story’s protagonists narrate through their letters what they experienced and observed during the astonishing evangelization of the Aztecs and later of the ‘Indians’ of the Philippine Archipelago. The Sicilian Dragons is a historical novel which is thoroughly accurate in its reconstruction and aims to counter the false post-modern revisionism that paints the spread of Christianity in the New World and the Far East as something that was violent or forced. On the contrary, history teaches us that the Gospel of Christ was so swiftly embraced in lands so distant apart because the promise of Christ’s redemption has always been particularly comforting to people who had until that day lived in perpetual slavery and subjugation. Just like the Gospel had appealed to the slaves of the Classical Era, the Word of God once again stirred the hearts of those who lived in slavery far away from the Holy Land, but were driven by the same identical human aspirations, what St Augustin calls Natural Law. We all desire to be happy. We all desire to be free.
On a philosophical level The Sicilian Dragons is a confrontation between the proto-historical top-down hierarchical collective models praised by our current political leaders, opposed to the grass root bottom-up individualism required by Christian teachings, which has historically characterized Western civilizations and is the root of the key differentiators responsible for the West’s success, both in technological achievements as well as social progress. In fact, contrary to the false pop culture prejudices of ‘white colonial conquistadores’, the Tercio that from Mexico sailed to the shores of Luzon, was already a melting pot of languages and ethnicities. Besides Spaniards, there were veterans from all over Europe and Mesoamerica, soon joined by diverse native people of the Philippines. And unlike their rivals who prospered in the heinous slave trade that had been forbidden for over a Millenia in Catholic Europe, what glued these Christian soldiers together was neither the whip nor the chain, but the promise of redemption and the dawn of the City of God, a land where humanity would overcome all suffering.
The novel escalates towards the historical Battles of Cagayan, fought between the fledgling Spanish Captaincy of the Philippines, headed by the enigmatic Captain Juan Pablo de Carrion and the Ronin Tay Zufu, leader of the Sino-Japanese Wokou pirates competing for hegemony over the island of Luzon. This epic series of battles become a confrontation between Christian individualism and proto-historical elitism (falsely pushed by today’s corporations as ‘collectivism’) and culminates in the astounding victory of the largely outnumbered Tercio. The outcome of the naval battle itself is preluded in two rounds of negotiations between the Spanish governor of Luzon and the ambassador of Sengoku period Japan, just before the rise of the Edo Shogunate. The first meeting is held over a game of Go where all the pieces are identical and the value of an individual is dictated solely by fulfilling their duty to one’s superior on the hierarchical structure of Confucian society. The second meeting is held over a game of Chess, where individual pieces develop specific skills, perform specific tasks and cooperate to deploy specific tactics, thus highlighting the capacities of different individuals and the competitive advantage achieved unleashing individual potential in a cooperative model.
At last, because love is the most profound of all driving forces to stir the human spirit, The Sicilian Dragons is also a love story between a man and a woman and their desire to create an idyllic family for their children, a safe haven from the torments of daily suffering. Alas, their happiness is short lived. After the Battle of Lepanto in the Eastern Mediterranean, Don Salvador, a half Taino Spanish Indio, grandson of Christopher Columbus is recalled to Spain by his other family, the Tercio Viejo de Sicilia, and sent to the most remote corner of the Spanish Empire, ‘the empire upon which the Sun never sets’, to fulfill his duty to his Catholic Monarch, leaving his beloved spouse and son behind. Donna Elisabetta Toledano, a young Maltese woman of Sephardic origins, whose family left Spain after the Alhambra Decree, bringing to Malta the Orange trade that flourished on the island for centuries to come, is left alone with a toddler in a rapidly changing Malta, only to discover she is carrying their second child. Years, possibly decades will pass before the couple and their children are reunited, but through their Faith and the commemoration of the lives of saints in their everyday lives, their love never wanes. We see the love of Don Salvador and Donna Elisabetta, born out of the ashes of the Great Siege, bloom, ignite and mature in the holy sacrament of marriage and the joy of parenthood, only to be ripped apart by the earthly duties of warfare. It is a story of devotion, sacrifice and redemption, and a faithful portrayal of how Christianity, founded on our individual desire for self-realization, drove the unification of our planet towards a single social and economic system in the pursuit of our individual happiness.
As per the commercial potential of the book, not only does it rest on subject matters urgent to our day and age and our youth in particular, it is also constructed in such a way to demand future works elaborating on the lives of the individual protagonists and the events that occurred after (and before) those described in the novel. This intentional construction of the novel as cornerstone to a new and independent universe, coupled with the urgency of its social themes and the thoroughness of its historical reconstruction can be summed up in just one phrase: “Pirates of the Caribbeans meets The Name of the Rose.”
Copyright © Carmelo Pistorio 2022
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