Book excerpt: In the year 1444, near long-lost Constantinople, a Christian monarch treacherously breaks his truce with the Muslims, but Fate double crosses him. He is crushed in battle. All of his personal knights are slain, and he vanishes without a trace. Some years later, on Madeira Island, 2,500 miles to the west, a mysterious Knight of Saint Catherine of Mount Sinai marries into the Portuguese elite . . . and has a son. Astonishing as it may seem, these two impossibly remote events have been connected -- and the clouded genesis of Christopher Columbus is thereby once and forever resolved. The key to unlocking the mystery was waiting in a place where nobody had ever looked before. 25 years of research has pieced together a stunning array of artifacts and data, from one end of Europe to another, from Asia, Africa and the Americas: a chapel ruin, a ceiling mural in a private palace, DNA test results, an impressive diversity of documents, keenly analyzed . . . and a sword, unearthed by a 19th century Bulgarian peasant, that found its way to a museum in Saint Petersburg. The study and comparison of carefully censored State archives also helped explain this life -- hitherto enshrouded in the deceitful machinations of power politics, false identities, and false discoveries in the Age of Exploration. Myth has at last been separated from fact, exposing what actually transpired. Being extremely fond of writing memoirs, journals and letters, the man known as Columbus left a great deal of this overwhelming proof himself. Many other clues have been painstakingly gathered and analyzed. Some were cryptically displayed in the details of portraiture and esoteric writings, others in the most obvious features of one of the greatest works of Spanish Baroque drama, on heraldry, on a gravestone, via signatures and pseudonyms. What emerges is the picture of a consummate double-agent, with a bold and grandiose agenda. Enter this 500-year-old labyrinth and discover the unimaginable: a medieval conspiracy so audacious, so massive, and so well executed that it fooled the world for half a millennium.The Christopher Columbus you knew will be history.