Taking advantage of emir Muhammad V´s overthrow, a group of North African warriors of the Sultan of Granada mug and kidnap a family of millers on the hills of Sierra de Cordoba. Fadrique, the miller´s son, who professes as Franciscan at the Monastery of Saint Toribio de Liébana, makes a request for his secularization after getting the terrible news, and goes back to Andalucía in order to find a way to get his parents and young sister Almodis out of captivity. He manages to cross the Strait as a Mercedarian monk and heads towards Tetuan, following the information given by some alfaqueques, who had assured him that his parents have been sold into slavery. When he gets there, however, he receives the discouraging news: his parents have died, victims of the plague. It is then that he returns to Córdoba and decides to search for his sister, who, he knows, has been offered as a gift to the new Sultan Ismail II.