Set against a backdrop of pre-Renaissance Italy (a larger than life time, with swaggering condottieri, Machiavellian plotting, and high stakes in politics and war) convent-bred orphan Bellarion is sidetracked almost immediately upon setting out on a journey from the monastery at Cigliano to study at Pavia. The adventure and practical lessons he finds along the way replace the further education he craves...Aware of this, the anonymous chronicler who has preserved it for us goes on to comment that the Princess said at once too much and too little. He makes phrases in his turn-which I will spare you-and seeks to prove, that, if the moieties of divinity and beastliness are equally balanced in a man, that man will be neither good nor bad. Then he passes on to show us a certain poor swineherd, who rose to ultimate eminence, in whom the godly part so far predominated that naught else was humanly discernible, and a great prince-of whom more will be heard in the course of this narrative-who was just as the beasts that perish, without any spark of divinity to exalt him. These are the extremes. For each of the dozen or so intermediate stages which he discerns, our chronicler has a portrait out of history, of which his learning appears to be considerable.