The facts of this history are often fratricidal. During the Chronicles' time between 1547 and 1558, Scottish Border families, who have leagued and intermarried for a half century in a vain effort to unite in common interest, still meet in tragically self-destroying battles. Within the great crusading order of priest-healers and knight-saints called the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, an order that looked back more than four hundred years to its founding during the Crusades, a common Christian heritage that might have held the Mediterranean against the Ottoman Turks declines in fratricidal differences between French and Spanish political interests. At the English court political parties crystallize around religious differences figured in two Tudor sisters after a powerful father's death. At the French court a strong new king cannot prevent the formation of separate policies and parties around his politically moderate Queen and the strenuously Catholic and Papal de Guise family. At the Sublime Porte the aging but still powerful Suleiman the Magnificent tries to extend his empire, while unknown to him an intrigue between his Sultana and one of his deputies moves him to order the death of his eldest son, leaving room for the Sultana's son to contend for the heirship.

In 1453 the Ottoman Turks had taken Constantinople. They became a permanent presence in Mediterranean Europe, gaining control of a significant portion of the North African shore when the corsairs of Algeria and Tunis allied with them in the 1520s. In the 1490s the Portuguese Vasco da Gama and the Genoese Columbus in Spanish pay opened routes to the old Indies and to the new Americas to explorers, traders, diplomats, and missionaries. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral and within three days copies of them were rolling off the new printing presses for transport across Europe. In the 1530s Spanish and Portuguese exploration of the Americas intensified, and by 1542 Bartholomew de las Casas had written his critical treatment of New World colonialism. By this time the libraries of the gentry were filled with the fruits of the rediscovery of Greek and Roman learning and were awaiting an explosion of new learning: in 1543 Copernicus published his discoveries about the organization of the heavens and Vesalius his book On the Fabric of the Human Body.

And somewhere between Machiavelli's The Prince (1513) and Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) emerged the Renaissance concept of the state, an abstract entity calling a people together under the rule of the leader under the law. "Universalist" desires about a divinely ordained and globally integrated human social community were still alive in the mid-sixteenth century, most vigorously prosecuted perhaps by the Ottoman Turks, the most politically universalist of the Islamic cultures. And there were two claimants to the ancient universalisms of "Christendom" too: the Holy Roman empire of Charles V with its roots in the figure of Charlemagne, and the Russian Orthodox monarchy of Tsar Ivan of Muscovy, with its inherited claims from Byzantium. But the tide was turning away from grand theocratic designs and toward the formation of nation states, with that politics of shifting alliances and that balancing of short-term and long-term national interests that we still call "modern."

In the 1530s and 40s strong Valois and Tudor monarchs in France and England consolidated national boundaries and policies through a sometimes ruthless integration of internal cultures and feudatories and turned to play for international stakes of prestige, identity, and wealth with the established empires of Charles V and the Turkish Sultan Suleiman. Diplomacy, religion, and trade made energetic use of each other. English explorer-traders opened a sea route to Muscovy in 1555 and returned with Russia's first Ambassador to England; in the same year the French Knight of St John Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon, disillusioned by the Order's failure to hold Tripoli against the Turks in 1551, received permission to take a group of French Protestants to found a colony in Brazil.

In the "balance of power" politics which give the Lymond Chronicles the chess motifs of their titles, the struggle of France and Spain, virtually border to border in Europe, is central. In 1519 Charles had defeated Francis I of France in the election for the imperial title "Holy Roman Emperor." From then on they were rivals for subsidiary territories and principalities, for trade routes and religious expansion and defense, in Italy and the Low Countries and North Africa--a rivalry that saw the French often formally in league with the Turks against Christian Spain. English politics meanwhile dictated an uneasy alliance with Spain, confirmed in political marriages between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and later between Mary Tudor and Phillip II of Spain.

The small and vulnerable nation of Scotland, both formed and deformed by civil and clan warfare since the fourteenth-century battles of (and between) William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, had resisted absorption by its English cousin and predator for centuries through the "auld alliance" with France. Ties of blood, culture, and diplomacy strengthened this alliance, which was underscored in 1538 by the marriage of a Bourbon princess, Marie de Guise, to King James V. Scotland had suffered a disastrous defeat by Henry VIII's troops at Flodden Field in 1513; in 1542 another defeat at Solway Moss and James's death immediately thereafter left the nation with a divided nobility, an infant Queen, Mary Stuart, and a strong royal French connection eventually confirmed by the Queen's appointment as regent. Henry's "rough wooing" of young Mary for his own child heir, Edward, involved regular invasions of Scotland through the 1540s, until in 1548 the Scots Parliament voted to send Mary to France and eventual marriage with the French Dauphin in exchange for French aid in the struggle against England.

French diplomacy in the 1540s and '50s involved maintaining Scottish, and indeed Irish, resistance to England, but it was the Spanish/English alliance that gave Henri II the most trouble. The essential element in the planned marriage of the Scottish and French heirs was in fact the expected transfer to France of Mary Stuart's claim to the English throne. As the granddaughter of James IV and Henry VIII's sister Margaret, Mary Stuart was seen as a strong contender after Henry V's death left a sickly son and two daughters, each of whom had been, at one point or another, formally disinherited and bastardized during the course of Henry's six marriages.