The Walls of Byzantium will be the first book of The Mistra Chronicles series. The series will tell the story of the last seven decades of the Byzantine Empire, up to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1460. It will begin and end in the little Despotate (Kingdom) of Mistra which, with Constantinople, was all that was left of the 2,000-year Roman Empire by the end of the 14th century. It is a tale of two cities in the Despotate, Monemvasia and Mistra, and three families whose destinies were to become entwined with the fate of Byzantium. It is a story of five clashing empires (the Byzantine, Ottoman, Timurid, Venetian and Ming) and two renaissances, those in Italy and Ming China. It was a time of heroes and giants and monsters, a time of fantasy when truth was stranger than fiction. And it’s all true.