James T. McMahan—Travis to his friends—began reading fiction at an early age and never stopped. Growing up, the books of Piers Anthony, David Eddings, Terry Brooks, and Robert Jordan were read and re-read until the characters were old friends.
His interest in historical fiction began with Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles and Saxon Stories, along with far too many hours spent on strategy PC games. Somewhere in all that, he started asking: what if history had gone differently?
McMahan teaches high school literature and lives in Oklahoma with his Siberian Husky, who has strong opinions about his writing schedule. The Winter Princess explores what happens when ambition, duty, and love collide in sixth-century Britain—and what it costs to build a crown from nothing.
This book is fictional and one of alternate history. However, I still tried to keep it as true to the sixth century as the story allowed. For anyone who wants to see behind the curtain of the year 560: here is my research, and here is where I cheated.
The Roman government left Britain in 410, and what followed is the least documented century in British history. We have almost nothing written from inside it. Our best contemporary source is a monk named Gildas, whose De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae was composed around 540.
What replaced Roman administration was a patchwork of small kingdoms. Dyfed, Powys, Gwynedd, Gwent, Dumnonia, Rheged, and Ceredigion were all real. So were the pressures on them: Saxon settlement pushing west out of the east and south, and no unified command anywhere to answer it. Glouvia is my name for the British polity around Gloucester—Caer Gloui in later Welsh tradition—which was real enough, and which fell for good at the battle of Dyrham in 577.
Dyfed really was ruled by an Irish dynasty. The Déisi settlement in south-west Wales is attested in both Irish and Welsh sources. King Baelmor is my invention; the Irish kings of Dyfed were not.
The name is genuine. When Diocletian reorganized the empire he divided Britain into provinces, and Britannia Prima was one of them—covering, as best anyone can reconstruct, Wales and the West Country. Its capital was probably Corinium, modern Cirencester. I have chosen to make Caitlynn's initial capital Isca Siluria, and from there, Caer Deva, as her conquests expanded.
Isca Siluria is Caerleon. Deva is Chester. Glevum is Gloucester, Moridunum is Carmarthen, Ariconium is Weston under Penyard, and Londinium, of course, is London. Caer Swys (logically!) is Caersws, where a Roman fort guarded the upper Severn. Holy Island (Ynys Môn) is Anglesey. Magiovinium, where the alliance is broken, was a Roman town near modern Fenny Stratford.
The roads Caitlynn builds are constructed the way Roman roads were actually constructed—trench, rubble, gravel, concrete, paving slabs, with the camber to shed water. It is a genuinely enormous amount of labor, and her back is right to complain.
A confession about the battlefield. Magiovinium was a real Romano-British town, sitting where Watling Street crosses the River Ouzel—a tributary of the Great Ouse—a little southeast of modern Fenny Stratford. The Ouzel is real. Watling Street is real, and it runs through that ground for the sound reason that it is the practical line between two river systems.
The Metaris is a slight liberty. Ptolemy gives the name Metaris Aestuarium to the Wash, the great estuary where Norfolk meets Lincolnshire, and not to any river. I have borrowed it for the Great Ouse, which drains into that estuary.
The strategic logic of the place is sound. The headwaters of the Thames system and the Ouse system really do approach one another across a watershed in that country, and the corridor between them really was the route an army would take, which is precisely why the Romans put a road through it. Three centuries after this book, when Alfred and Guthrum divided England, the frontier they agreed ran along Watling Street and then turned to follow the Great Ouse. That ground has form.
What is not sound is the funnel. The real country there is broad, gently rolling lowland—Watling Street comes down off the Brickhill heights and out into open plain—and there is no pinch between the two river systems narrow enough to make a battle unavoidable. A determined commander with time and nerve could have gone around.
I narrowed it, because a battle needs somewhere to happen, and two armies need a reason to be standing in the same field on the same morning. Leonidas's argument about the baggage train—that an army that abandons its oxen and paychests stops being an army—is perfectly sound in principle. I simply gave him tighter ground to make it on than the Ouse valley actually provides.
The bucellarii were real. As imperial finances buckled, private citizens of means raised and paid their own armored retinues. Belisarius, Justinian's great general and no relation to the family of my novel, is said to have maintained seven thousand of them. The word means, more or less, "biscuit-eaters," from bucellatum, the hard ration bread that kept an army moving. It is unlikely that her father could have hired fifty of them for essentially a lifetime contract, and I must confess I handwaved a bit on that, lest Caitlynn have to go fight her battles with no soldiers.
The distinction Caitlynn draws between limitanei and comitatenses—frontier troops and mobile field army—was the genuine structure of the late Roman military. Her frustration that her Britons insist on calling them "legionaries" is comparable to modern members of the United States army demanding to wear the uniforms and wield the weapons of General George Washington: the legion had been obsolete for generations by 560! She is trying to run a "modern" sixth-century army, and her men keep wanting to be in a Caesar play.
The maniple formation her legate uses against the Dumnonians is likewise archaic—abandoned centuries earlier because it fared badly against cavalry. Against grieving tribal infantry with no cavalry at all, it seemed likely to me that it might have worked.
The rest is as accurate as I could make it: the spatha that replaced the short gladius; the seax that gave the Saxons their name, or took it from them, depending on whom you ask; the lead-weighted plumbatae carried behind the shield and thrown at close range; the centurion's vitis, a vine staff of office that was famously and frequently used for beating soldiers. The Teulu was the genuine Welsh term for a king's household warband, and they were exactly as good as Gwent's are here.
Caitlynn leaves an empire under strain. Justinian's reconquest of Italy had consumed a generation and a treasury; the plague that bears his name arrived in 541 and kept returning; and the taxes fell where taxes fall. Nikolas Bellisarius selling property to equip his daughter is not sentimentality. It is what the period did to families like his.
Details and threats of the letter Caitlynn writes in Chapter Thirteen are not invention either. Political mutilation was standard practice in the eastern empire — blinding disqualified a man from the throne, castration disqualified him from founding a dynasty, and both were preferred to execution precisely because they were survivable. Narses, one of Justinian's two finest generals and the man who finished the Italian war, was a eunuch. When Caitlynn threatens her cousin with news from home, she is threatening him with current events.
Roman law set the minimum age of marriage at twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, with betrothal earlier still. Caitlynn's mother married at sixteen. Her sisters marry at fifteen and nineteen. Her own wedding was contracted for the year she turned fifteen, and she ran from it. Marrying at nineteen makes her the latest bride in her own household by several years.
Slavery was pervasive and unremarkable. Patrick was taken from Britain as a slave, and the Severn estuary ran slaves for centuries either side of this book. Killing the men of a defeated people and selling the boys was the ordinary economics of conquest rather than an excess of it: adult male captives are dangerous and difficult to sell, and boys are neither.
What Caitlynn orders done to Dumnonia sits at the far end of the period even so. The individual elements are routine; the scale and the premeditation are not. Britonic warfare in this century ran to cattle raids, declared campaigns and pitched battles between men who expected to be negotiating within the month—the contrast the book draws between ritual war and Roman war is the whole point of that chapter. Systematic depopulation, village by village, planned in advance and concealed until the moment it began, is a Roman method rather than a Britonic one, and rare even in Roman history.
Settling a warrior population on emptied land and expecting them to take local wives was unremarkable across a good deal of post-Roman Europe. Caitlynn's arrangement with the Taifals follows that pattern, and Theodoric understands exactly what he is being offered.
The Taifals were a real people—probably Sarmatian in origin, long allied to the Goths—and they were in Britain a century and a half before Caitlynn was.
The Notitia Dignitatum, the late Roman register of offices compiled around the turn of the fifth century, lists a cavalry unit called the Equites Taifali under the command of the Comes Britanniarum, the Count of the Britains. The Count commanded the mobile field army: the comitatenses. The unit was probably raised by Honorius between 395 and 398 from Taifali already settled in northern Italy and Gaul. Taifal horse under Roman command in Britain is not something I invented; it had simply been gone for a century and a half by 560.
Theodoric, his ten thousand, the crossing from Gaul in the 560s and the ultimatum that drove them to it are mine. The Franks were Nicene, Arian Christianity did die out under Frankish rule across the sixth century, and the pressure in this book is plot-driven more so than historical.
Given the opportunity, attaching Taifal cavalry to an army of heavy infantry in the era my story is set in would have been one of the easiest decisions a commander or King (or Queen!) might have made in a lifetime.
Amantium irae amoris integratio est— is from Terence, from Andria, written some seven hundred years before Caitlynn hears it in a room of sunlight and warmth from her lover.
"Hannibal knew how to gain a victory but did not know how to use it" is Maharbal's reproach after Cannae, as Livy reports it. Caitlynn quotes it at a man who has just handed her a victory, which is either very apt or slightly rude.
The history lesson she delivers by letter—Caesar's fatal clemency toward the men who killed him, and Augustus's rather more selective mercy afterwards—is accurate, and she means every implication of it.
And, I must confess, as a high school teacher who routinely teaches Julius Caesar to my classes, being able to slip in a reference to the Ides of March was as much an Easter Egg to myself as much as anything else.
Everything above is history, or close enough to it that I can defend the distance. But this novel is a work of alternate history, and we must have a point of divergence, where our history stops and our story begins.
A woman of Caitlynn's class in the eastern empire in 559 would never have been able to simply refuse a marriage, much less ask to become a conqueror. Her father held patria potestas—legal authority over his children that Roman law had softened but never surrendered. Roman marriage did technically require the bride's consent, and that requirement was worth almost nothing in practice: a daughter could refuse only a match that was disgraceful, and "I would prefer to go and conquer Britain" would not have qualified in any court in the empire.
Nor would any house have equipped her to try. The bucellarii served the head of the household, and the head of the household was a man. Women in the eastern empire could hold enormous power—Galla Placidia governed, Pulcheria ruled in all but name, and Theodora shaped an emperor and a legal code—but they held it through position, regency, marriage, and influence. None of them were handed fifty armored horsemen and told to go and take a province. It is worth saying that Justinian's own reign expanded the legal protections of women more than most, and that even in that reign this was unthinkable.
So the divergence in these books is not military or dynastic. It is one family's peculiar rule, and one father who chose to honor it.
The tradition of the House Bellisarius—that any member may invoke the founder's right and leave to make their own fortune—is my invention. Chara is quite correct when she calls it a pseudo-legal family tradition, because that is precisely what it is: a private custom inside a single house, of no force whatsoever outside its own walls, which happened to be binding on the one man who believed in it. Nikolas Bellisarius could have refused his daughter. Legally, socially, and practically, nobody would have blinked. Nikolas chose to honor his daughter's wishes through the family tradition out of faith and honor.
Fortunately for me, and hopefully my readers agree, his decision resulted in Caitlynn, Leonidas, and a small army showing up in an area they had no business being in, historically speaking. And the rest is her story.
The same promise as last time: here is my research, and here is where I cheated.
Book One's cheating was mostly small. A battlefield narrowed, a river renamed, a father who let his daughter go when no father would have. Nothing that happened to anyone real and historical. But now, history has been significantly changed, thanks to Caitlynn's actions.
In addition, because Book 1 took place in a location where records were spotty at best, a significant amount of kings and lords were simply invented. For Book Two, by virtue of including the Anglo Saxons, we DO have several historical figures that I was able to work in. Of course, due to the alternate history mentioned above, some of their roles changed, and the timeline itself blurred a bit, but I felt it was worth it to include the actual historical individuals that would show up in a wikipedia search over me simply inventing names.
The early Anglo-Saxon kings are barely history at all. Our sources are Bede, writing in Northumbria in 731—more than a century after most of the men in question died—and the Historia Brittonum, and a set of royal genealogies that trace every dynasty back to Woden. That last detail should tell you what kind of document you are reading.
The lists do not agree with each other. Bede names Wuffa as the first king of the East Angles and the grandfather of Rædwald. The Historia Brittonum ignores Wuffa entirely and gives the honor to a man called Guillem Guercha. Wuffa may not have existed at all—the name may simply have been invented backwards to explain why the dynasty was called the Wuffingas.
And the dates are worse. The years they ruled come from Roger of Wendover, a chronicler writing around six hundred years after the fact, and one modern historian's summary of them is that they "may well represent nothing more than educated guesses."
So when I chose to take a name from history, please understand that these are very murky waters I'm wading into here.
He was real, or real enough, anyway. Bede names him as the father of Rædwald and the son of Wuffa. He appears in the Anglian genealogies. He is the father of Rædwald.
He is a name between two other names. That's it.
Were I writing a biography, I likely would be unhappy at how little we know. As I am instead writing alternate history, it means I can create anything I want. Everything Tytila does in this book—the duel at the fair, the proverbs, the axe, kneeling in the blood to close his champion's fingers around a sword—is mine, and it contradicts nothing, because there is nothing to contradict.
What I did do was move him. By the traditional reckoning, his father Wuffa ruled until about 578 and Tytila succeeded him then, dying somewhere between 593 and 616. In this book he is already the dominant power in eastern Britain in 568, and he dies outside Caer Deva on Christmas Eve of 570.
Augustine of Canterbury is real, and he is thirty years out of place.
The historical Augustine landed in Kent in 597, sent by Pope Gregory the Great, and the mission that converted the English began there. In this book he has been in Britain since roughly 567 and is meeting Caitlynn in a cellar under Londinium in 570.
The pope is deliberate, and I would hate for anyone to think it was a slip. Gregory was not pope in 570—he would not be elected for another twenty years. The pope in 570 was John III, and so John III is who sends Augustine here.
As for why the mission comes early at all, that is the point of an alternate history. A stable, wealthy, Christian Roman state in the west of the island, trading into Gaul, running its own church and its own couriers, makes Britain look like a live prospect rather than a lost one. Caitlynn's kingdom is the reason Rome looks north thirty years sooner. She never knows it, and it is the largest thing she does in this book.
Æthelberht of Kent is likewise real, and likewise early. Historically he was baptized around 597, and the mechanism was domestic rather than military: his wife Bertha was a Frankish Christian princess who arrived at Canterbury with her own bishop and her own chapel, and Augustine walked into a court that was already half-persuaded. I have him converting a generation early and for a soldier's reason—a bargain and a betrayal of Tytila.
Nothing in this book says Bertha does not exist. I simply had no room for her.
Sigebert, whom Tytila mentions visiting, is Sigebert I of Austrasia, one of the four sons of Chlothar who divided Francia between them. He reigned from 561 to 575, so Tytila's winter at his palace two years before this book is comfortably possible.
Ratae is Leicester. Eboracum is York. Caer Gai and Caer Swys are real Roman sites in the Welsh mountains, the latter guarding the upper Severn. Dumnoniorum is Isca Dumnoniorum, modern Exeter, which the Taifals have inherited along with the rest of the province.
Voliba is a small piece of luck. Ptolemy names four towns for the Dumnonii—Isca, Tamara, Uxella, and Voliba—and Voliba has never been identified by anyone. It is a genuine Roman-era name for a place in the right region that nobody can put on a map, which meant I could put it wherever I liked and no one can tell me I am wrong.
Mannu is Manchester, more or less, and Julianus is right about the etymology even though he wishes he were not. The Roman name was Mamucium, and the best reading of it really does derive from a breast-shaped hill. I did not invent my way into that joke, even if Caitlynn might wish I had.
The prologue's Legio II Deva Victrix is a nod rather than a fact. The legion that actually held Deva was the Twentieth, Valeria Victrix, and it is the only legion missing from the Notitia Dignitatum — it simply stops being mentioned. I liked the idea of Caitlynn's descendants raising a new one at the same fortress and borrowing half the name.
The manuballista was real—a portable bolt-thrower light enough for one man to carry and shoot, described by Vegetius among others. So was the onager, the torsion catapult that throws the stones at Llellawyn. Field artillery of this kind was a genuine Roman capability, and Tytila is right that the Franks had learned it from them.
The naphtha is real and old. Incendiary oils were known and used for centuries before this book, and Wulfraed's memory of the smell from a siege at Eboracum is exactly how a soldier would have met it.
The name is where I have taken a liberty, and it is one I enjoyed. Greek fire proper is a Byzantine invention of about 672, a full century after these events. But here is the thing: the Byzantines never called it that. They called it sea fire, or liquid fire. Greek fire is what everybody else called it — the name outsiders gave to the weapon the Greeks had.
Which is precisely what happens in this book. Taifal horsemen and Gaulish mercenaries call it Greek fire because it came off a Greek queen's ships, recommended by a Greek merchant. The name arrives a century early, from the wrong direction, for the right reason. The Saxon who has actually been on the receiving end calls it naphtha, because he knows what it is.
The carrier pigeons are real. Roman use of homing pigeons for military dispatches has been well known before this period, and Lucilius is right that they only fly one way.
The poppy is real, and so is Leonidas's problem with it. Opium was standard practice for pain, and the difficulty of taking enough to function without taking enough to fog your judgment was as obvious then as now.
Caitlynn's father shows her a piece of fabric that stops her in her tracks, and that scene is more historically loaded than it looks.
Silk had come west along the trade roads for centuries at ruinous prices, because only China knew how it was made. Then, around 552 — seventeen years before this book — two monks are said to have carried silkworm eggs to Constantinople inside hollow staves, and Justinian had a domestic industry.
So in 569 Byzantine silk is new, it is a jealously guarded state secret, and it is worth what the merchant selling it thinks it is worth. The Lucilius family is very well placed indeed, to have access to it.
Two admissions here.
The Taifals' Arianism drives them out of Gaul in this book, and while the direction of that pressure is right—the Franks were Nicene from Clovis onward, and Arian Christianity did die out under Frankish rule across this century—the specific ultimatum is plot rather than history. It is also fair to say the Taifals' own confession is disputed.
The larger liberty is Anglesey. The druids of Ynys Môn were destroyed by Suetonius Paulinus in 60 or 61, and Tacitus describes the burning of the groves. That is five hundred years before Caitlynn's bargain with Augustine.
What I have imagined is not survival but revival: a splinter faith that grew back in the western isles after Rome withdrew and the province stopped caring. There is no evidence for it. It is a writer's liberty, and I would rather claim it than have someone find it.
Wyrd bið ful aræd — fate is wholly inexorable — is genuine Old English, from the poem we call The Wanderer.
It is also, for readers of historical fiction, the line Bernard Cornwell hung his Saxon Stories on, and giving it to Wulfraed is a deliberate salute to a writer who helped inspire this series.
The rest of the Old English is simply the right words for the things. Weregeld was the real and precisely calculated compensation owed for a killing. A gesith was a king's sworn companion. A ceorl was a free commoner. A hide was a real unit of land assessment. Hundredfolc is my own coinage, built to sound like the others.
Tytila's proverbs are all mine. I wrote them to sound like the poetic sayings that survives from the period, and if any of them reads like something genuinely old, I will take that as the compliment I was fishing for.
Tytila, December 570. He should have become king of the East Angles around 578 and lived another fifteen years at least. Instead, he dies in the snow outside Caer Deva with a Greek sword through his neck, and he leaves no son.
The historical Tytila's son was Rædwald, who ruled the East Angles from about 599 to 624 and was the most powerful king in England in his generation. Rædwald is also, by near-universal agreement, the man buried in the ship at Sutton Hoo—the helmet, the shoulder-clasps, the whetstone, the gold. The single greatest archaeological find in English history.
In Caitlynn's world, none of it happens. There is no Rædwald, no Wuffingas ascendancy, and nothing under the mounds at Sutton Hoo but sand.
The Church, from 567 onward. Augustine's mission comes thirty years early under the wrong pope, and Kent turns Christian a generation ahead of schedule—by treaty, not by marriage and preaching. Everything that flows from Gregory's mission in our history flows from John III's here, and flows differently.
Gwent, 570. Aurelianus dies on his own throne, and his kingdom is extinguished. In our history, Gwent outlives him by centuries.
The Saxon advance. The biggest divergence: In our history, the westward push does not stop. It grinds on through the seventh century and the eighth until the Britons hold Wales, Cornwall, and nothing else, and from the fact that this book was written by an American, in the English language, it is quite obvious how successful the cultural and language takeover of the Angles and Saxons was.
Leading up to:
The Roman prologue. An empire with its capital at Londinium. Roman roads relaid across the heartland. Britannia Secunda at York under a king named Thalpaetra. Taifalia in the south, loyal and poor. The Saxons reduced to reluctant clients in the marshes. Some of those conclusions were reached by the end of this book. Others were not, and readers will have to wait until I decide to write a Book 3 to see the results of the Church Rites bargain and a Christian King of the Saxons.