Mikes Kelemen: Letters from Turkey (Törökországi levelek angol nyelven)

Description

After the unsuccessful War of Independence (1703-11), in which he had endeavoured to liberate Hungary and Transylvania from the Habsburgs, the prince and his entourage spent some five years in France before in 1717 going to Turkey at the invitation of Sultan Ahmed III. Some of the party eventually left, but Mikes, like Rákóczi, spent the rest of his life in Turkey.
Memoir had a considerable vogue at the time, and Mikes wrote in a well-established tradition: the combination of memoir and epistolary form, however, was a novelty in Hungarian, rooted in Mikes's years in France. The 207 Letters, never before englished in their entirety, were addressed over a period of forty years to an imaginary aunt in Constantinople. In them Mikes speaks of the Hungarians' daily life, their hopes and disappointments, and of current events in Turkey and beyond; he describes the deaths of some of the party, including that of the prince himself.