How this 4 part novel was created

Although the four books were written in about four and a half years it has been almost a lifetime that I devoted to studying the history of Europe and France in particular. Together with my wife who had always been my first reader I often went to Europe to visit the places where Mazarini had lived and advanced his amazing career.

SPAIN

This is the country where Giulio Mazarini first revealed his talent for gaining friends and outsmarting enemies. We came to the town of Alcala de Henares near Madrid. Here was an ancient university founded in 1507 by Cardinal Jimenes de Cisneros. This was the place to where Giulio Mazarini and his master Geronimo Colonna had come to study from Italy in 1620 when they both were 18. In the end of the 20th century the ancient university buildings were there intact and full of students. We talked to some of them and they told us about their constantly present feeling of communing with the past centuries when they saw the old uneven stones of the walls, the worn out stairs and wind eroded statues on the cornices, when they saw the storks on roofs whose nests seemed as old as the eaves and gables themselves. In the inner court-yard of the main building there still is a well that probably used to be the only source of water in the university. This school was not as ancient as let's say the University of Salamanca, but its prestige was already quite high in the 17th century when Mazarini and Geronimo Colonna came there.

University of Alcala de Henares

ITALY

Here we stayed in Rome and after standing for hours in a colossal line to the Vatican could finally see the palatial chambers visited by my hero. We saw the famous Vatican library where the young Giulio Mazarini first met with the Pope of Rome, His Holiness Urban VIII, also the Vatican gardens frequented by Cardinal Bentivoglio.

An important stop in Italy was Ancona. This Adriatic port was the place where Mazarini served as captain in the army of the Papal states. His garrison was stationed some 10 miles from Ancona in Loreto. We came to Loreto to see the famous basilica. Here Mazarini had met with a priest who turned out to be a Spanish secret agent. Their talk was near the Holy House of the Virgin or Santa Casa inside the cathedral a sacred shrine believed to be miraculously transported to Italy from Palestine. Together with other pilgrims we entered the sanctuary. It was a cubicle, 28 by12.5 feet, made of roughly hewn stones almost blackened by their age. About twenty people were inside standing in front of the small image of the Virgin and Child in a niche. No one talked, some prayed silently. It seemed the air itself was filled with the energy of the people's faith and holiness of the shrine.

Santa Casa shrine in Loreto behind a marble screen

Ancona is now a large town with modern traffic moving past 16^th and 17^th century houses. We sat at a cafe on a high hill near the Cathedral of San Ciriaco which is believed to stand at the site of a Roman temple of Venus and looked down at the port and roofs of houses and churches. Of course the cafe did not exist at the time of Mazarini, but he definitely visited the cathedral and saw the same beautiful sight of town minus the modern ships and cranes of the port.

Cathedral of San Ciriaco in Ancona

We came to Falconara Marittima 10 miles north of Ancona. A tourist town of beaches and restaurants. Its ancient part is on the hills away from the sea. Here, in a square with old buildings and no people around we saw a very old church. It was in this church that we met the kind old priest who showed us the church's sacrarium and afterwards introduced us to some local people telling them that I was writing a book about their famous compatriot Giulio Mazarini or Mazzarino as they preferred to call him. They did not know much about him though and were surprised to hear that he had once lived in Ancona and visited their church in Falconara which was there in the 17^th century looking almost the same.

The amiable priest of Falconara became the prototype of Father Luciano who appears in Book 2 of the novel.

FRANCE

This was Mazarini's adoptive country. Here he became cardinal, Richelieu's assistant and, after Richelieu's and Louis XIII's death, the ruler of the kingdom. Here he waged and won the war against the princes and aristocrats and defended the reign of the young Louis XIV. In spite of all the slander poured on Mazarini by his detractors this Italian was a greater French patriot than most of the highly born native pretenders to the supreme power who fought against him.

Cardinal Mazarini

In Paris we went to see the building of the National Library occupying the mansion bought by Mazarini in 1650s. An imposing building with an elaborate gate and a guard near it who said he was guarding the entrance to the book stacks and did not know much about Mazarini. This used to be the cardinal's home. From here a short walk led him to the Palais Royal where the queen and Louis liked to stay.

Another Mazarini place in Paris is the lnstitut de France. It stands on the left bank of the Seine and is one of the eye-catchers in the center of Paris with its high dome and wide facade. Mazarini presented this building as a gift to the city of Paris to house The College of Four Nations later renamed Institute of France an institution for students coming from the territories conquered through the cardinal's military and diplomatic efforts: Alsace, d'Artois, Southern Flanders, and Roussilion. Behind the College starts a long street called Rue Mazarine.

These trips to Europe were very helpful in making the imagined Mazarini more real and full of life.