Chiesa di San Sisto

This guide to the Chiesa di San Sisto in Pisa opens with a puzzle set into its plain facade: a funerary inscription in flowing Kufic script for al-Murtada, a Muslim ruler of the Balearic Islands who had already been dead for about twenty years when Pisa went to war there. It follows Pisa's fleet sailing for Majorca in eleven thirteen, backed by Catalan allies and a pope's blessing, and the fall of the city in April of eleven fifteen. The guide then asks what happened to a conquest that barely lasted a year, once the Almoravids sailed back in from Spain. Look at the weathered ceramic bowls set into the wall, copies of originals now kept in a museum across town.