Part One of the Baroque Cycle contains:

• Discussions about history with young Benjamin Franklin.
• A water-powered computer at the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts.
• Murder at Trinity College.
• A voyage back to Europe from Boston.
• Room-sharing with Isaac Newton.
• Natural Philosophy during the Plague Year outside of London.
• Pirates in Plymouth Bay.
• London burning.
• Meetings of the Royal Society.
• The unseen flows of precious metals.
• War against the Dutch.
• Suspicious and dangerous activities involving gunpowder.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz coming to London.
• Dying of the stone.
• Bankruptcy.
• A mistress.
• Two boys in the execution relief business.
• Chasing an ostrich through the Turkish camp before Vienna.
• Abduction from Qwghlm by a band of Barbary Corsairs led by a very perverted Personage.
• The Leipzig Trade Fair.
• Leibniz trying to find investors for his mines in the Harz Mountains.
• Walpurgisnacht.
• Amsterdam, the financial centre of the world.
• Paris, smelliest city of the world.
• Disputes about diplomatic protocol between the Ambassadors of England and France.
• Ice skating in The Hague.
• Staging a civil war to manipulate the stock market.
• Persecution turns Huguenots into galley slaves.
• Sanity succumbing to syphilis.
• The politest man in France.
• The Vagabond King crashing the Sun King's party.
• Would-be slave-traders enslaved by the Barbary Corsairs.
• Performing spying and other services to William of Orange.
• The death bed of Charles II.
• Rising in rank at the court of Versailles.
• A dispute between Leibniz and Newton that splits the scientific community in two camps.
• Sand-sailers on the beach.
• A soldier with a grudge.
• Sex on Huygen's dinner table.
• Defending the Protestant Defender.
• Being tortured by a secret court at Westminster Palace.
• Imprisonment in the Tower of London.
• A comprehensive report to Louis XIV by His Royal Cryptanalyst.
• James II in a bar fight.
• The central role of childbirth in the political sphere.
• Being cut for the stone by the world's foremost surgeon.