Complete and unabridged, with 39 full-page plates by Piero del Pollaiuolo, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Albrecht Dürer. A condottiero of Urbino is ordered to court a woman he has never met on behalf of a man who is not worth her, and discovers he would rather fight the whole duchy. Sabatini was raised across Europe, spoke five languages, and chose English because, he said, all the best stories are told in it; this is his Renaissance Italy — poison, siege engines, and a hero who argues in epigrams. Thirty-nine plates of Renaissance painting, from Mantegna to Vasari, carry the sieges, campfires and court portraits of the world this story moves through.