I was born in Hamburg in 1355, twelve years before my master. Our city, with others in the league, served as an intermediary between Western Europe and the East – as did Italy. But the Italian East and our East were different things. Their East was older and richer. Ours was in the process of colonization. Russia – if one could call it that and not Western Tibet, for the Mongols ruled there – was in a state of primitive barbarism, covered with forests and fringed by a sea rendered inaccessible by ice.

My father, a cannoneer, was killed at Helsingborg defending the league against Waldemar IV. I was ten years old when my mother, with about a hundred other young German widows, took me aboard a Hanseatic cog in a convoy of six cogs and two escort ships, to sail for the island of Sicily, where husbands were waiting for them. When we were well into the Mediterranean Sea, two ships of the Cossa private fleet attacked us. Our cogs were sunk. My mother drowned. I remember her so well and I love her to this day. I was pulled out of the sea and thrown like a fish into the bottom of a boat. I slept there until I was flung ashore, dragged to a warehouse and locked in, alone and frightened. That is what I remember about my origins.

In time, I was told that I was the slave of Baldassare Cossa, the eldest son of the Duke of Santa Gata, whose pirates had drowned my mother. All the German women who survived were sent off to the slave market at Bari to be sold. My mother escaped that disgrace.

Baldassare Cossa, my master, was five years old. I was seventeen. The duke gave me my new name. I had a serviceable and honourable name Franz Heller which my family had defended throughout time, but to the duke I was nameless. He said at my Christian Baptism ceremony; laid on to entertain his crew ashore, and which I could do nothing to prevent, ‘Ellera means ivy in the Italian language and this Franco Ellera will cling to my son.'