Letters from Turkey

"Plague in Poland called a temporary halt to the turbulent career of Prince Ferenc Rakoczi II of Transylvania. A dramatic flight from Danzig, a stormy voyage up a pirate-infested Baltic and a crossing of a North sea menaced by French privateers brought him and his tiny retinue to Hull, where his ship was placed in quarantine; the Transylvanians - one of them the author of this book - were obliged to spend Christmas 1711 at anchor in the Humber estuary." "There was in Ferenc II's retinue a young nobleman named Kelemen Mikes. He was widely read in Latin and French, and left no small corpus of translations of philosophical works, together with the present book, his only piece of original writing. The Letters from Turkey are addressed to an aunt living in Pera, a suburb of Constantinople (the modern Beyoglu in Istanbul), but no such person can be shown to have existed, and in fact the work is a memoir in the form of 207 letters, written at irregular intervals over forty-one years." "The range of topics covered in the Letters is extensive. Some are on purely domestic themes, revealing the hopelessness of the prospect of seeing Hungary again, Mikes' thwarted desire to be married, the bor