Mikael Karvajalka by Mika Waltari

A restless young man from a provincial Finnish town leaves home in the turbulent 16th century and embarks on a picaresque journey across Europe, studying, loving, fighting and falling in with a wide cast of scholars, soldiers and outcasts; his travels through cities and battlefields amid the upheavals of the Reformation force him to confront shifting loyalties, moral ambiguities and the formation of his own identity.