CASEUS BELLI

The wars were real. The cause, in this book, was cheese.
From Acre to the salt pans of Taghaza, from a grange near Parma to a stand at Genoa's Olive Gate, kings and merchants have always given their wars a public reason. Jerusalem. Gold. A strait. In Caseus Belli, the private reason is a master cheesemaker, and the living brine he will not surrender.

A Frankish widow buys her brother's life with a cave. A Massufa woman at Taghaza is shown a forged letter. A Parmesan maker is taken on the Modena road because his beloved's brother wants an office. The jar passes west, into the back room of Domenico Colombo, wool weaver and keeper of a cheese stand, where his son Cristoforo learns weights, loses Elena Cattaneo to a winter lie, and sails from Palos in 1492 with a map his wife has only half burned.

The dates are the public record. The affairs, the ransoms, and the jar are not. Columbus sits in the middle of a mock-history that runs from Richard and Saladin to the China coast, told straight, so the joke has something solid to lean on.

Caseus Belli is a work of fiction by Charles R. Powell. Historical persons and voyages appear as a frame. No archive claims that Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the further East went to war over cheese.