Lord Sebastian Blacke was born in 1166 in the French city of Auxerre in the Abbey of St. Etienne. His father's name is Sir Henri Blacke and his mother's name is Ingebjorn. His family's ancestral seat of power is the manor house of Blackwheel and is eight miles northwest of Auxerre. Sebastian is the 6^th son and the 9^th child of Henri. Sebastian's mother Ingebjorn is Henri's second wife.

Sebastian was given over to the abbey as an oblate to be educated and raised to one day become a monk when he was fourteen. It was in the abbey that he learned to read and write Latin and at his father's request, French. However, in 1178, Ingebjorn's father, two brothers, and all of her nephews were killed by fires and flooding during a violent storm that smashed the North Sea coastlines and her family's homeports in Ribe, Denmark and Nidaros, Norway. As the only surviving male of Ingebjorn's line, even one by marriage, Henri Blacke inherited all of their lands and property -- including two surviving merchant cargo ships.

Henri moved his wife and children to Ribe for a short time to familiarize himself with the business and his men and servants in Denmark, then traveled to the small port town of Scardeburg in the English Danelaw, where Ingebjorn's father had purchased property only a few months earlier. Scardeburg remains the primary residence of Henri. Sebastian and his brothers, Roger, Stephen, and Dominic spent the next seven years sailing the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea aboard the family's ships, learning the business, training with weapons to help defend the ships against piracy, and generally being dissolute younger sons.

Then in 1185, after he and his three closest brothers went to give confession in Lincoln Cathedral while drunk and then lied about their sins, an earthquake struck north-central England. Most of the cathedral was destroyed but enough remained intact for Sebastian, his brothers, a few priests and parishioners, and the cathedral's prized green ducks to survive. Terrified, they gave true confessions to the priests. In penance, they were to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Henri gave Sebastian and his brothers horses, crossbows, and enough money for the trip. They sailed aboard a family ship to Arles, France, where they visited their older brother Gilbert, who had become a clark in the service of the archbishop of Arles. They had to take passage aboard a non-family ship for the rest of the trip to Tripoli in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. On the trip, a storm struck the ship off the coast of Malta and the youngest brother, Dominic was washed overboard and lost.

After they arrived in Palestine, life was rather good. The entered into the service of Sir Humphrey of Chester, who himself was vassal to Count Raymond of Tripoli. Sir Humphrey had two fiefs, a manor-farm near Tripoli, and a house in the southern coastal town of Ascalon. It was in Ascalon that the brothers spent the majority of their time. Their ability to read and write Latin and French and their experience with numbers and a business that made them valuable vassals. Sir Humphrey bought a merchant ship of his own, the Lincolnshire Maiden, and charged them to operate it throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Sometimes they were at the disposal of Count Raymond. It was during this time that they began to learn Arabic and Greek in their dealing with other Islamic and Byzantine merchants.

All went relatively well for almost two years until the summer of 1187. There had been no serious threats of warfare from the array of fragmented and squabbling Muslim states around the lands of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and its Frankish allies of Edessa and Antioch since the ill-fated Second Crusade over twenty years before. Trade and the lucrative pilgrimage routes kept the local economies running smoothly and the Crusading Orders of the Hospitallers and the Templars fore-stalled anything above the level of determined raiding on the part of the neighboring Muslims. But then a series of events plunged the Franks, and Sebastian his brothers, into full-scaled warfare: the rise of Saladin, the political ineptitude of King Guy de Lusignan of Jerusalem, and the cruel depredations of Baron Reynald de Chatillon of Kerak.

It culminated into the Battle of the Horns of Hattin on July 4, 1187. In that battle was lost the future of the European states in the Middle East. The twenty-thousand man strong army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, led by King Guy was essentially wiped out. Only a few hundred men survived. Their patron, Sir Humphrey, was killed but by staying close to Count Raymond, Sebastian and his brothers, serving as mounted crossbowmen serjeants, were able to follow him and his men through a breakout in the shrinking Saracen perimeter.

The brothers entered into a loose vassalage under Count Raymond during the bloody and chaotic months that followed. The survived the fall of Ascalon on September 4^th to Saladin and the fall of Jerusalem on Jerusalem on October 2^nd. Before he died from illness in November, Count Raymond purchased back from Saladin the brother's ship, which had been captured when Ascalon was captured.

By this point, the brothers were generally clear of any feudal bonds and re-established themselves as a small merchant house. They had a tenuous link with Balin of Ibelin, under whom they fought in the Siege of Jerusalem, and it was to him that they paid a percentage tax of their business in order to operate under the umbrella of his name. While the news of the disaster of Hattin and the Fall of Jerusalem dismayed and outraged western Christendom, and thus Sebastian's family back in England, Denmark, and France, for the brothers things fell into a general routine of trading between ten different port cities along the broad sweep of coastline from Egypt to Asia Minor: Alexandria, Ascalon, Jaffa, Acre, Tyre, Tripoli, Lattakieh, Tarsus, Seleucia, and Famagusta (in Cyprus). Having had enough troubles against the armies of Saladin, the brothers dropped any arrogance they still carried for Muslims and Greeks and settled down to become prosperous. They kept learning Arabic and Greek and duly paid tariffs and bribes at every port of call and soon found acceptance among their fellow traders and at every market they called upon. Several times they ventured into the Aegean Sea and stopped at Rhodes, Crete, and even Constantinople. By the autumn of 1189 they had earned enough to purchase another, albeit a smaller boat, the Danish Dragon, and a house in the merchants quarter of Famagusta.

But the political events of the rest of the world, which is how they viewed the burgeoning Third Crusade, eventually caught up with them. In September 1189, a flotilla of ships from Denmark and Flanders at Sicily to help with the preparations and supplying of the massive armies gathering together in Northern Europe. Some of those ships made their way into the Aegean and coastal cities of Greece and Anatolia, where the brothers met up with friends and colleagues from back home. Some of those ships were going to return to Denmark and took messages with them for their father, Henri. Overall though, the Danish ships that had arrived at Sicily took part in the Christian naval blockade of Acre and were soon joined by more and more ships arriving from southern France and the Italian cities. The brothers managed to not become attached to the blockade and served as a ferry for crusader knight and lords involved in the landward siege of the city. When a major battle at Acre took place on October 4^th, Sebastian was with Stephen in northern Syria selling food and bow wood to the Syrian merchants supplying Saladin's army.

More and more crusaders arrived to swell the ranks of the army besieging Acre, as well as the rest of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (still called thus despite the fact that Saladin still held the city). These newcomers had ahead of the armies being gathered in England by King Richard, in France by King Philip, and in the German states by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. They all needed to be fed and supplied and the brothers grew richer selling to them openly while secretly maintaining their partnerships with various Muslim merchants. This proved to be invaluable to the brothers when on October 31^st, an Islamic fleet of fifty ships from Egypt and Syria broke the blockade of Acre briefly and on December 26^th an even larger armada broke the blockade and scattered the European fleet. The crusaders had lost control of the sea but the brothers continued to trade and ferry messengers undisturbed. The landward siege lines began to suffer from disease and hunger -- that is, among the common soldiers. In general, the wealthier nobles managed to do just fine thanks to sporadic supplies from the brothers and a few other well-favored merchant vessels. This situation held for a few months until a rebuilt Crusader fleet drove off the Muslims on March 5^th, 1190. After a resupply run from Tyre on May 4^th, the brothers decided to stay out of southern Syria for a while.

From that point on, thing became bloody and chaotic for the brothers again. They still took the city messengers to Tripoli, but they also took aboard several wealthy Syrian merchants and their families with them. Despite being leaderless, the arrival of the German army frightened a great many northern Syrian Muslims. The depredations of the First Crusades was remembered throughout the Islamic world. Over the next two months the brothers generally focused on helping Muslim merchants with whom they had had close dealings escape from Asia Minor to the safety of Syria. This role was discovered by a Pisan ship and incurred the anger of King Tancred of Sicily, who demanded that they choose one side or the Aware of their dangerous situation should the crusader armies defeat Saladin, declared their solidarity as Christians. The brothers returned to Famagusta and tried to stay uninvolved, never leaving Cypriot waters and confining themselves to intermittent coastal jaunts. Occasionaly they entertained and quarted fellow merchants, Danish crusaders, and vassals of thier distant patron, Balin of Ibelin. This situation suited them well for the next year until King Richard Coeur-de-Lion finally arrived.