Baltasar Albueno (b. 1480, d. 1550), is the illegitimate, but only, son of a noble Spanish father and a Moorish slave girl. He is sent off to Venice with a lethal family secret, a gentleman's education, divided religious loyalties, no inheritance, and a missing foreskin. The Ottoman Turks, North African pirates, a corrupt and expansionist papacy, and the emerging nation states of France, Spain and Portugal are all threatening the well-being of the Venetian trading empire. A harried Venetian spymaster sees where the young man's true talents lie and recruits him as a secret agent. Baltasar—hand-reared, home-schooled, pampered, and trusting—is thrown into an unforgiving world of intrigue and warfare. In Venice, he makes the acquaintance of a variety of colorful outsiders: a young nobleman and gifted swordsman with sodomite tendencies, a converted Jew and brothel owner with literary aspirations, a lovely and erudite nun of noble lineage, and an ambitious teenage courtesan who becomes his friend and confidant. Even with the assistance of such worldly colleagues, Baltasar's reeducation and survival is in question to the very end as, with humor, self deprecation, and not inconsiderable pain, he revises his thinking about his employers, his profession, and his approach to life—and death.