Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

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  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  David Boyle is also the author of Troubador’s Song, The Sum of Our Discontent, and The Money Changers. He lives with his family in Crystal Palace, London.

  FOOTNOTES

  Chapter 1

  * A headless body with the imperial insignia embroidered on its socks was found later and assumed to be Constantine, but its burial place is now forgotten.

  * Bankers did not always win. When Edward III of England declared himself bankrupt in 1339, he brought down two of the biggest banking firms in Florence, Bardi and Peruzzi.

  * The inspirational preacher Thomas Couette of Rennes used to speak in Arras cathedral in the 1420s suspended on ropes from the roof so that he could see the vast congregation who had come to hear him.

  * Sir Thomas Malory, who would write the chivalric classic Le Morte d’Arthur, was now in prison in London charged with rape, extortion, and cattle rustling.

  * Ibiza actually means “Isle of Salt.”

  * There were also the new phenomenon of sweet shops selling the little conical loaves of crystallized sugar known as candi, a word derived from Arabic.

  * The Grimaldi family remains powerful in the region. Prince Rainier of Monaco, husband of the late Grace Kelly, was a Grimaldi.

  * The tiny house has consistently disappointed visitors. “I am sorry to have to say,” wrote the French historian Henry Harisse in 1890, “that the house is too narrow and dark inside to be used now as a public library, school or geographic museum, as would be my intention, if I were to buy it.”

  * The blue cotton cloth from Genoa, exported to France, carried the sign GÊNES, which is where the word jeans comes from, or so it is said.

  * It was these fifteenth-century palaces in Florence that provided the model for the Federal Reserve building in New York in the 1920s.

  * Five years earlier, Lippi had been involved in a scandal when he eloped with a nun named Lucrezia Buti. The two of them had a son called Filippino, who Botticelli in turn employed as his assistant. Lippi escaped censure because of his close relationship with the Medicis.

  * The painting was whitewashed over in 1661 and only uncovered again behind the altar in 1892. For years afterward, there was a dispute about which figure in painting was Amerigo. The result was that medals struck in his honor by the Italian government—Vespucci is, after all, the Italian candidate for the discovery of America—were made in the likeness of the bald man kneeling at the feet of the Virgin.

  Chapter 2

  * As late as 1872, a professor at the Royal Irish Academy claimed to have seen it. The last remaining memory of this mythical island was the final disappearance of the equally mythical Brazil Rock from British Admiralty charts in 1873.

  * Henry devoted himself so singlemindedly to the task that he was widely believed to be a virgin. When he died in 1460, he was found to be wearing a hair shirt.

  * The book has a rather wonderful title: The Immense Toils and Serious Lucubrations of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli on the Measurement of Comets.

  * Though this was the city that gave us the prodigious Bellini family, now out sketching the city.

  * René was theoretically King of Jerusalem, though that city was then in Muslim hands, and was supposed to have been grand master of the secret society known as the Priory of Sion (if it actually existed). His daughter Margaret was the fearsome wife of Henry VI of England, one of the forces driving the War of the Roses, in exile at the time.

  * The St. George’s cross is more famous now as the flag of England. In fact, England had only just adopted St. George as their patron saint—before the fifteenth century they used St. Edward the Confessor—and borrowed George from the Genoese because of the protection the flag afforded them on the high seas, or so the Genoese say.

  * The case for clemency was put forth by the Duke of Clarence, who, as a result, was famously drowned in the Tower of London in a barrel of fortified wine known as malmsey.

  * The previous summer an expedition of the Danish pilot Johannes Scolvus had left from Iceland to reestablish contact with a European settlement on the east coast of Greenland—the settlement on the west had been abandoned about a century earlier. It has often been speculated that Columbus heard about this while he was in Iceland.

  * Palle was a reference to the golden balls that were the symbol of the Medici family. The slogan was literally, “balls, balls!”


  * D’Ailly also correctly predicted the French Revolution and much else besides.

  * Felipa’s father had actually shown very little aptitude for seafaring, but he was given the task of settling Porto Santo because two of his sisters were mistresses of the Archbishop of Lisbon.

  * The islanders believe that these charts and secret documents are still there, buried somewhere on Porto Santo to protect them from Moorish raiders. †Strangely enough, the window of his home in Madeira still exists—in the garden of a nearby property.

  * This was an enormous miscalculation. The real distance is over eleven thousand miles.

  Chapter 3

  *When they arrived off the Pepper Coast, Columbus recorded that he saw some sirens, the mythical sea creatures that were said to lure sailors to their deaths with their seductive songs.

  *One story says that when he arrived in North America, Cabot was astonished to be confronted with native Americans speaking Basque. It sounds far-fetched, but in 1918, the Basque Academy of language commented on the strange similarities between Basque and the Huron language. They both, for example, used the word orein for deer. †As late as 1669, the Rev. Morgan Jones was traveling through the Carolinas when he came across a tribe that understood his Welsh. A century later, the search for the heirs of Madoc took the Welsh clergyman John Evans all the way to North Dakota. “I think you can safely inform my friends,” he wrote home sadly after a fruitless search, “that they have no existence.”

  *Three centuries later, in 1838, the map was owned by the Count of Montenegro and was unrolled for a distinguished visitor, the French novelist George Sand (then in the middle of an affair with Chopin). The servant held one corner down with a full inkwell, but it was not quite heavy enough and the map leaped into the air and rolled up with the now-empty inkwell inside. It was restored in time for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892, when it was sent by steamboat across the Atlantic, insured for $100,000.

  *It was said that Mirandola could recite any page of text forward or backward having read it just three times.

  *Richard’s wife, Anne Neville, probably died of tuberculosis, and he wept openly at her funeral. Shakespeare’s allegation that he had her killed is not true. They also had rather a romantic courtship: Richard is supposed to have discovered her working as a scullery maid, having been hidden away by her guardian so that he could pocket the income from her estates.