The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys depicts the life of a Dutch seventeenth-century sailmaker, the alleged author of a book of breathtaking overseas travels, which became a bestseller across Western Europe after its first publication in Amsterdam in 1676, and is a key source for Russian and Iranian history. With this first comprehensive investigation of this book and its author, Kees Boterbloem provides unique insight into the precociously modern mindset of the Dutch, early capitalism, the European view of non-European cultures, Russia's modernization, and the relation between Islam and Christianity in the seventeenth century.