House of Niccolo Series

Dorothy Dunnett is the author of the world-famous Lymond Chronicles set during the sixteenth century, as well as the House of Niccolo series. She was awarded the OBE for her services to literature in 1992, and lived in Edinburgh.

The House of Niccolo - set in the 15th and 16th centuries and ranging all over Europe and the Mediterranean while being anchored in Scotland. The House of Niccolò consist of eight historical novels 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 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.