When we reached Rome, I as leader of our party (even if Cossa wasn't aware of that, but his father had put the entire expedition in my charge, sought out the house of Cossa's uncle in the Via Artanis, off the Tiber across from Vatican hill. Rome was a collection of shanties, thieves and vermin. The Black Death had reduced its population by one third, to 17,000. The city was wracked with factional strife among -the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Gaetani, Copocci, Stefaneschi and Annabaldi families. As we rode along the river on our first night, on a guided tour of the city by Cossa's Uncle Tomas, we saw wolves wandering near St. Peter's. `If this is Rome,' Cossa said, 'Bologna must be only a clearing in the forest.

`Bologna was a city when Rome was a, village,' his uncle said. `Rome looks like this because: it has lived off the papal interests like a mendicant. The whole population has allowed itself to depend on the hordes of pilgrims and litigants the papacy brings to Rome.'

Tomas Cossa was a one-eyed man who had been a sea captain it the family business, but whom the duke had judged to be too smart to stay at sea, there being plenty of other men to do his job. Tomas was a ruffian who was burned to dark leather by his lifetime in the sun. He had a hanging left eyelid which had frightened many people before he had killed them. His voice was coarsely hoarse from drinking Greek olive oil. He was the Cossas' chief intelligence agent and employed dozens of sub-agents in the seaports of Germany, France, England, Spain and North Africa, to locate and evaluate shipping destined for the Mediterranean.