Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [2]
* Lorenzo di Matteo Strozzi of Naples, her son
The Vatachino Company and Associates (Genoese):
* David de Salmeton, broker, merchant and agent
Martin, broker, merchant and agent
Raffaelo Doria, commander of the Fortado
Tati, his servant girl
Michael Crackbene, ex Doria, sailing-master of the Fortado
* Urbano Lomellini, Genoese plantation owner, Madeira
* Baptista Lomellini, his brother
* Gilles Lomellini, host to Genoese merchants in Bruges
* Prosper Schiaffino de Camulio de’ Medici, former envoy of Milan
Kingdom of Portugal:
* Diogo Gomes, former sea captain, Treasurer of Palace of Sintra
* Zarco, Captain of the Funchal region of Madeira
Princes of Guinea:
* Zughalin, Jalofo King of the Senagana
* Gnumi Mansa, under-King in the Gambia
* Bati Mansa, under-King in the Gambia
Muslims of Guinea:
* Saloum ibn Hani, marabout, freed Mandingua interpreter
* Ahmad al-Qali, freed captive and guide
* Muhammed ben Idir, prince and Timbuktu-Koy
* Umar, his son and successor
* Akil ag Malwal, Maghsharen Tuareg commander
* And-Agh-Muhammed al-Kabir, Qadi and scholar
* al-Mukhtar, Muhammed and Ahmed, scholars, his sons
* Muhammed Aqit, judge and scholar
* Katib Musa, of the imamate of Sankore
Abderrahman ibn Said, merchant of Timbuktu
Jilali and Mustapha, his brothers
(Umar ibn Muhammad al-Kaburi)
Zuhra, his wife
Introduction
THE ELEGANT WORKING out of designs historical and romantic, political and commercial, psychological and moral, over a multivolume novel is a Dorothy Dunnett specialty. 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 Scales of Gold, 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 Scales of Gold, 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.” This 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, center 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 the making and on the take all around. Mrs. 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 that 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,