The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [0]
PREFACE
When my chronicle of Francis Crawford of Lymond ended, it seemed to me that there was something still to be told of his heritage: about the genetic lottery, as well as the turmoil of trials and experience which, put together, could bring such a man into being.
The House of Niccolò, in all its volumes, deals with the forerunner without whom Lymond would not have existed: the unknown who fought his way to the high ground that Francis Crawford would occupy, and held it for him. It is fiction, but the setting at least is very real.
The man I have called Nicholas de Fleury lived in the mid-fifteenth century, three generations before Francis Crawford, and was reared as an artisan, his gifts and his burdens concealed beneath an artless manner and a joyous, sensuous personality. But he was also born at the cutting edge of the European Renaissance, which Lymond was to exploit at its zenith—the explosion of exploration and trade, high art and political duplicity, personal chivalry and violent warfare in which a young man with a genius for organization and numbers might find himself trusted by princes, loved by kings, and sought in marriage and out of it by clever women bent on power, or wealth, or revenge—or sometimes simply from fondness.
There are, of course, echoes of the present time. Trade and war don’t change much down through the centuries: today’s new multimillionaires had their counterparts in the entrepreneurs of few antecedents who evolved the first banking systems for the Medici; who developed the ruthless network of trade that ran from Scotland, Flanders, and Italy to the furthest reaches of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, and ventured from Iceland to Persia, from Muscovy to the deserts of Africa.
Scotland is important to this chronicle, as it was to Francis Crawford. Here, the young Queen of Scots is a thirteen-year-old Scandinavian, and her husband’s family are virtually children. This, framed in glorious times, is the story of the difficult, hesitant progress of a small nation, as well as that of a singular man.
Dorothy Dunnett
Edinburgh, 1998
Characters
(Those marked * are recorded in history)
Rulers
*France: Charles VII; Louis XI
*England: Henry VI; Edward IV
*Flanders: Duke Philip of Burgundy
*Pope: Pius II
*Milan: Duke Francesco Sforza
*Ottoman Empire: Sultan Mehmet II
Charetty company, Bruges, Louvain and Trebizond
Marian de Charetty, owner
Nicholas vander Poele (Niccolò), her husband and former apprentice
Mathilde (Tilde), her older daughter
Catherine, her second daughter
Julius, her notary
Tobias Beventini of Grado, her physician
Father Godscalc of Cologne, her chaplain
Gregorio of Asti, her lawyer
John le Grant, Scots engineer and shipmaster
Astorre (Syrus de Astariis), her mercenary leader
Loppe (Lopez), a former Guinea slave; bursar to Nicholas
Thibault, vicomte de Fleury of Dijon, husband of Marian de Charetty’s late sister
Tasse of Geneva, maid to Marian de Charetty
Margot, mistress of Gregorio
Patou, assistant to Julius
Thomas, under-captain to Astorre
Medici company, Florence, Pisa, Bruges and Venice
*Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici of Florence, head of the Medici Bank
*Giovanni de’ Medici, his son
*Cosimino de’ Medici, son of Giovanni
*Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, nephew of Cosimo
*Laudomia Acciajuoli, wife of Pierfrancesco
*Angelo Tani, manager, Bruges
*Tommaso Portinari, under-manager, Bruges
*Antonio di Niccolò Martelli, sea-consul, Pisa
*Roberto di Niccolò Martelli, manager, Rome
*Alessandro di Niccolò Martelli, manager, Venice
The company of Strozzi, Florence and Bruges
*Alessandra Macinghi negli Strozzi of Florence, widow of Matteo Strozzi
*Lorenzo di Matteo Strozzi, Bruges, her exiled son
*Filippo di Matteo Strozzi, Naples, exiled elder brother of Lorenzo
*Caterina di Matteo, her daughter
*Marco di Giovanni da Parenti, silk merchant and husband of Caterina
*Jacopo di Leonardo Strozzi, manager, Bruges, and cousin of the late Matteo
Merchants and noblemen, Scotland and Flanders
Simon de St Pol of Kilmirren,