THE STORY OF FORTUNATUS (1509) begins and ends in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean and a nexus of trade and travel between West and East. From this pivotal space, the narrator maps the protagonist’s development as he travels first to Europe and then, again from Cyprus, to the Arab world and Asia. Strangely, however, the fact that this southern German Prosaroman has a Cypriot as its protagonist has piqued the curiosity of only a few critics. And yet the choice to make Cyprus the center point of Fortunatus’s geographical—and psychological—space is the critical narrative strategy behind the novel’s elaboration of its main concerns: money and travel, and the challenges inherent to them, as well as the role of wish, desire, and fantasy in human subjectivity. With a main character who is at home in neither the East nor the West, Fortunatus explores the very nature of “foreignness,” the psychological consequences both of being a foreigner in a strange land and of seeing that which is alien. All these themes are charted across a topographical grid that spans from the westernmost edges of the world—which in this early prose novel are defined as the coast of Ireland—to Indonesia, at the farthest ends of the East, with Cyprus as the neutral point of departure.

Fortunatus was written by an as-yet-unidentified author, most probably a person living in southern Germany, and enjoyed “best-seller” status in its own time as well as in the centuries that followed. Printed by Johann Heybler at the commission of Johann Otmar, it appeared in twenty editions in the sixteenth century, eleven in the seventeenth, and nine in the eighteenth century and was translated into thirteen languages. The Frankfurt bookseller Michel Harder noted in his Mess-Memorial at the 1569 Frankfurt Fastnachtsmesse that Fortunatus took first place with 198 copies sold, compared to other “Volksbücher” such as Magelone with 176, Melusine with 158, and Octavian with 135. Part of the book’s appeal derived from its melodramatic, rags-to-riches plot, which resonated with a new reading audience of wealthy merchants and bankers, but also from a narrative that swept from the far reaches of one corner of the known world to the other.