Africa is an imagined destination rather than a setting the narrative visits. It enters the story as both a place to which people may be driven under religious coercion and the intended goal of a Christian crusade. The contrast between these roles tracks Katherine’s changing understanding of religious authority: the campaign she once embraced as a royal mission ultimately becomes one she rejects.

Refuge under religious coercion

In the account of Granada’s new Christian rule, Africa is named as the immediate alternative offered to those who will not conform: leave, convert, or face the Inquisition. The choice makes the continent a destination of exile within a policy meant to impose one faith and fashion one people. The narrative sets that coercion against the promise of convivencia, which had offered Moors, Christians, and Jews the hope of living with safety and self-respect. The promise is broken; Africa appears as the place to go when coexistence is withdrawn.

A proposed crusade

Katherine also imagines Africa as the far end of an expansive Christian campaign. She argues that England should carry the crusade through Europe and the Holy Land, onward to Africa, and against the Turks and Saracens. Her confidence is explicit: she says she will defeat the Scots and regards that danger as no reason to abandon the larger undertaking. Africa thus belongs to a vision of England as a militant religious power, not to a description of African landscapes or societies.

After the death of her baby, Katherine receives a letter from her father describing a proposed crusade against the Moors in Africa. The letter presents their existence as a danger to Christendom, citing raids that terrify the Mediterranean and threaten shipping from Greece to the Atlantic. It calls for England’s best knights and leaders to join the expedition. Katherine translates the message for Henry, carrying the proposed campaign into the English court as both diplomatic correspondence and a personal reminder of the crusading purpose she had long awaited.

The expedition that never sailed

The plan does not become an African campaign. English knights reach Cádiz, but the crusade never sets sail for the Holy Land. In later letters, Katherine translates her father’s explanations that his troops have not yet been raised and that he is not ready to depart. The expedition remains an announced intention rather than an event on the ground; the narrative supplies no account of English forces reaching Africa.

From holy-war frontier to moral test

Africa’s association with crusade changes as Katherine’s convictions change. Remembering the Moorish physician who treated her with compassion, she revises her judgment of the people her earlier religious outlook had classed as enemies. She comes to reject a crusade against the Moors, as well as persecution and cruelty on grounds of skin color or belief. The proposed African campaign therefore marks a reversal in her political and spiritual development: the destination once invoked as the outer reach of Christian expansion becomes part of the world she refuses to reduce to an enemy.