The Unicorn Hunt (2 page)

*Elizabeth, Prioress, Cistercian Priory, Haddington

*Dame Alisia Maitland, nun of the same priory Ada, priory servant

*William Roger (Whistle Willie), English musician

*Thomas Cochrane, master mason

*William Scheves, cleric, royal apothecary

*Archibald Crawford, Abbot of Holyrood

*Sir William Knollys, Preceptor in Scotland of the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem

*John Gosyn of Kinloch, a chaplain of the Order

*David (Davie) Lindsay, 5th Earl of Crawford

*James (Jack) Lindsay, his cousin in the Tyrol

*George, second Lord Seton

*Edward Bonkle, Provost of Trinity College, Edinburgh

*Andrew Haliburton, merchant

*Cornelia, his wife, daughter of Catherine van der Goes

*Alexander Napier of Merchiston, merchant, vice-admiral of Scotland

*Gilbert of Edmonston, merchant of Leith

*Walter Bertram, merchant of Canongate

*Stephen Angus, agent, Canongate and Bruges

*John Brown, merchant of Leith

*John Lauder, burgess of Canongate

*Martin Gordon, merchant, Canongate and Leith

*William Touris, merchant of Canongate

*Matthew Auchinleck, goldsmith of Canongate

Flanders and the Duchy of Burgundy

*Charles, Duke of Burgundy and Brabant, Count of Flanders, Holland, Zeeland etc.

*Margaret of York, his wife and sister of King Edward IV

*Cecily Nevill, Duchess of York, mother of Duchess Margaret and King Edward

*Isabelle of Portugal, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy

*Anselm Adorne, merchant, nobleman, magistrate, of the Hôtel Jerusalem, Bruges

*Margriet van der Banck, his wife

*Anselm Sersanders, his nephew from Ghent

*Katelijne (Kathi) Sersanders, his niece

*Jan Adorne, law student, his oldest son

*Katelijne Adorne, his daughter, serving Duchess Cecily in England

*Maarten, divinity student, a younger son

*Lewisje, Antoon and Arnoud, youngest sons
  Emmelot, maid to Katelijne Sersanders

*Dr Andreas of Vesalia, physician in Bruges and Scotland

*Jehan Metteneye, host to Scots merchants in Bruges

*Daniel Colebrant, Bruges merchant

*Lambert van de Walle, merchant kinsman of Adorne

*Pieter Reyphin, merchant kinsman of van de Walle

*Antoine de Francqueville, chaplain to the Duke of Burgundy

*Audomaro, monk of St Nicholas, Furnes, his companion

*William Caxton, Governor of the English Nation at Bruges

*Henry van Borselen, seigneur of Veere, admiral to the Duke; ‘uncle’ of Gelis van Borselen

*Wolfaert van Borselen, his son

*Charlotte de Bourbon, daughter of the Count of Montpensier, Wolfaert’s second wife

*Paul van Borselen, bastard son of Wolfaert

*Louis de Bruges, seigneur de Gruuthuse, merchant nobleman

*Marguerite van Borselen, his wife

*William Hugonet, Chancellor of the Duchy of Burgundy

*Michael Alighieri, merchant of Florence and Trebizond

*Nerio of Trebizond, exile, Burgundian court

*Hugo van der Goes, artist

*Colard Mansion, scribe and illustrator

Republic of Venice

*Marco Corner, merchant, sugar-grower in Cyprus

*Fiorenza of Naxos, his wife, sister of Valenza and Violante below

*Andrea Corner, his brother

*Catherine, his daughter, Queen of Cyprus

*Giovanni (Vanni) Loredano, deputy Bailie of Cyprus

*Valenza of Naxos his wife

*Caterino Zeno, merchant

*Violante of Naxos, his wife

*Paul Erizzo, Venetian Bailie in Negroponte

*Anne, his daughter

*Niccolò da Canale, Captain-General of the Sea

*Piero Bembo, merchant

*Family of Filippo Buonaccorsi of Murano

*Brother Lorenzo of Crete, steward and treasurer of the monastery of St Catherine’s, Mount Sinai

Republic of Florence

*Piero de’ Medici, head of the House of Medici

*Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, his cousin

*Laudomia Acciajuoli, wife to Pierfrancesco

*Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli, Greek-Florentine cousin of Laudomia

*Bartolomeo Giorgio (Zorzi) his brother, alum merchant

*Benedetto Dei, Medici agent in Africa and the Levant

*Tommaso Portinari, Medici manager in Bruges

*Maria, his wife, daughter of Francesco Bandini Baroncelli

*Alessandra Macinghi negli Strozzi, merchant’s widow

*Filippo Strozzi of Naples and Florence, her elder son

*Lorenzo di Matteo Strozzi of Naples, her younger son

*Antonia, his wife, sister of Maria Baroncelli above

*Caterina, daughter of Alessandra Strozzi

*Marco Parenti, silk merchant, husband of Caterina

*Mariotto Squarcialupi, Florentine consul in Cyprus and Alexandria

*Francesco Sassetti, Medici manager, Lyons

*Francesco Nori, recently of the Medici company, Lyons

The Duchy of the Tyrol

*Sigismond, Duke of Austria and Styria and Count of the Tyrol

*Eleanor Stewart, his wife, aunt to the King of Scotland
  Gertrude, mistress of the Duchess’s ladies

*Antonio Cavalli, Venetian adviser to the Duke

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

T
HE 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’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 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.