If you read the first volume, you will know that Doctor Faustus really existed. The Master’s Apprentice tells the story of how Faust became the restless, egocentric, and yet somehow lovable magician, astrologer, and quack. The second volume describes Faust’s (supposed) demise. My version doesn’t follow Goethe’s complicated plot (thank God!), but I still tried to accommodate some of his themes. You could say that Goethe is my very own master. And I’d say that isn’t the poorest choice for a writer.
Unlike in the first, more personal part, this time the big politics of the time affect the lives of the protagonists. The 1519 election of the German king is easily on par with any current American presidential campaign. Just like in the US today, the candidates needed one thing more than anything else: money, and lots of it. The king of the Germans was elected by the seven German electors. The candidates were the grandson of the late emperor Maximilian, Charles, who had grown up in the Netherlands and Spain and knew the German Empire only from tales; and Maximilian’s old opponent, King Francis I of France. With the help of the Fuggers and nearly one million guilders, Charles indeed managed to bribe the German electors and decide the election of the German king in his favor. Nonetheless, it was a close race, and the German Empire almost got a French king. Who knows how our history would have developed then? In any case, Francis sulked following his defeat and retreated to the Loire Valley to work on his castles. In that regard he resembles the Bavarian fairy-tale king whose memory I honor in my historical thriller The Ludwig Conspiracy. If you’d like to learn more about the Hollywood-worthy wrestling of the two powerful rulers Charles and Francis, I recommend my novel The Castle of Kings.
In Goethe’s Faust Part II, the emperor’s dire need for money leads first to the manufacture of paper money and then to devastating inflation. In my novel, the philosopher’s stone takes its place. While the formula to make gold was never discovered, many scientists at the beginning of the sixteenth century considered it not a silly idea but a real possibility. What today we call chemistry was then known as alchemy, a field that the real Doctor Faustus must have been rather good at. I liked the idea of various powerful leaders struggling to extract this secret from Faust—and all the while he doesn’t even know it.
Aside from money, war also has a significant role in Goethe’s play. In my search for the perfect weapon I happened across igró pir, the Greek fire. It was a top-secret incendiary that belonged to the most feared weapons of antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Components of Greek fire are petroleum, sulfur, burnt lime, and several other ingredients. If correctly produced, it can’t be put out with water and sets alight anything it touches. I was surprised to learn that this miracle weapon completely vanished after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, at the latest. In my novel, Leonardo da Vinci succeeds at reproducing igró pir. Consequently, questions arise that are comparable to the questions scientists around five hundred years later must ask themselves on the subjects of nuclear power and genetics: How far may science go? What ethical boundaries are there, and how can we protect those boundaries? And so we arrive at Leonardo da Vinci.
Next to Faust, Leonardo is the hero of this second volume. If you had to define the Renaissance with one person, he is the figure who epitomizes this era. Has there ever been a greater genius? Painter, sculptor, inventor, anatomist, mechanic, architect, musician, and, on top of everything, he was left-handed, a vegetarian, a pacifist, and homosexual. It’s easy to become addicted once you start reading about Leonardo da Vinci. For beginners I would recommend Walter Isaacson’s gripping biography and Stefan Klein’s Leonardo’s Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World, a highly entertaining read. Both books have helped me greatly during my research and are as thrilling to read as novels. From those works I borrowed Leonardo’s gloomy predictions for the future of mankind. How would Leonardo react to the possibility of genetically manipulating babies? What would he—pacifist and inventor of war machines—say about the atom bomb? Our modern-day scientific way of thinking had its beginnings in the Renaissance.
Leonardo da Vinci left behind around ten thousand sketches and notes, and many of them have now been lost. Who knows, maybe there’s a formula for the legendary igró pir among the missing documents? By the way, apparently Leonardo often considered having his anatomical knowledge recorded and bound in a book titled Figura Umana. But the master was working on so many projects at once that he never got around to it—only in my novel.
As in every good story, there are not just heroes but also villains. In my research for the first part of my Faust saga, I came across the French knight Gilles de Rais, who lived at the time of the Hundred Years’ War and was a close companion of Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orléans. Almost everything I wrote about him is true—as horrible as it seems.
Gilles de Rais became a marshal of France, but he lived beyond his means. After trying to produce gold, he grew enamored of the idea of invoking the devil. To please Satan, but also taking personal pleasure in it, he murdered hundreds of children. He tortured them in the cruelest manner and sometimes even violated their dead bodies. If the devil ever existed in human form, then Gilles de Rais comes very
