The Puppeteers: Aus dem Feuer

SYNOPSIS

Richard, a bastard from Augsburg's immensely rich Fugger family, is raised as novice in a far-way German monastery' school, near his converted Saracene mother Zobeida, but the open-minded abbot's hands are tied when the papal-mandated inquisitor Heinrich Insistoris imposes a reign of heresy-paranoid terror. Zobeida is raped by a frustrated monk, who delivers her to the stake to save his own neck. Grief-maddened, Richard stabs the inquisitor half-blind and flees, but is rescued from death row dungeon by Fugger's discrete minder Eberding, who starts his mundane education to become a trustee in the Fugger mining and financial empire, rising to chief accountant. Richard is obsessed with revenge on the inquisition, hence motivated to help Jakob Fugger, who needs a crusade-friendly pope to stop the Ottoman threat to his Hungarian silver and copper mines, prevent the Holy See falling to another 'witchhunter'.* So they set out over the Alps to prepare the electoral conclave of cardinal Sforza. On the way, Richard falls in hopeless love with gallantly saved gypsy in trouble Saviya, who may even expose Richard to the inquisition and hence compromise Fugger's mission.