In this vivid and powerful novel of the late Middle Ages, a time when three Popes reigned simultaneously in the world, Richard Condon tells the epic story of Baldassare Cossa: lawyer, army general and prelate, born into a family of pirates, who twice refused to accept the papacy but who left a name reviled in Church history after he was finally trapped into becoming Pope John XXIII.

 

All the elements of gripping drama are here: lust, greed, murder, intrigue and the power of history. Banking problems within the Vatican today are foreshadowed as, almost five hundred years earlier, Pope John is manipulated by Cosimo di Medici through his agent, the Marchesa di Artegiana. She becomes mistress and counselor to the Pope even as he tries to attain fulfillment with the other love of his life: Catherine Visconti, Duchess of Milan.

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In A Trembling Upon Rome a fated cast of the most powerful men and women of medieval Europe is assembled: Sigismund, King of Hungary and King of the Romans; Count John of Nassau, the warrior Archbishop and Elector of Mainz; John Hus, the Bohemian religious; nine popes and hundreds of others. Intrigue and maneuvering within an enormous tapestry of European politics culminate at the Council of Konstanz, where a medieval city is transformed into a carnival for the first densely populous nominating convention of international purpose in world history. 

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A Trembling Upon Rome is a dazzlingly original, enormously readable novel from an author whose work has never failed to astonish and delight.