The House of Niccolò

The House of Niccolò is a series of eight historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett set in the mid-fifteenth-century European Renaissance. The protagonist of the series is Nicholas de Fleury (Niccolò, Nicholas van der Poele, or Claes), a boy of uncertain birth who rises to the heights of European merchant banking and international political intrigue. The series shares many of locations with Dunnett's earlier six-volume series, the Lymond Chronicles: Scotland, England, France, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. The House of Niccolò extends much further geographically to take in the important urban centers of Bruges, Venice, Florence, Geneva, and the Hanseatic League; Burgundy, Flanders, and Poland; Iceland; the Iberian Peninsula and Madeira; the Black Sea cities of Trebizond and Caffa; Persia; the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Rhodes; Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula; and West Africa and the city of Timbuktu.

The eight volumes of the The House of Niccolò are part of what Dunnett viewed as a larger fourteen-volume work, which includes the six novels of the Lymond Chronicles series. The Lymond Chronicles was written prior to The House of Niccolò but is set chronologically later, telling the story of descendants of characters in The House of Niccolò in the following century. The House of Niccolò includes occasional foreshadowing of events in the Lymond Chronicles. Dunnett recommended readers read the books in the order they were written, beginning with the Lymond Chronicles and then reading The House of Niccolò.

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