He also meets a young woman called Mary Margaret Cullen, who was traveling with her father, in search of superior Turkish sheep. Here he becomes Jewish in appearance, and travels eastwards with a group of Jewish merchants, learning their ways as best he can. Rob travels, as a Christian, from London throughout Europe to Constantinople. This decision carries its own risks: while Jews generally were allowed more freedom in the Muslim world than they were in Christian Europe, Rob would still have to cross Europe, where Jews were routinely faced with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and killings.

In a moment of epiphany, Rob decides that he shall take on the guise of a Jewish student, so that he can travel to Persia and study at the feet of Avicenna (Ibn Sina). Unfortunately, besides being worlds away, the schools do not admit Christians-and even if they did, no country in Christendom would allow a person with such heathen learning to return. He meets a Jewish physician in Malmesbury who tells him of schools ( Madrasahs) in Córdoba, Toledo, even in far-away Persia, where the medical and scientific learning of the Muslims is taught. But he is restless, desiring to know more about the ways of medicine. When Barber dies, Rob takes over his traveling medicine show. He also teaches the boy all he knows of medicine-which is little. He teaches the boy how to juggle, to draw caricatures, to tell stories, to entertain a crowd, to sell the nostrum on which they make their living. Over the next years, he takes Rob as his apprentice. He is a fleshy man with fleshy appetites and a very great zest for life. Rob is taken by the only one who wants him: a traveling barber-surgeon who goes only by the name of Barber.

The Cole children are parceled out likewise. When his mother and father both die, the Cole household is parceled out to various neighbors and friends. Robert has a particular Gift: he can sense when someone is going to die. His mother, Agnes Cole, is his father's wife. His father is a Joiner in the Guild of Carpenters in London. The film rights to the book were purchased. Its European success caused its subsequent sequelization. The book did not sell well in America, but in Europe it was many times a bestseller, particularly in Spain and Germany, selling millions of copies in translation. The book was initially published by Simon & Schuster on August 7, 1986. It is about the life of a Christian English boy in the 11th century who journeys across Europe in order to study medicine among the Persians.

The cole trilogy noah gordon