Set in the heart of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm in 12th-century Anatolia, Gece Yıldızı follows Yıldız Arslan, 24, a Black woman raised from infancy by the Arslan family — one of the Sultan's most trusted military houses — in the magnificent city of Konya. She is fully and completely Turkish in every dimension: her language, her faith, her values, her identity. She speaks Arabic and Persian in addition to Turkish, excels in the poetry of the court, and manages the Arslan estate with the authority of a woman who was raised to lead. Her adoptive father Emir Tuğrul Arslan is one of the most respected commanders in the Sultanate, and Yıldız has grown up in the full warmth of his family and their society. When the Sultan arranges for Yıldız to marry Kaan Doğan, the son of a rival military house with whom a strategic alliance is needed, Yıldız must navigate a marriage that begins as politics and becomes something far more complex — real, consuming, and requiring her to negotiate who she is within the most intimate of relationships. Simultaneously, a Byzantine military threat at the western border pulls Kaan to war, and Yıldız discovers she is more than a court wife — she is an administrator, a strategist, and eventually a diplomat who travels to the Byzantine court herself in a breathtaking season two arc.
