The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [3]
The Vatachino Company and Associates: Genoese
*David de Salmeton, broker, merchant and agent
Martin, broker, merchant and agent
*Prospero Schiaffino de Camulio de’ Medici, Genoese and Milanese agent
*Pietro de Persis, Genoese consul in Alexandria
*Tobias Lomellini, Treasurer of the Knights Hospitaller
Rome
*Pope Paul II
*Bessarion (John) of Trebizond, Cardinal Patriarch of Constantinople, Archbishop of Negroponte
*Father Ludovico de Severi da Bologna, Patriarch of Antioch
*Philibert Hugonet, doyen of St Vincent of Macon (brother of Chancellor Hugonet of Burgundy)
Mameluke Sultanate of Cairo and Alexandria
*Sultan Qayt Bey, Cairo
*Grand Emir the Dawadar Yachbak, Cairo
*Emir Madjlis, Master of Ceremonies, Cairo
*Katib Musa, of the imamate of Sankore, Timbuktu
Abderrahman ibn Said, merchant of Timbuktu
*Katib al Sirr, the Clerk of the Secrets, Cairo
*Chief Dragoman, Cairo
*Cami Bey, Second Dragoman, Cairo
Cyprus
*King James de Lusignan (Zacco)
*Marietta of Patras, his mother (Cropnose)
*Jorgin, his servant
*Sir Rizzo di Marino, Sicilian chamberlain to the King
*Sor de Naves, Sicilian Constable of Cyprus
*Louis Perez Fabrice, Catalan Archbishop of Nicosia
*John Langstrother, former Grand Commander of Kolossi Castle of the Knights
Persia and Karamania
*Uzum Hasan, Turcoman prince of Persia
*Hadji Mehmet, his Chief Delegate
*Emir Kilidje Arslan II of Karamania
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 The Unicorn Hunt, 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 The Unicorn Hunt, 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, 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,” 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