The Captain of the Janizaries

Albania and Constantinople in the fifteenth century: a boy taken by the Turks and raised as a janissary, Scanderbeg's revolt in the mountains, and the last spring of the Byzantine city. Ludlow was a Presbyterian minister and wrote this in 1886, when Scanderbeg was a name Americans had never heard; the siege chapters are still the clearest account in fiction. Fifty-eight plates, from Goya to Munch, follow the boy soldier from snow and country lanes to the markets and piazzas of the old Mediterranean world.