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A must for lovers of historical fiction, particularly of the Crusading era, and the Byzantine Empire. Stephen Bondar has given us a fictionalized first-person account in the form of a private letter from a member of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Comnenus's Varangian Guard, describing the Battle of Myriocephalon (September 17 -18, 1176) in graphic and brutal detail.

Although fiction, the author has taken great care to stick close to the real historical sources for this watershed event, which unfortunately, like so much else of Byzantine (Later Roman) history is not well-known to students of the Middle Ages who focus on Western Europe. While Crusader knights of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and Principality of Antioch fought and died alongside their Byzantine (Greek) allies at Myriocephalon, which has been described as the single largest undertaking by a Christian monarch against a Muslim power in the twelfth century, it is barely mentioned in most western histories of the period.
Yet despite the importance of the subject, this is no dry recounting of facts and figures. Bondar's Varangian spares his reader, "who has the soul of a warrior" nothing of the terror and the horror of Mediaeval warfare writ both large and small. Nor of the valour of those who fought in it.
This is a work of historical fiction, that, while highly informative, is also highly entertaining, but not for the faint of heart. It is a tale that would have been at home in the pulps of the 1930's, of the likes of Oriental Stories. Warning : historical accuracy, but also very graphic violence.