[The Great Fear] This is the story of the illegitimate son of a king with a slave. He started as a persecuted slave on a pirate’s ship to turn into the man who shook Byzantium with his tempestuous revolutionary actions and his fiery passions. The man truly existed, as the famous historian Sir Steven Runciman discovered, but he is totally unknown. He is not referred to in official history books, and the Church made sure he remained in the dark because of his extremely subversive actions. Breathless readers follow his shocking experiences in the dens of the Church, in the monasteries’ dungeons and in Mount Athos –where he was accused of killing innocent monks–, in palaces and in the Emperors’ sanctuaries, in brothels with his friends the beggars, the whores and the actresses, in the beds of gorgeous women and young slaves, in rebellions against the feuds which he himself instigated in the name of a socialist society, and finally in the secret sect that tried to revive the paganism of the ancient Greeks. Our hero was controversial and had diabolical virtues. He was loved by the people and particularly by women; he lived intensely and remained true to his vision of social justice until the day he was arrested and executed in the crudest of manners by the Spanish Inquisition. |