Free Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

even a dancing bear. But I was wrong. In the lee of a cart, a huge brown Carpathian beast, his cheek resting on folded paws, lay fast asleep; and even as I watched he began to stir. Sitting up, he yawned long and wide, rubbed his eyes, then dropped his paws in his lap and peered about with bleary goodwill, while his companion, blowing on embers, prepared breakfast for two. I rejoined Malek, and as we both munched, I noticed that our sheltering tree, tall as a medium-sized oak, belonged to a kind I had never seen. The bark was darker, oval leaves the colour of verdigris grew in symmetrical sprays and leathery pods dangled among them like dark runner-beans. It was a carob-tree. (Its blackish pods, with the faint, dull, haunting taste of fossil chocolate, are like teak to chew. A few years later I sometimes used to stem hunger with them on the southern rocks ofCrete, unconsciously imitating the Prodigal Son: they are the husks which he and the swine did eat, and they are still fed to pigs. ‘Locust-beans’ is an alternative name and some rashly think it was these, with wild honey, that kept St. John the Baptist alive in the desert.)
    I saddled Malek, and said goodbye. We headed east.
    It was time, and perhaps it is again, to see where we were, and to glance at the past of this extraordinary region. Since the centuries of Rome’s frontier along the Danube, the logical way from Buda—Strigonium—to the Levant lay due south along the river to its confluence with the Sava, where the huge and crucial fortress of Belgrade was later to spring up: then through the Balkan passes, across the future kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria to Adrianople and over Thrace to the Imperial City, or to the Hellespont, where Asia began. This was the overland link between the Kings of Hungary and the Byzantine Emperors; it was the path of Barbarossa and his crusaders on the journey which ended with the Emperor’s death in the chill flow of the Calycadnus. But the last crusading army but one—the Hungarians of King Sigismund, with his French, German, Burgundian and Wallachian allies and even, some say, a thousand English—kept on recklessly downstream until Bajazet the Thunderbolt, striking at Nicopolis, utterly destroyed them. (More later of this.) A final Crusade in the next generation was smashed to bits on the Black Sea; then Constantinople itself was lost. The same route in reverse had carried the Turks by fatal stages into the heart of Europe. They had subjugated the Balkans in the late Middle Ages and by Tudor times they were advancing upstream. Suleiman the Magnificent defeated King Louis II, [4] then he captured and burnt Buda; but in 1529 he laid unsuccessful siege to Vienna, and when the second attempt on Vienna failed at the end of the next century, the Ottoman tide began to turn. Charles of Lorraine, and then Prince Eugene stemmed their advance and harried them downstream along the same waterythoroughfare; and the Austrian army, awfully arrayed, boldly, by battery, besieged Belgrade. The Stadt und Festung fell and the time-honoured path became the itinerary for all Western travellers; in particular, for Ambassadors travelling to the Sublime Porte. Strings of carriages with outriders and escorts of musketeers, or ribboned houseboats with many oarsmen wended majestically downstream. (One must imagine Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu during a halt, half-furred and half-flimsy in Turkish dress, reading Pope’s Homer under a poplar tree.)
    Kinglake followed in the next century, but, infuriatingly, his narrative skips Hungary and only begins with the author mimicking the sound and the action of a steam-engine to edify the Pasha of Belgrade; for the coveted citadel was once again Turkish. The railway which eventually linked it to the West and to Constantinople has played a great part in novels of espionage and adventure.
    (Years after the present journey, I followed in all these ancient footsteps. If the river before