*/Thread\* A good story has legs – legs that can take a good story very far indeed. I’ve recently been looking at one such late-antique story. Let’s call it ‘the virgin’s gambit’. As first told the story takes place in early-7th century Jerusalem 
Set in CE 614, it takes place during the siege of Jerusalem by the armies of the Sasanid dynasty of Persia -- ruled at the time by Khosraw (II) Parvez (r. 590-628; depicted below in relief from Tāq-e Bustān) --
The conquest of the Jerusalem, the massacre captivity of its inhabitants, & the Persians’ capture of the relic of the True Cross was a signal event of the Byzantine-Sasanid War of 602-628 – here, we’re interested in only one (likely legendary) story... tinyurl.com/y9w7b8tj
On the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem there was a convent called Dayr al-ʿAḏārā (Eng. ‘convent of the virgins’). Persian soldiers captured its nuns & divided them as spoils. A clever nun schemed to preserve her virginity from her captor's lust (see the text below) …
The story appears in a surprisingly number of places – the above text is from a Christian Arabic recension of what purports to be an eyewitness account of this Persian conquest of Jerusalem –but not only is the story often re-told, it’s also placed in many different contexts …
The Egyptian John the Deacon (d. after CE 768) recounts the same story in his bio of the Coptic Patriarch Michael (744-768), but he sets it rather amid the Umayyads' suppression of a revolt in Upper Egypt during the caliphate of Marwān II (r. 744-750; tinyurl.com/yc9586kn)
The story entered Muslim Arabic literature as well. Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (1327- 1370) relates the story about an unnamed wife of the last Abbasid caliph al-Mustaʿṣim (r. 1242-1258), set during the Mongol siege of Baghdad in 1258...
The caliph's wife uses this gambit to trick the Mongol conqueror Hülegü Khān into killing her and, thus, successfully preserves her honor. Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī claims to have encountered similar such stories about ‘righteous women (al-ṣāliḥāt)’ in other works...
[btw, if anyone knows anything more about this Rawḍat al-ʿulamāʾ by al-Dabūsī, which he mentions, pls let me know] ...
The story has a long after life in Europe, too. It appears in Ariosto's (d. 1533) *Orlando furioso*, Christopher Marlowe's (d. 1593) *Tamburlame the Greate*, and as recently as Jack London's (d. 1916) *Lost Face*
A good story is like a fine coin -- it will travel across astounding expanses of time and place, unbound even by hurdles such as language, religion, and culture.
