And in fact the politics of the Niccolò years, 1460-1483, continued a decisive movement away from the East-West ideological clash of Islam and Christianity towards the North-South commerce in ideas whose foundation is the idea of commerce. Cardinal John Bessarion's efforts to reunite Eastern and Western Christianity after the Council of Florence (1439) were still on the table. And Pope Pius II's call in 1459 for a new crusade had seemed the obvious response of the Christian West to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. But for a century beforehand the city-states of Italy had been teaching monarchies from Dijon and Lisbon to Edinburgh and Moscow new lessons in wealth-creation and self-invention, and experiments in nation-making had diluted the old imperatives of "Christendom." Uprisings around the religious reformers John Wycliffe in England (1414 ) and Jan Huss in Bohemia (1415) showed where the fractures in doctrine and practice lay, and suggested the degree to which new ideas about nationhood were already producing a new Europe bent on mapping a new world for itself.

That world would be round, and in motion, like the routes of traders and sailors. Columbus "discovered" the new world in 1492, Vasco DaGama rounded Africa to reach India in 1496 and Copernicus published his "new" theory of the revolution of the earth around the sun in 1543. But these ideas and activities were in fact the stuff of learned correspondence among diplomats, travellers, philosophers and scientists for a hundred and fifty years before that, and the "invention" of double-entry bookkeeping recorded in Luca Pacioli's Summa di Arithmetica (1494), which is often compared to the deeds of Copernicus and Columbus and DaGama, can be found in the ledgers of Florentine mercantile houses by 1300.

Expanded sciences of arithmetic and geometry contributed not only to efficient commerce but to changes in art and war: Italian painters and sculptors perfected the use of perspective, and engineers the new arts of artillery. In this way both warfare and decoration became more expensive, new items of commerce themselves, and incitements to new commerce, particularly in loans to princes. The creation of new universities--Louvain in 1425 among others--meant larger populations of literate persons for whom cheaper books, printed in Germany by the 1440's, became another new item of trade with its own routes. The Englishman Caxton learned printing in Cologne and set up his first press in Bruges in the 1470's: his early texts for English readers duplicated those in the formidable library of Louis de Gruuthuse of Bruges, and included The Game and the Playe of Chesse, whose first Scottish publication supplies headnotes for the final novel of The House of Niccolo series.

Especially to her own citizens, Bruges seemed the hub of this new world of motion. Home of the first formal trading Bourse (1409), commercial and banking center for trade routes from Venice, Africa and the Orient, London, Hamburg and Riga, Bruges was also patron for a Flemish school of painting that rivalled even Florence, and wealth-creator for the kingly ambitions of a century of Dukes of Burgundy.

As a brokering and manufacturing center, Bruges was particularly connected both to the longstanding English and Scottish cloth and metals trade routes and fairs and through the spice and silk routes of the cities of northern Italy to the trading politics of the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, where imperial Venice and ambitious Genoa maneuvered for supremacy within and against the Ottoman Turkish advance. Venice had maintained a dogged and guilty responsibility for Eastern political affairs at least since its nobility took Constantinople (not Jerusalem) in the Fourth Crusade (1204), making use of potential allies among the Turcoman tribes and the Christian states of Dalmatia. But neither a new Persia nor a new Albania rose to help check the Ottoman advance: the chief outcome of Venetian statecraft in the fifteenth century was the marriage of a Venetian merchant's daughter to the king of Cyprus in 1468 Ð which throne she was forced to abdicate in 1489 when Cyprus became essentially a province of Venice.

As a political entity of considerable self-awareness within the Duchy of Burgundy, fifteenth-century Bruges contributed with pride to the rise of a "middle kingdom" between France and Germany whose name went back to Roman and Carolingian times. The new Burgundy was the creation of a cadet branch of the French house of Valois, beginning with the ascension of Philip the Bold to the Burgundian Duchy in 1364 and his acquisition of Flanders, including Bruges, through marriage in 1384. It continued through the high diplomacy of his grandson Philip the Good, who backed Lancastrian England against France in the 1420s and in that country's Joan-of-Arc-inspired reconstruction gained enough independence to play arbitrator between France and England in the 1430s. Canny diplomacy, plus possession of the most commercially productive lands in Europe at the time, advanced the influence of Burgundy through midcentury, until Philip's son Charles inherited in 1467 a nation-in-the-making, double-centered in wealthy Bruges and Antwerp in the north and pastoral Dijon in the south, which in his opinion cried out for a unification from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.

Charles set his heart on this expansion, by force and diplomacy south towards Anjou, Provence, and Savoy, by continual war in the lands between his northern and southern domains. These lands were centered on and fatally symbolized by the city of Nancy. In a final attempt to retake this city Charles was killed in 1477, leaving the southern "island" of his would-be kingdom to revert to French control by 1482, and the northern "island" of merchant cities to be absorbed into the Holy Roman Empire with the Duke's daughter's marriage to Maximilian of Hapsburg. These independent-minded sites of commercial power would struggle against that absorption for another one hundred years, seeking a united national identity, before separating again into the modern states of Holland and Belgium.

The opposing monarchical styles of the French king, Louis "the Spider," and the Burgundian would-be king, Charles "the Rash," were the subject of two novels by Dorothy Dunnett's predecessor, the great historical-novelist, Sir Walter Scott: the popularity of Anne of Geierstein (1829) and especially Quentin Durward (1823) was an indication of how historically and even psychologically connected these fifteenth-century European matters were, and are, to the making of England and Scotland.

English and Scottish trade had of course both relied on Flanders since at least the eleventh century. Scottish politics had similarly relied on the "Auld Alliance" with France against England, while by the middle of the fifteenth century marriage alliances connected both the Stewart kings of Scotland and the battling Yorkist and Lancastrian kings of England to domains in or under the influence of Burgundy. Early in the century civil war set royal Stewart against Stewart cousins, and among the Plantagenets White Rose cousins went to war against Red Rose cousins, until in the early 1480s each country's ruling family turned even more intimately against itself.

In England Edward IV had his brother the Duke of Clarence sentenced for treason and killed: when he died in 1483 the throne went to his youngest brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Edward's two child-heirs disappearing into the mists of controversy. Two years later an invasion force under the Lancastrian Henry Tudor, supported by the French, defeated and killed Richard III. In Scotland James III's youngest brother died under mysterious circumstances and his surviving brother, the Duke of Albany, came against James three times in treasonous alliance with England. In 1488 James died in battle against an army of rebellious nobles which included his own son.

In the sixteenth century, with the heroism of a new Tudor dynasty to establish in England and a mixed Stewart history to restore in Scotland, a group of eloquent but not-unbiased poets and historians arose in both countries to assure the people that the kings who were deposed and killed in the 1480's were, like the Duke of Burgundy, rash, tyrannical figures of a bygone feudal world, now properly succeeded by the craftier architects of a more rational, a more "modern," state. The marriage of Henry Tudor's daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland in 1503 began a long century of complex statecraft interrupted by the "rougher wooing" of war between the two nations, which climaxed in 1587 in the execution by Elizabeth of England of that pair's granddaughter, Mary Queen of Scots, and culminated in 1603 in the accession of Mary's son as King James VI and I of Scotland and England.