In Berlin in the late 1670s, the Hungarian scholar, diplomat, and educator Jakab Harsányi Nagy signed an album amicorum, adapting a passage from Seneca’s De otio: “Non uni angulo nati sumus, civitatem nostram cursu solis metimur” (“we are not born into one corner, but measure our home with the path of the sun”). The motto, argues Gábor Kármán, was revealing: both justification and consolation for a man who some two decades previously had left the homeland to which he was never to return. Harsányi’s “odyssey” is the subject of Kármán’s impressively researched book. The first four chapters follow the protagonist on an academic peregrination through the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and back to the colleges of Nagyvárad and Gyulafehérvár in Transylvania, and explore his work as a scribe at the Transylvanian embassy in Constantinople, as secretary to Gheorghe Ştefan, the Moldavian voivode, or lord, during his exile in Russia and Sweden, and as court councillor to Frederick William at the electoral court of Brandenburg. Chapters 5 and 6 reflect on Harsányi’s “self-fashioning” as a “bureaucrat” and an “intellectual,” reconsider his commitment to “Puritanism,” and trace his changing “image of the Turks” in his letters from the Porte and in his later Colloquia familiaria Turcico Latina (1672), a series of dialogues in Turkish and Latin intended both as a textbook for language students and a firsthand observer’s account of the Ottoman society of his age.

Drawing inspiration from microhistory, Dr. Kármán seeks to place biography and context in a mutually illuminating juxtaposition. The details of Harsányi’s life, gleaned from his letters and the paper trail he left in the wake of his travels across Europe, are used “to reach a deeper insight into various spheres of Central European social environments in the seventeenth century” (1). At the same time, “context can help fill in the gaps left by the lack of sources” (2); the documented careers of Harsányi’s contemporaries and a reconstruction of the norms governing the social milieus through which he moved enable the historian to explain his subject’s intentions and motivations, even if, as the author acknowledges, “many of these answers remain in a conditional mode” (4). On the whole, these aims are achieved with skill and erudition. The analysis of Harsányi’s activities in Constantinople during the 1650s, for example, illuminates the workings of the Transylvanian embassy: the fraught relationship between Harsányi the scribe and a succession of orators and the interconnections between diplomacy at the Porte and the political struggles in Eastern Europe (Harsányi’s intercession, for example, on behalf of the future Mihnea III to secure the throne of Wallachia). All of this adds a valuable perspective to recent work by Eric Dursteler, John-Paul Ghobrial, and others on the functioning of European diplomatic communities in the Ottoman capital.

Elsewhere, the obscure period of Harsányi’s life between his release from captivity in the infamous “fortress of the Seven Towers” and his employment in the service of Gheorghe Ştefan is thoughtfully pieced together from the extant scraps of evidence. The risk here, however, is that the thread of the biography is lost in a maze of contextual detail. The account of Bengt Skytte and his plan for a university at the court in Brandenburg, for example—though interesting in itself—ultimately contributes little to the question of what brought Harsányi to Berlin. Likewise, the lengthy discussion of Andreas Müller and the speculations linking him to circles of Oriental scholars in England turn up almost nothing on the publishing history of Harsányi’s Colloquia. This failure to establish any connection between Harsányi and the broader learned world somewhat weakens the later analysis of Harsányi’s “self-construction as a scholar” and attempt “to fashion himself . . . as an expert on Ottoman-related questions” (240).

Such occasional red herrings, however, detract little from an impressive feat of historical detective work. Exploring archival sources in Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, Kármán has produced a valuable study that more than substantiates his claim for Jakab Harsányi Nagy as “an intriguing object of biography” (1). The book will be of interest not only to historians of early modern Hungary, but to those concerned with seventeenth-century Orientalism, the history of diplomacy, and Ottoman-European relations.