Half the courts of Europe and most of mighty Rome itself are bastards. Our employer,
my patron for the moment, Cesare Borgia, is a bastard.
The year is 1502. A boy is fished from a river in Romagna, Italy, by the party of Leonardo da Vinci. When asked his name, the boy replies, “Matteo”.
Matteo explains that he is an orphan, that he has escaped from his employer who has treated him brutally, and that it was during this escape that he accidentally fell into the river. Matteo deliberately omitted saying that he was the son of a gypsy woman and has been in the care of his grandmother until she died, that he never knew who his father was, and that he was escaping from Sandino, a man-for-hire, who was trying to kill him when he fell into the river.
Matteo had an even bigger secret: he had with him the seal of the Medicis which the much-feared Cesare Borgia (Duke of Valentinois) and the Medici family would kill to obtain. And so Matteo came to live with da Vinci, acting as his all around errand boy and the latter’s assistant in his nocturnal activities which included cutting up of cadavers for his studies in anatomy.
He lived a happy enough life until his past started catching up with him. Friends who have cared for him have been brutally murdered, and people have been lurking in the shadows prepared to ambush.
In the midst of the struggle between the Vatican and the Italian states, the alliance of the French army with Milan, the beauty and magnificence of Lucrezia de Borgia, the transfer of power in the Vatican from Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia ( Pope Alexander VI) to Cardinal Guiliano della Rovere (Pope Julius II), the art and scientific experiments of Leonardo da Vinci, and the political treatises of Machiavelli, Matteo would find out the explosive truth of the people who were after him. And it was not primarily because he had in his possession the seal of the Medicis.
If you liked Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, you will like The Medici Seal.
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