Changing Times

Poul Anderson's Rogue Sword (New York, 1960) shows the fourteenth century as a time of change. Is every century?

Lucas, the hero of Rogue Sword, is a transitional figure and a modern man:

the illegitimate son of a Venetian father and a Cretan mother;

 
learned the handling of boats from his stepfather;

learned Greek and Latin from mother's uncle, a monk;

at eleven, thanks to his natural father's family, was apprenticed to a Venetian counting house;

learned half a dozen languages in the cosmopolitan Republic but left urgently because of an affair with his employer's wife;

became a knight's attendant;

travelled with a Venetian merchant to the Crimea, Bokhara and Samarkand;

 
was captured and imprisoned by the Genoese but escaped;

travelled with a Tartar merchant and spent time in Cathay;

homesick, returned to the West but no longer felt at home there;

familiar from childhood with Catholic-Orthodox conflict, was influenced by the Cathayan belief in many (or no) roads to God;

 
found no reasonable answer to the question of what God wanted of men;

valued Oriental hygiene and Cathayan police procedures that prevented the planting of evidence after an accusation had been made;

gains an ambiguous social standing -

" 'If you were clearly of gentle rank...you're no simple commoner who must be punished for assaulting a cavalier. Confound it, Lucas, you aren't anything! Neither in birth nor nation nor way of thinking. Does anyone alive understand you? Do you understand yourself?' " (p. 146)

Maybe he is an American?