Published in 1862, this was the first major Czech prose work to be translated into English, and proved very popular.

The figure of the renegade - a European Christian or Jew who had converted to Islam and was now serving the Ottoman sultan - is omnipresent in all genres produced by those early modern Christian Europeans who wrote about the Ottoman Empire. As few contemporaries failed to remark, converts were disproportionately represented among those who governed, administered, and fought for the sultan. Unsurprisingly, therefore, renegades have attracted considerable attention from historians of Europe as well as students of European literature. Until very recently, however, Ottomanists have been surprisingly silent on the presence of Christian-European converts in the Ottoman military-administrative elite. The Sultan's Renegades inserts these 'foreign' converts into the context of Ottoman elite life to reorient the discussion of these individuals away from the present focus on their exceptionality, towards a qualified appreciation of their place in the Ottoman imperial enterprise and the Empire's relations with its neighbours in Christian Europe. Drawing heavily on Central European sources, this study highlights the deep political, religious, and cultural entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe beyond the Mediterranean Basin as the 'shared world' par excellence. The existence of such trans-imperial subjects is not only symptomatic of the Empire's ability to attract and integrate people of a great diversity of backgrounds, it also illustrates the extent to which the Ottomans participated in processes of religious polarization usually considered typical of Christian Europe in this period. Nevertheless, Christian Europeans remained ambivalent about those they dismissed as apostates and traitors, frequently relying on them for support in the pursuit of familial and political interests.

The bibliography volume of the three-volume East Looks West: East European Travel Writing in Europe collates travel writing published in book form by east Europeans travelling in Europe from ca. 1550 to 2000. It is intended as a fundamental research tool, collecting together travel writings within each national/linguistic tradition, and enabling comparative analysis of such material. It fills an important gap in the existing reference literature, both in western and east European languages, and will be of use to those working in the growing fields of comparative travel writing, regional and national identities, and postcolonialism.These texts exist in surprisingly large numbers, and include writings of high literary quality as well as of historical interest, but they have been relatively little studied as a genre. Much of this material is rare and difficult to find, even in national libraries. As a result, there are few bibliographical surveys of the literature of east European travel and self-representation, and none that are region-wide or comparative in scope. This is the third volume of a three-part set of East Looks West, Vol. 1 - An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe; and Vol. 2 - A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe.