Atuwase 1 - The Royal Scholar

Around 1480, a prince plants his stool in the mud at the edge of a kingdom not yet his own and says simply: "This will do." Generations later, his descendant Domingos — baptized in a mission chapel his own grandfather welcomed, educated at the University of Coimbra, knighted into the Order of Christ, and married to a Portuguese noblewoman in 1610 — returns home in 1611 to a kingdom watching to see which crown he'll choose. In 1625, he is crowned Olu Atuwase I: the first ruler of Iwere Kingdom to wear silver instead of coral, the seventh in a line that began with a stool planted in the mud. Based on the real, documented life of a 17th-century Itsekiri king, The Royal Scholar is a story of what it costs — and what it builds — when a person holds two inheritances instead of choosing between them.