Of Mud and Crown: A Young Author’s Journey Through Medieval Bohemia

Playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance can send you down a rabbit hole of medieval history. For 13-year-old Erik Kitaev, playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance led to a fascination with medieval Bohemia with an unexpected outcome: he wrote a novel.

The novel, Of Mud and Crown, is a historical adventure set among the villages, forests, castles, and muddy roads of 15th-century Bohemia. Kitaev didn’t need to invent a medieval setting for his story. He set the novel in Czechia, researching everyday life, food, travel, taverns, and historical swordsmanship, and even visiting the Czech countryside where his story takes place.

The novel is focused on Mark, a sixteen-year-old peasant boy living in the small village of Krtschkowitz. His days are spent working the fields alongside his father, but Mark dreams of something more. He wants to be a knight and live a life of adventure in distant places, rather than spend his life tending the same fields.

When Mark discovers a group of bandits hiding in the nearby woods, he sees his chance. Against his father’s advice, he takes up a sword and sets out to do something about them.

The adventure he finds, however, isn’t quite the one he imagined.

Mark’s journey takes him across the Bohemian countryside, through forests and villages, into crowded taverns, along muddy roads, and eventually to the walls of Kost Castle. Along the way, he meets pilgrims, merchants, hunters, millers, and knights. He learns how to wield a sword from an experienced warrior, discovers that killing is nothing like the heroic stories make it seem, and gradually begins to understand that becoming a knight involves considerably more than carrying a sword.

The scenes give Of Mud and Crown much of its charm. Rather than building a generic fantasy world loosely inspired by the Middle Ages, Kitaev places his adventure in a real landscape. The castles, villages, and countryside are based on places he visited in modern Czechia, and the book even includes a pilgrimage guide for readers interested in following Mark’s journey themselves.

That enthusiasm for medieval history comes through on nearly every page.

Kitaev also deserves credit for resisting the temptation to turn Mark into an instant medieval superhero. His first experience with violence shakes him. His training is difficult. The romantic image of the knight that Mark carries with him at the beginning of the story becomes increasingly complicated as he encounters the realities of the wider world.

But Of Mud and Crown ultimately isn’t a story about sword fighting and knightly heroics.

It’s a story about the road and about a young man’s journey to discover the world beyond his own village.

The inspiration behind Of Mud and Crown is as interesting as Mark’s journey across Bohemia. Kitaev’s interest in medieval Bohemia was sparked in part by Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Rather than stopping with the game, his interest led him deeper into the history, to visiting the Czech countryside himself, researching medieval daily life and historical swordsmanship, and ultimately writing his own adventure set there.

That’s something we can appreciate here at Medieval Archives.

Books, movies, television, and video games are often gateways into history. Sometimes a game leads someone to pick up a history book. Sometimes a movie inspires a trip to a castle. And sometimes an interest in medieval Bohemia leads a 13-year-old author to write a novel about it.

Of Mud and Crown is a story about curiosity, adventure, and discovering what lies beyond the horizon. Both Mark and the young author who created him seem to understand something important:

Sometimes the best part of an adventure is simply seeing where the road takes you.

Visit Erik’s website to purchase Of Mud and Crown.

About the Author

Erik Kitaev was born in 2013 in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has been interested in books and storytelling from a young age, and wrote his first book when he was seven.

At twelve, he wrote and published Starborn of the Galaxy. He is now writing Of Mud and Crown, a historical adventure set in medieval Bohemia.

Outside of writing, Erik is a boxer, parkourist, and gamer.