The Prisoner of Avignon

Education had once been a privilege reserved for the wealthy, and Latin had been the universal language. Pomona and Severus could still understand this portion of the materials, but they could not make sense of those written in Italian and Spanish. Fortunately, they still recognized the dates written in Arabic numerals, though very few diaries had survived to the present day.

Few people had possessed the habit of keeping diaries to begin with, and after so many years of wear and tear, as well as Napoleon's plundering, even fewer books remained in Venice's libraries.

He was also looking for the Knights Templar's money. After all, there were many legends concerning where that fortune had gone.

But Pomona felt that the French king had probably used that money to buy the Pope's throne.

Nearly all the darkness of the Middle Ages had been connected to French popes. Urban, who launched the First Crusade, had been French. Clement V, who framed the Knights Templar alongside the "Handsome Man," had also been French. From 1305 to 1389, every Pope had been French, and the Holy See had even been located in Avignon, France. During the Middle Ages, with warfare raging throughout Italy, the Pope had been forced to leave Rome and take temporary residence in peaceful Avignon. Who could have expected that temporary stay to last six hundred years?

Pomona remembered it vividly. Only British students did not receive discounted admission to the Golden House, so she pulled out some promotional materials about it and discovered that the building had originally belonged to the Contarini family.

The 97th, 100th, 104th, and 106th Doges of Venice had all been from the Contarini family. Clement X was known for persecuting Protestants. If the Contarini family also hated Protestants, then it made sense that their museum