READ EXCERPT: 'The Secret Supper,' by Javier Sierra
March 27, 2006 — -- Like the controversial best-seller "The Da Vinci Code," "The Secret Supper" takes on Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting of Jesus Christ eating with his disciples the night before he was betrayed and turned over to the Romans to face death. "The Secret Supper" is a novel full of intrigue, religious zeal and murder. The author, Javier Sierra, suggests Da Vinci's painting is full of hidden heretic messages -- and that the book is the key to unlocking them.
Read an excerpt of the book below.
I cannot recall a more dangerous and tangled puzzle than the one Iwas called upon to solve in the New Year of 1497, when the duchyof Ludovico il Moro lay in its painful death throes, while the PapalStates watched on.
The world was then a dangerous, fast-changing place, a hellishquicksand in which fifteen centuries of faith and culture threatenedto collapse under the onslaught of new ideas imported fromthe Far East. Suddenly, from one day to the next, Plato's Greece,Cleopatra's Egypt and even the extravagant curiosities of the ChineseEmpire that Marco Polo had discovered seemed to deservegreater praise than our own Scriptural stories.
Those were troubled days for Christendom. We were ruled by asimoniac Pope (a Spanish devil crowned under the name ofAlexander VI who had shamelessly bought his own tiara at the latestconclave), governed by several princes seduced by the beautyof all things pagan, and threatened by Turkish hordes armed to theteeth, waiting for an opportunity to invade the Western Mediterraneanand convert us to the faith of Islam. In all truth, it can besaid that never before, in almost fifteen hundred years of history,had our own faith stood so utterly defenseless.
And there, in the midst of it all, was this servant in God,Agostino Leyre, the very same who is writing to you now. I foundmyself at the threshold of a century of transformation, an epoch inwhich the world was shifting its borders daily and demanding fromus all an unprecedented effort to adapt. It was as if, with every passing hour, the Earth became larger and larger, constantly obliging
us to update our store of geographical knowledge. We, men of thecloth, had already begun to realize that there would no longer beenough of us to preach to a world peopled by millions of souls whohad never heard of Christ, and the more skeptical among us foresawa period of imminent chaos that would bring into Europe awhole new tide of pagans.
