Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [7]
*Emperor Frederick III of the House of Habsburg
*Archduke Maximilian of Austria, his son
*Sigismond, Duke of Austria and Styria and Count of the Tyrol
*Eleanor Stewart, his wife, aunt to King James III of Scotland
*Paúel Benecke, Danzig privateer
Rome and Italian states:
*Father Ludovico de Severi da Bologna, Patriarch of Antioch, papal and Imperial envoy
*Cardinal Philibert Hugonet, brother of Chancellor Hugonet of Burgundy; master of Jan Adorne in Rome
*Josaphat Barbaro, merchant; Venetian envoy to Uzum Hasan of Persia
*Caterino Zeno, merchant; also Venetian envoy to Persia
*Violante of Naxos, his wife
Nerio, her unacknowledged son
*Catherine Corner, her niece, widowed Venetian Queen of Cyprus
*Charla, *Eugene and *John, natural children of the late King James Lusignan (Zacco) of Cyprus
*Marietta of Patras (Cropnose), mother of Zacco
*Lorenzo de’ Medici of Florence
*Francesco Nori of Florence, former Medici manager in Geneva
*Tommaso Portinari, former Medici manager in Bruges
*Lorenzo di Matteo Strozzi, merchant in Naples
INTRODUCTION
THE ELEGANT WORKING out of designs historical and romantic, political and commercial, psychological and moral, over a multi-volume novel is a Dorothy Dunnett speciality. In her first work in this genre, the six-volume Lymond Chronicles, suspense was created and relieved in each volume, and over the whole set of volumes; the final, beautifully inevitable, romantic secret was disclosed on the very last page of the last volume. The House of Niccolò does the same.
The reader of Gemini, then, may wish to move directly to the narrative for a first experience of that pattern, with a reader’s faith in an experienced author’s caretaking; the novel itself briefly supplies the information you need to know from past novels, telling its own tale while completing and inaugurating others. What follows, as a sketch of the geopolitical and dramatic terrain unfolding in the volumes which precede Gemini, may be useful to read now, or at any point along the narrative, or after reading, as an indication of which stories of interest to this volume may be found most fully elaborated in which previous volume.
VOLUME I: Niccolò Rising
‘From Venice to Cathay, from Seville to the Gold Coast of Africa, men anchored their ships and opened their ledgers and weighed one thing against another as if nothing would ever change.’ The first sentence of the first volume indicates the scope of this series, and the cultural and psychological dynamic of the story and its hero, whose private motto is ‘Change, change and adapt’. It is the motto, too, of fifteenth-century Bruges, centre of commerce and conduit of new ideas and technologies between the Islamic East and the Christian West, between the Latin South and the Celtic-Saxon North, haven of political refugees from the English Wars of the Roses, a site of muted conflict between trading giants Venice and Genoa and states in making and on the take all around. Lady Dunnett has set her story in the fifteenth century, between Gutenberg and Columbus, between Donatello and Martin Luther, between the rise of mercantile culture and the fall of chivalry, as the age of receptivity to—addiction to—change called ‘the Renaissance’ gathers its powers.
Her hero is a deceptively silly-looking, disastrously tactless eighteen-year-old dyeworks artisan named ‘Claes’, a caterpillar who emerges by the end of the novel as the merchant-mathematician Nicholas vander Poele. Prodigiously gifted at numbers, and the material and social ‘engineering’ skills that go with it, Nicholas has until now resisted the responsibility of his powers, his identity fractured by the enmity of both his mother’s husband’s family, the Scottish St Pols, who refuse to own him legitimate, and his maternal family, the Burgundian de Fleurys, who failed his mother and abused him and reduced him to serfdom as a child. He found refuge at age ten with his grandfather’s in-laws, especially the Bruges widow Marian de Charetty, whose