The Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the phenomenal expansion of the Ottoman Empire thereafter produced a ready market in the West for works about the origins, history and institutions of the Turks. Theodore Spandounes, himself of a Greek refugee family from Constantinople who had settled in Venice, was one of the first to publish such a work. Its final version, published in 1538, was written in Italian. This book offers the first English translation of the complete text, with a historical commentary and explanatory notes.