About this author
I’ve begun researching North American pre-contact history more than a decade ago, after spending some years with the Classic Ancient Mediterranean.
From Republican Rome and their resemblance of democracy I was hurled straight into the Great League of the Iroquois, studying their wise and amazingly detailed constitution. Fascinated, I couldn’t help comparing both political structures, finding a few resembling points between the two. The articles, excitedly typed on the subject, I cannot find today, which is a great relief - I wasn’t grown up enough to write on such matters ten years ago.
The same fate awaited my first novel, which was far from being satisfactory both technically and otherwise (very ambitiously I went for the story of the Great Peacemaker himself, too young to realize that some historical characters you do not tamper with while writing fiction).
I see it today as another curve on the learning process of a growing up writer.
“The Cahokian” is a wholly different story. Two years ago I was mature enough to start working on a new project, being through with a thorough research and a few writing classes. This time I knew better than to target real, even if long since dead, characters, building an accurate historical setting instead. Inspired by ‘Shogun’ of James Clavell, I wanted to present a somewhat similar clash between two, very different cultures, when somewhere around the 14th century the luxurious but declining monarchists of the Mississippi meet the fierce democrats of the Great Lakes. And not a peaceful meeting it was.
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The Cahokian
By 1,250 AD the Great Mound of Cahokia on the Mississippi River was the center of the largest North American empire, populated more densely than the 13th-century London. A hundred years later the Great Mound lay abandoned.
“The Cahokian” is a historical novel, based on the final years of that empire.
The chief warlord of Cahokia - a magnificent center of the Mississippians - is embroiled in a dangerous political conspiracy. An attempt to escape the consequences brings him northwards, up the O-hi-o River and into the lands of the powerful League of the Iroquois, where his life takes an unexpected turn.
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