The Tanukhid Lioness (Fascinating Lives Series)

The Warrior Queen Who Forced Rome to Negotiate

In the fourth century AD, the Roman Empire dominates the ancient world—but on its eastern frontier, one Arab queen refuses to submit. The Tanukhid Lioness tells the remarkable story of Mawiyya of the Tanukhids, a perceptive leader who rises from royal court life to command a powerful confederation of Arab tribes.

Faced with growing Roman interference, Mawiyya leads a revolt against Emperor Valens, using the speed and skill of her cavalry to defeat imperial forces and compel Rome to seek peace on her terms. Her struggle is not driven by conquest, but by a determination to defend her people’s independence, traditions and Christian faith. When catastrophe later threatens the Eastern Empire, she honours that peace by sending her own warriors to help defend Constantinople.

Rich in political intrigue, desert warfare, faith and diplomacy, this 66,000-word historical novel brings to life a formidable fourth-century queen whose victories reshaped relations between Rome and the Arab world—before her story faded almost entirely from history.

Discover the nearly forgotten true story of Mawiyya in The Tanukhid Lioness.

Excerpt from the book

The day broke as it always did: slowly, as if confirming the solemnity of history. Pale light bled piecemeal across the dunes, catching the sharp edges of wind-burnished gravel and the undulant backs of grazing camels. The desert here was no wasteland, but an overwritten manuscript of centuries: tribal boundaries scored into the earth, rivalries as old as the first rain, alliances sealed and broken beneath the same indifferent sky. The mountains to the east shimmered blue and then white in the changing light; dust rose, pale and bitter, from the morning movements of Bedouin camps. Here, beyond the reach of Roman stone, nomad law ruled—its logic written not in statutes, but in the bone and blood of kinship. Within the mind of any outsider, this land might have seemed the purest form of chaos, but to those born of its hardships—its hunger and beauty both—it was the only order they trusted.

Mawiyya rose before any man in her husband’s camp. She crept past the sleeping body of her daughter, the scuffed hands and tangled hair of a child only half-claimed by civilisation. Her veil was worn thin from years of sand and sun, her fingers nicked from the daily work of mending leather and tending goats. She walked the length of the sleeping camp, past the tethered horses licking dew from their own forelegs, past the ragged knots of mercenaries and the more dignified spread of her husband’s kin. Even this early, the smell of frankincense drifted from the largest tent: her husband’s, the king’s, where traders and courtiers and the occasional Roman dignitary gathered in uneasy fellowship. She did not approach; instead, she watched as the sun cut a line across the horizon, and she thought of the world beyond.

This was how she remembered her father: alone with the dawn, his silhouette thrown tall upon the sand, the air around him trembling with the promise of violence or grace. Her father had been slain when she was still a girl, in a feud so old neither side could recall the original offence. She was bartered for peace, married to the king of a rival tribe according to her parents’ will. She adapted, learning the shape of power as boys learn to track a snake by the furrow it leaves in dry earth. She bore her husband’s child, kept his secrets and listened—always—to what was said just outside her hearing.