The Spring of the Ram: The Second Book of the House of Niccolo Read online

  The House of Niccolò

  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, landowner and merchant of Scotland

  Jordan de St Pol, exiled vicomte de Ribérac, father of Simon

  Katelina van Borselen, wife of Simon and niece of Henry van Borselen of Veere

  Henry de St Pol, son of Katelina

  Agnès, her servant

  *Henry van Borselen of Veere, Knight of the Golden Fleece

  *Franck van Borselen, Knight of the Golden Fleece

  *Wolfaert van Borselen, son of Henry

  *Mary, princess of Scotland, wife of Wolfaert

  *Charles van Borselen, son of Wolfaert and Mary

  *Alexander, Duke of Albany, Scottish royal nephew of Wolfaert and Mary

  *Pierre Bladelin, Treasurer of the Golden Fleece and Controller to Duke Philip, founder of the Golden Fleece Order

  *Louis de Gruuthuse of Bruges, Knight of the Golden Fleece, husband of Marguerite van Borselen

  Genoa and Milan

  *Anselm Adorne of the Hôtel Jerusalem, Bruges

  Pagano Doria, sea adventurer

  Michael Crack-bene, his sailing-master

  Noah, his Negro page

  *Jacques Doria, Genoese merchant, Bruges

  *Prosper Adorno, Doge of Genoa and kin to Anselm Adorne

  *Prosper Schiaffino de Camulio de’ Medici, envoy of the Duke of Milan

  Greeks and Byzantines

  *David Comnenos, 21st Emperor of Trebizond

  *Helen Cantacuzenes, his Empress

  *Anna, their younger daughter

  *George VIII, King of Georgia, their son-in-law

  *Maria Gattilusi, Genoese widow of the Emperor’s brother Alexander

  *Alexios, son of Maria and Alexander

  *George Amiroutzes of Trebizond, philosopher, Great Chancellor, Treasurer, Protovestarios to the Emperor

  *Alexander and Basil, sons of George Amiroutzes

  *Altamourios, Chief Secretary and half-Muslim cousin of the Emperor David

  *Violante, daughter of Niccolò Crespo, Duke of Naxos, grand-daughter of Emperor John IV of Trebizond and great-niece of the Emperor David

  *Bessarion (John) of Trebizond, Cardinal of Nicaea

  *Paraskeuas, servant to the Cardinal’s late mother

  *Thomas, Despot of the Morea, brother of the late Constantine, last emperor of Constantinople

  *Demetrius, brother of Thomas and joint Despot of the Morea

  Persia (The Ak-Koyunlu, the White Sheep Tribe of Turcomans)

  *Uzum Hasan, Muslim prince of Diyarbekr, lord of High Mesopotamia and of the White Sheep Tribe and grandson of a princess of Trebizond

  *Sara Khatun of Syria, Christian mother of Uzum Hasan

  *Sheikh Hüseyin, Muslim kinsman of Uzum Hasan’s Kurdish wife

  *Theodora, Christian wife of Uzum Hasan, aunt of Violante, and niece of the Emperor David

  Diadochos, Archimandrite of the Greek Orthodox Church, chamberlain to Uzum Hasan’s Christian household, and to Violante of Naxos

  *Mahon Turcomannus, Uzum Hasan’s envoy to the West under Ludovico da Bologna

  Latin/Greeks, Modon, Constantinople (Pera)
and Venice

  *Giovanni Bembo, Venetian Bailie at Modon

  *Piero Bembo, kinsman, merchant of Venice

  *Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli, kinsman of the former Florentine dukes of Athens

  *Bartolomeo Giorgio/Zorzi his brother, alum farmer and silk merchant in Pera

  *Girolamo Michiel of Venice, partner of Bartolomeo

  *Dietifeci of Florence, agent for Florence in Pera

  *Bastiano da Foligno, partner of Dietifeci

  *George Scholarius, Greek Patriarch of Constantinople

  *Giovanni da Castro, godson of Pope Pius and former dyer, Constantinople

  *Caterino Zeno, Venetian merchant, husband of Violante of Naxos

  *Marco Corner, Venetian merchant, married to the sister of Violante of Naxos

  *Doge Pasqual Malipiero of Venice

  Eastern delegation to Europe

  *Fra Ludovico de Severi da Bologna, Franciscan Observatine friar

  *Michael Alighieri, Florentine envoy of Emperor David of Trebizond

  Ottomans

  *Sultan Mehmet II

  *Grand Vizier Mahmud Pasha, renegade son of a mother from Trebizond

  *Tursun Beg, Turkish secretary to Mahmud

  *Thomas Katabolenu, Greek secretary to Mahmud

  *Kasim Pasha, the Sultan’s admiral

  *Yakub, Kasim’s deputy

  *Jacopo of Gaeta, the Sultan’s physician

  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 Spring of the Ram, 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 the previous novel, telling its own tale while completing and inaugurating others. What follows, as a sketch of the geopolitical and dramatic terrain unfolding in the volume which precedes The Spring of the Ram, 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 the previous one.

  VOLUME 1: 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, 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 dyeing and broking business becomes the tool of Nicholas’ desperate self-fashioning apart from the malice of his blood relatives.

  Soon even public Bruges and the states beyond come to see the engineer under the artisan. The Charetty business expands to include a courier and intelligence service between Italian and Northern states, its bodyguard sharpened into a skilled mercenary force, its pawnbroking consolidated toward banking and commodities trading. And as the chameleon artificer of all this, Nicholas incurs the ambiguous interest of the Bruges patrician Anselm Adorne and the Greco-Florentine prince Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli, both of whom steer him toward a role in the rivalry between Venice, in whose interest Acciajuoli labors, and Genoa, original home of the Adorne family. This trading rivalry will erupt in different novels around the different, always highly symbolic commodities: silk, sugar, glass, gold, and human beings. In this first novel the contested product is alum, the mineral that binds dyes to cloth, blood to the body, conspirators to a conspiracy—in this case, to keep secret the news of a newly found deposit of the mineral in the Papal States while Venice and her allies monopolize the current supply.

  Acciajuoli and Adorne are father-mentor figures Nicholas can respect, resist, or join on roughly equal intellectual terms—whereas the powerful elder males of his blood, his mother’s uncle, Jaak de Fleury, and his father’s father, Jordan de Ribérac, steadily rip open wounds first inflicted in childhood. In direct conflict he is emotionally helpless before them. What he possesses superbly, however, are the indirect defenses of an “engineer.” The Charetty business partners and others who hitch their wagons to his star—Astorre the mercenary leader, Julius the notary, Gregorio the lawyer, Tobias Beventini the physician, the Guinea slave Lopez—watch as a complex series of commodity and currency maneuvers by the apparently innocent Nicholas brings about the financial and political ruin of de Fleury and de Ribérac; and they nearly desert him for the conscienceless avenger he appears to be, especially after de Fleury dies in a fight with, though not directly at the hands of, his nephew.

  The faith and love of Marian de Charetty make them rethink their view of this complicated personality. Marian, whose son was killed beside Nicholas in the Italian wars, and whose sister married into his family, is moved towards the end of the novel to suggest that Nicholas take her in marriage. It is to be platonic: her way of giving him standing, of displaying her trust in him and his management of the business, and of solacing him in his anguish. Once married, however, she longs despite herself for physical love, and Nicholas, who owes her everything, finds happiness also in making the marriage complete.

  That marriage, however, sows the seeds of tragedy. The royally connected Katelina van Borselen, “characterful,” intelligent, and hungry for experiences usually denied a genteel lady, has refused the vicious or vacuous suitors considered eligible, and seeks sexual initiation at the hands of the merry young artisan so popular with the kitchen wenches of Bruges. Against his better judgment, Nicholas is led to comply, for, however brusque her demands, she has just saved his life in one of the several episodes in which the St Pols try to destroy him. Two nights of genuine intimacy undermined by mismatched desires and miscommunicated intentions culminate in Katelina’s solitary pregnancy. Unaware of this, Nicholas enters his marriage with Marian, and Katelina, alone, fatalistically marries the man in pursuit of her, the handsome, shrewd, and fatally self-centered Simon de St Pol, the man Nicholas claims is his father. Sickened at what she believes is Nicholas’ ultimate revenge on his family—to illegitimately father its heir—Katelina becomes Nicholas’ most determined enemy.

  Judith Wilt

  Overture

  THE SPRING sign of the Ram is, of course, the earliest in the Zodiac; and Aries relates to the first House in the Wheel. You will have
read the Divine Ptolemy on the subject. The Greeks considered the starfield of the Ram to represent the Golden Fleece sought by the heroic Jason; others called it the Ram of Ammon instead. You may now forget the whole issue. It is my business, not yours. Your business (and mine) is the star of Niccolò, whose foot I am required to set on the same quest as that of Jason.

  Whether I can do it, I am not at all sure. He is nineteen years old, and clever. It is clever to begin life as a dyer’s apprentice in Bruges and gain control of your employer’s business by marrying her. A business in Flanders is worth something. Flanders is ruled by the Duke of Burgundy, one of the richest princes in the world, and feared even by the King of France, although Charles is supposed to be Duke Philip’s overlord for the lands he possesses in France. Bruges in Flanders is a world centre of trade and finance, dealing across the narrow Channel with England and Scotland (although England is embroiled in its war between Yorkist and Lancastrian). Bruges houses merchants from the republics of Venice and Genoa and from the bits of Spain that are not under Saracen rule. It lodges a branch of the House of Medici, whose head, Cosimo de’ Medici, is the power in my ancestral city of Florence. It deals with representatives of Pope Pius in Rome, and the war-worried Kingdom of Naples and the prosperous Duchy of Milan, whose Duke Francesco Sforza is so anxious to win Genoa from the French. It sends goods as far away as Constantinople and Asia Minor, because it likes the luxuries it imports in return, and has moreover a need for Asian alum, the powder which fixes dye into cloth. Aries is, of course, the sign of the wool merchant.

  It is a pity that, intelligent as he is, Niccolò should have made so many mistakes while living in Bruges. The worst has threatened his wife and her business. He has antagonised a powerful Scottish nobleman, and must leave Bruges until the danger has lessened. But for me, he would have joined his wife’s mercenary troop somewhere in Italy. It is I who have placed before him another prospect, brilliant as the Fleece, and in the same far-off country of legend.

  Seven years ago, Constantinople fell before the Sultan Mehmet, and its Byzantine Emperor died. The other European lands of Byzantium were all in time overrun by these Ottoman Turks, my own Greek possessions included. There remained only one spangle of the exquisite culture which had survived for so long at the meeting-place of the West and the Orient, preserving the finest of both. This was the Empire of Trebizond, a garden on the southern coast of the Black Sea, no more than forty miles deep and the worth of three to four days journeying from one end to the other. There ruled the Emperor David of the Byzantine family of the Comneni, a dynasty of legendary beauty and wealth which had survived for two hundred years against the enemy tribes at its frontiers, sometimes through war; sometimes through diplomacy; sometimes through marriage.