The book by Kondraty Birkin (P.P. Karataev), an almost forgotten Russian writer, offers readers a rare opportunity to feel the atmosphere of palace secrets, intrigues and scandals in Russia, England, Italy, France and other states in the period of the 16th–18th centuries. Glory and the pride of Turkey, the thunder and horror of Southern and South-Eastern Europe, Suleiman II (more correctly, the first) belongs to those giant rulers whose appearance on earth can be likened to the appearance of a comet or a terrible meteor in the sky. This personality contains within itself the most contradictory qualities and vices, combining a broad, educated mind with ardent, unbridled, animal passions, generosity with inhumanity, unyielding will with childish compliance, suspicion with gullibility, deceit with directness.