Torreblanca belonged to the Kingdom of Valencia, and like every settlement on this shore it lived within reach of the sea's dangers. For the fishing and farming families strung along this coast, a strange sail on the horizon could mean the loss of everything in a single morning, with rarely a garrison near enough to help in time. The raiders came from the Barbary coast, corsairs of the Hafsid domains led, the records say, by a man named Fusta. The moment was tense across the western Mediterranean: quarrels had opened between the Hafsid sultanate and the kingdom of Sicily, and a new monarch had only just taken the Valencian throne that spring. Into that unsettled season, raiders from Ifriqiya struck at the soft, exposed villages of the Christian coast, and Torreblanca was one of them.

The raiders looted the village church and seized its silver ciborium, the vessel that held the consecrated hosts, the bread that Catholic belief holds to be the body of Christ. To the people of the age, this was not simply stolen treasure; it was a desecration, an insult aimed at the heart of the faith itself. Alongside the sacrilege came the human toll, 108 villagers carried off into captivity, ordinary people whose names the chronicles barely record, torn from a place that could not defend them. For the raiders this was commerce as much as war. Captives were often the true objective, to be sold into slavery or held for ransom in the markets of North Africa, and more than a hundred people represented a substantial haul. Their individual fates are almost entirely lost to the record, a silence that says much about how routine such suffering had become on this frontier of the sea. It was the outrage over the stolen sacrament, more than the fate of the captives, that stirred the kingdoms of the crown of Aragon to act.

Retaliation came the following year, and it came dressed as a holy war. King Martin I of Aragon, known as Martin the Humane, ordered an expedition against the North African coast, and a crusading fleet was assembled at Ibiza. It was no token force: some seventy ships and around seven and a half thousand men, the fleet under Joan Gascó and the army under Jaume de Pertusa. In August 1398 it sailed for Dellys, on the coast of what is now Algeria, and sacked the town, leaving roughly a thousand of its inhabitants dead. A second punitive expedition followed in 1399. For a raid on one small village, the scale of the reprisal was staggering, a measure of how gravely the desecration of the host was taken. The stolen sacrament had been answered in fire.

There is a bitter irony in where the blow finally landed. The raiders had been Hafsid corsairs, yet it was the neighbouring Kingdom of Tlemcen, and towns like Dellys, that bore the brunt of the vengeance. On both shores of the sea, ordinary people paid for the ambitions and grievances of distant rulers: the villagers of Torreblanca carried into slavery, the villagers of Dellys cut down in reprisal. Raids like this were the grim rhythm of the medieval Mediterranean, and they are why this whole Valencian coast is still studded with watchtowers, silent stone sentinels built by communities who knew, from experience, that the next danger would come from the water.