Chapter Text
“Not bad as a plan, huh?”, Prince John smuggly said.
“Oh, yes – Now we can have the cake, eat it, and partition the whole Mediterranean Basin…”, replied Jafar.
The two of them had snatched back the thrones after the death of the two respective sovereigns, King Richard and the Sultan of Agrabah, and were now ready to move on with their plans:
“So… With the power vacuum following the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, I might also put my paws on that crown… And if everything will go as planned by marrying Isabel of Angouleme, I might also have legitimate claims on the Crown of France, which means… All of Western Europe will be mine!”
“Yes, you can be the King of all ‘Franks’, but I will take the Title of Caliph and the dominion on all ‘Dar-al-Islam’, the Muslim lands – This partition will put an end to the Crusades, won’t it?”
“For sure, my dear colleague. I’ll have mine, and you’ll have yours. We can settle for what we already have, right?”
“As you now are my guests, and that’s my house, thus my rules… Don’t forget about me!”, exclaimed Alexios III – “I will have the rights on Eastern Europe and you will have to keep your hands down from Constantinople, right?”
Alexios too had snatched the throne from the hands of his younger brother Isaac II, and in the eyes of Prince John he was thus something like his perfect accomplice, having done what he already had done with Richard, and now done once again.
“Oh, yes – A King for the ‘Franks’, one for the ‘Byzantines’, and one for the ‘Saracens’. So much simpler, isn’t it?”, said Prince John.
“Let’s celebrate with some good wine!”, exclaimed Alexios III.
“Wait a moment!”, replied Jafar – “That’s haram, sinful to me!”
“Don’t worry, you can have some almond milk as a substitute. Cheers!”
“Hmmm… Your almond milk is delicious. Once we’ll have settled on the details of the agreement, I’ll bring the recipe back to Baghdad.”
“With the utmost pleasure. Now let’s have a good sleep, we deserve it, don’t we?”
“Oh, yes”, Prince John said, chuckling – “Being… cunning is hard work.”
But in every plan, curve balls might hide somewhere, and in this case they were hiding in a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean…