They took his name. They could not take the mountain.

Fifteenth-century Albania. When the Sultan's men ride into the Kastrioti valley to collect the blood tax, they take the lord's son, a boy of nine with quick eyes and a quicker temper. In the barracks of Edirne they give him a new name, a new god, and a curved sword, and they forge him into the deadliest weapon the empire has ever owned: Iskender, the Sultan's own blade.

For twenty years he serves. He forgets his mother's face. He learns to love the men who own him.

Then, in the smoke of a battle the Sultan is losing, he makes a choice that cannot be unmade. With a forged seal and three hundred riders, he turns, and rides for the mountains that bore him.

What follows is a war that should never have been winnable: one man, a ring of feuding clans, and a fortress on a rock, against the greatest empire on earth. They will call him the Dragon of Albania. They will call him the Athlete of Christ. His own people will simply call him the one who would not kneel.

Based on the true story of George Kastrioti ? Skanderbeg ? the shepherd's son who held the gate of Europe, Skanderbeg: The Dragon of Albania is an epic of war, faith, betrayal, and the cost of becoming free.