قصة الكتاب :
The scene of the story is laid among the virgin forests and inaccessible mountains of seventeenth century Transylvania, where a proud and valiant feudal nobility still maintained a precarious independence long after the parent state of Hungary had become a Turkish province. We are transported into a semi heroic, semi barbarous borderland between the Past and the Present, where Mediævalism has found a last retreat, and the civilizations of the East and West contend or coalesce. Bizarre, gorgeous, and picturesque forms flit before us rude feudal magnates and refined Machiavellian intriguers; superb Turkish pashas and ferocious Moorish bandits; noble, high minded ladies and tigrish odalisks; saturnine Hungarian heydukes, superstitious Wallachian peasants, savage Szeklers, and scarcely human Tartars. The plot too is in keeping with the vivid colouring and magnificent scenery of the story. The whole history of Transylvania, indeed, reads like a chapter from the Arabian Nights , but there are no more dramatic episodes in that history than those on which this novel is based the sudden elevation of a country squire (Michael Apafi) to the throne of Transylvania against his will by order of the Padishah, and the dark conspiracy whereby Denis Banfi, the last of the great Transylvanian magnates, was so foully done to death.