Poland and the Teutonic Order at the turn of the fifteenth century: young Zbyshko of Bogdanets vows three peacock plumes from Knights' helmets to a little Mazovian girl, Danusia, and the vow draws him, his uncle Matsko and her father Yurand into a private war with the Order that runs through captivity, torture and the Lithuanian forests to the field of Grunwald in 1410, where the Knights are broken. Sienkiewicz wrote it while his country did not exist on the map, and Poles read it as instructions. This is Jeremiah Curtin's complete translation, which he made from the finished novel. Sienkiewicz won the Nobel Prize five years after it appeared. Fifty-four plates of castles, sieges and ships, from Peel Castle to the siege of Malta, give the medieval warfare of the novel its visual counterpart.