The Adventurer

Name: The Adventurer
Rating: 4.2 (32 reviews)

by Mika Waltari Book 1 in the Mikael series.

Amazon

3.7(32)

Early sixteenth-century Europe. Mikael Karvajalka, an intelligent but restless young Finn of uncertain birth, leaves home with his companion Antti and is drawn into a continent being reordered by religion, dynastic ambition and war.

His travels carry him through Sweden, Paris, Reformation Germany and Italy. He encounters the German Peasants’ War, persecution and witch trials, the contest between Christian and Ottoman powers, and finally the Sack of Rome in 1527. The novel uses Mikael’s picaresque rise and repeated compromises to show how ordinary lives are caught in the political and religious violence of the age.

Mikael’s travels place the Reformation beside the dynastic wars that are redrawing Europe. Religious belief cannot be separated from employment, citizenship or political allegiance, and a man of uncertain birth may find opportunity precisely because institutions are being disrupted. The novel uses his restless movement to show how personal identity becomes negotiable in an age of confessional conflict and expanding state power.