The Sea-Kings of the Mediterranean

This history of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta—more commonly known as the Order of Saint John or the Knights of Malta in the modern era—covers the period from their founding in A.D. 1099 as a charitable order called the Knights Hospitaller, tasked with caring for sick pilgrims in Jerusalem, through their centuries of patrolling the Mediterranean against Muslim piracy and aggression, until the end of their military aspect during the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century.

The story of the Sea-Kings is an often ignored but crucial part of Western history.  The author, Reverend George Fyler Townsend, most famous as the translator of the standard English edition of Aesop’s Fables (1867), published The Sea-Kings of the Mediterranean in 1872 through the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London, specifically because he felt that young men of his era were neglecting an important part of their history, a part of their history that is full of “fiery courage, bold exploits, and brilliant achievements.”  And if they were neglecting it then, how much worse are things now?

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.