Baffa is the place where Alatiel’s fortunes begin to turn from repeated displacement toward a return to her family. Reached by sea after she has passed through the hands of others, it becomes the setting for her reunion with Antigonus of Famagosta, the disclosure of her identity, and the arrangements that carry her onward to Famagosta and her father. The story also gives Baffa a second, carefully shaped role: Alatiel describes her arrival there differently when recounting her history to the Soldan, while Antigonus supplies what her account leaves out.

A landing after long displacement

Alatiel reaches Baffa with the merchant Antiochus, who has taken her into his care after the death of Constantine. Their voyage begins in Rhodes, where Antiochus has been attending to his business. Before they leave, he has promised the dying Constantine to care for Alatiel and his possessions. To protect her from possible affronts during the return journey, Antiochus presents her as his wife. They share a small cabin and a narrow bed aboard ship; the darkness, the warmth, and their mutual desire lead them into a relationship that neither had intended when they left Rhodes. Before the vessel reaches Baffa, they have formed an alliance together.

That arrival marks a change in Alatiel’s circumstances, but not yet a restoration of her former life. She remains with Antiochus for a time while he is away on business in Armenia. Her presence in Baffa is therefore a pause within a journey that has repeatedly transferred her between men and places, rather than an immediate homecoming. The town brings her within reach of someone who can recognize her past, although neither she nor the reader knows at first how that recognition will happen.

Recognition at the window

Antigonus of Famagosta, an elderly gentleman of considerable wit but little wealth, comes to Baffa on business connected with the King of Cyprus. As he passes the house where Alatiel is staying, he sees her at a window. Her beauty prompts a vague recollection, but he cannot initially identify where he has seen her. Alatiel, by contrast, recognizes him at once: she remembers him from Alexandria, where he had held an important place in her father’s service.

Knowing Antiochus is away, she summons Antigonus and asks whether he is the man she remembers. When he confirms his identity but cannot place her, she embraces him in tears and reminds him of Alexandria. He then recognizes her as the Soldan’s daughter, long believed to have drowned at sea. Baffa is thus the site of a reciprocal but unequal recognition: Alatiel knows whom she is addressing before Antigonus knows who stands before him, and her disclosure changes a passing encounter into a possible route home.

Alatiel tells Antigonus that she has concealed her identity through her misfortunes and asks him either to find a way to restore her former position or, if that proves impossible, to keep their meeting secret. She recounts what has happened since her shipwreck on Majorca. Antigonus weeps at her account and promises to return her to her father, then to the King of Algarve as a wife. The recognition in Baffa is not itself the return: it begins a practical sequence of requests and journeys beyond the town.

From Baffa to Famagosta and home

Antigonus goes from Baffa to Famagosta to approach the King of Cyprus. He presents the chance to return the Soldan’s daughter as an opportunity to bring honor to the king and to serve himself, at no great cost. The king agrees, and Alatiel is brought to Famagosta, where he and the queen receive her with great honor and hospitality. A few days later, at her request, the king sends her back to her father under Antigonus’s protection, accompanied by a company of men and women.

In this route, Baffa functions as the point of departure for a negotiated return. Alatiel’s identity gives the encounter political and familial weight: Antigonus can approach the King of Cyprus, and the king can make her safe passage a matter of royal generosity. Her return does not follow from recognition alone; it depends on Antigonus’s intervention, the king’s assent, and the organized escort from Famagosta. The narrative’s movement from a private meeting in Baffa to a royal reception elsewhere makes the town a hinge between private misfortune and public restoration.

Two accounts of the same arrival

When Alatiel later explains her experiences to the Soldan, she describes arriving at Baffa with French gentlemen and their ladies, who had taken her into their care after she had lived among religious women. She says that, finding herself ashore without knowing anyone in the place, she did not know what to tell the travelers, who wished to deliver her to her father. At that moment, she says, Antigonus appeared on the beach. She called to him in their own language, so the French company would not understand, and asked him to receive her as a daughter. He understood, welcomed her, and took her to the King of Cyprus.

This account differs from the earlier narrated encounter. The earlier version places Alatiel in Antiochus’s house after their voyage from Rhodes and describes her recognition of Antigonus at a window; the later account presents her arrival with French travelers and their meeting on the beach. Alatiel’s version to her father is explicitly selective: Antigonus says that she has omitted a part that does not become her to tell, and reports that the travelers praised her chaste and modest life among the religious women. Baffa therefore belongs not only to the geography of her return but also to the story’s contrast between what is recounted privately to the reader and what is presented to her father. The town’s importance rests in that double function: it is where recognition enables a homeward passage and where the narrative reveals how an account of the past can be shaped for its audience.