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 boredom of the quasi-monastic routine that Rakoczi imposed on his exiled court and the impossibility of befriending the neighbours. There are descriptions of various places and events, discussions of silk-worm farming and the propagation of wheat, comments on the education of boys and girls - Mikes is an early feminist - and accounts of political activity in Turkey and abroad, together with a campaign up the Danube and an embassy to Wallachia."--BOOK JACKET.