The King of the Mountains (original: Le roi des montagnes) was written by Edmond About. The French About (1828-1885) was a writer, satirist and academician who published, among a number of other works, The Man with the Broken Ear (original: L' homme à l'oreille cassée), an early (1880) story about suspended animation.

Hadji Stavros is the leader of a band of thugs who roam the Attic mountains of Greece and kidnap travelers for ransom. Stavros is no ordinary any gang leader, however. He is exceptional in a number of respects. He began as a patriotic pirate fighting against the Turks during the Greek War of Independence and then continued the war against them from land. Stavros became an international hero because of this; Byron dedicated an ode to him, Parisian poets compared him to the heroes of the classics, and citizen organizations in France, England and Russia sent him money to continue the fight against the Turks. But when the war ended Stavros ran into difficulties, because he was unwilling to pay taxes for the money he had been given. So he continued his banditry, this time focusing on travelers. His success attracted others to him, so that by the time of The King of the Mountains he has an enormous gang who obey him completely. (Those who do not are killed). Stavros' profits are enormous, in part because he is not choosy about his crimes:

a simple theft or a glorious raid was equally welcome. This wise impartiality rapidly increased his fortune. Shepherds on learning that they had a chance with him of getting as much gold as glory, flocked under his lead, and thus it came to pass that, thanks to his reputation, he soon had an army at his command.¹

The other members of his gang spend their money as bandits usually do, but Stavros is much too wise for that. He has a daughter, and he felt the need to guarantee her future, so he temporarily left the gang and educated himself. He traveled around Europe, learning what he could from civilization, and then returned to the mountains. Rather than keep his money in the mountains he had it invested overseas, in England and in Europe, and from the mountains he sends daily letters to his bankers telling them how to manage his finances. (He invests conservatively, preferring low-yield but reliable accounts).

Stavros is called “The King of the Mountains” because of his complete rule of the area. The local Greeks continue to see him as a hero, even though he sometimes preys on him. The Greeks sympathize with the brigands and “scolded publicly and petted in private”²Stavros. He augments his income by hiring out to politicians and kidnapping their enemies. Stavros’s gang is strong enough to even loot ships. But events do not always go Stavros’ way, and by the end of The King of the Mountains his army is dead or scattered and he has retired and is trying to become the government’s Minister of Justice.

The King of the Mountains was a bestseller in the late 1850s, to the point that it “out sold all novels in Europe of the 1850s.”³ The novel was extremely unpopular with the Greeks, who felt unfairly maligned by About. About had written about them previously, in Greece and Greeks of the Present Day (1855), “in which he compared modern Greek society unflatteringly with that of ancient Greece,”⁴ so the Greeks had good reason to feel that he bore them a grudge or was prejudiced towards them. But the truth was that brigandage was a serious problem in Greece in the mid-century decades and the state of affairs was close to what About described. The novel as a whole was what the Encyclopedia Britannica called “a pardonable exaggeration.”⁵

The King of the Mountain is typical of the mid-century räuberromane. The original tendency in the räuberromane to portray the outlaw as a passionate man who cannot live by society’s laws was done away with by the middle of the nineteenth century. What replaced it was the portrayal of the outlaw as a powerful and uncomplicated villain who is nonetheless the protagonist of the story. The main flaw in The King of the Mountain is About’s approval of Stavros. He lacks the complicated morality and nobility of the Prichards’ Don Q (see: The Don Q Adventures) and has far fewer redeeming qualities. The King of the Mountain is inferior in most respects to the Don Q stories. About was not the stylist that the Prichards were, and lacks their economy and talent for the mot juste. (The problem may of course be in the translation, though that is doubtful).

The King of the Mountain is an entertaining tale of mountain thieves—modern readers will quickly see why it sold so well—but there are far better examples of räuberromane, both morally and as literature.

Print: Edmond About, The King of the Mountains. Los Angeles, CA: Hardpress Publishing, 2012.

¹ Edmond About, The King of the Mountains (Akron, OH: St. Hubert Guild, 1902), 27.

² About, The King of the Mountains, 25.

³ Rodanthi Tzanelli, “Haunted by the ‘Enemy’ Within: Brigandage, Vlachian/Albanian Greekness, Turkish ‘Contamination,’ and Narratives of Greek Nationhood in the Dilessi/Marathon Affair (1870),” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20, no. 1 (May 2002): 55.

⁴ John Flower, Historical Dictionary of French Literature (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 54.

⁵ “Brigandage,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 11^th edition, accessed Oct. 24, 2018, https://theodora.com/encyclopedia/b2/brigandage.html