Lew Wallace - American writer, author of the famous "Ben-Hur" - was first a lawyer, and then a governor and general of the northerners during the American Civil War, then an envoy to Turkey, where the main action of the novel "The Eternal Wanderer, or The Fall of Constantinople." Working on the book cost the author six years of tireless work. The plot is based on one of the most amazing events in world history - the capture of Byzantium by the Turks. According to Wallace, it would be difficult to find a more suitable canvas for a work that has become an amazing fusion of historical fact and fiction, reality and myth. “I tried to present a true picture of the struggle of opposing civilizations that collided during the capture of Constantinople, although I gave room for imagination, but within the limits of a sober study of historical truth,” the author admitted. In this edition, the novel is published without abbreviations, in a new translation (the novel was first published in in Russian in 1896 under the title “The Fall of Constantinople”). The book features illustrations by the wonderful Czech artist Wenceslav Cerny.