Introduction

This informative and engaging historical novel uniquely turns a complicated study into interesting reading of American history. All the characters are the creation of the author and entirely fictional. The exceptions, of course, are those public figures mentioned by name.

This is the saga of a family of Renaissance Florence that had re-awakened the culture of education, ideas, art, and governance with responsibility. The world suddenly opened to exploration and adventure.

Story and Themes

The book brilliantly intertwines historical fact with gripping fiction—a novel of politics, love, intrigue, and passions that rule human lives while spanning four centuries of a most unusual family deeply and personally involved with the age of discovery of the Western Hemisphere, an unknown mass that encompassed almost half of earth's land mass to the founding of the United States of America.

Picture yourself with Marco Polo and the Emperor of China, or talking with Christopher Columbus in his cabin aboard the Santa Maria sailing an unknown ocean, or observing the remarkable Leonardo da Vinci when he required funds to visit the King of France, or perhaps listening to the discussions in the Court of St. James of plans of King Charles to rid England of undesirables and populate the Land Grants in the new American colonies.

Historical Reflection

Western Civilization is replete with wars with little or no reason, with intrigues where monarchs make momentous decisions with little thought but having enormous unintended consequences, where a storm is able to change the course of history and the reader becomes involved in the drama. Almost as the wind changes, history bends and for America, it determines its language.