I'm slowly catching up with the newer books, as eBay.co.uk and finances permit, and I've been reading
Field Manual: Updates on the train to and from work for the last few workdays. I'm intrigued by a comment in the Deep Periphery section from Cameron St Jamais, where he states that:
"The only disappointment is our investigation into the so-called Umayyads. Their origins, though perhaps not what we had hoped for, can still be when the time is right, particularly as a strained peace now exists in that cluster of worlds thanks to our order's intervention."
Looking through the books that I've got that mention Neuva Castille, combined with the wiki, I'm aware that the Umayyads appeared in 2830 as a single JumpShip with transported refugees that included technology previously unknown in Neuva Castille, technology that included BattleMechs. Have any of the more recent books gone any further into the origins of the Umayyads, or does the comment from St. Jamais remain a throwaway comment? The date of the Umayyad arrival in Neuva Castille seems to beg for some kind of link to the Minnesota Tribe connection to be implied given that the Tribe were moving through the Inner Sphere in 2825, but I'm conscious that the Minnesota Tribe seem to get invoked a lot when there's a mystery.
