The story of the Bavarian Johannes Schiltberger is published in the first edition. There will be 11 editions in the 17th century. He is the page of a Bavarian nobleman taken prisoner in the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396. He spends thirty years as a slave, first to the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid, then to the Mongols of Tamerlane when they defeat the Ottomans. He is taken to the steppes and then to the Caucasus and Crimea, eventually managing to escape and return to Istanbul. He returns home in 1427. It circulates as a manuscript story, and with the spread of printing around 1450, it is one of the first stories to be widely distributed throughout the West.
