History Literature / Sandokan

* AnimatedAdaptation: There was one in the 1990's, which takes place in a WorldOfFunnyAnimals - Sandokan and his men are anthropomorphized tigers, while BigBad The Rajah of Sarawak is [[CatsAreMean a cat]].

Sandokan is the [[ProtagonistTitle eponymous protagonist]] of a series of {{adventure}} novels by Italian writer Emilio Salgari, published between 1895 and 1913. Set in and around the Indian Ocean, the novels tell Sandokan's story, starting from his pirate career to avenge his father, a Bornean rajah [[YouKilledMyFather killed by a British-sponsored white man]]. Alongside him we find Yanez de Gomera ([[MightyWhitey the only white man of Sandokan's pirate gang and his second in command]]), Tremal Naik (a former professional tiger hunter fighting the Thuggee cult), Kammamuri (Tremal Naik's servant), and Sambigliong (the most important of the pirates after Sandokan and Yanez).

** Italian media of the time tended to praise brawn over brain. Salgari had the habit of thrusting Sandokan into situations where Yanez's smarts were more useful than his considerable strength and skill, and in ''The Tigers of Mompracem'' used Marianna and Yanez to call him an idiot when he decided to kill a tiger with a knife (Marianna tried and shot the tiger to prevent Sandokan from facing a tiger in melee combat, and told him to his face) and wait the dawn to cripple a British gunship because he wanted to show off his wife (Yanez pestered him to hurry up and shoot the damn cruiser, as he was good enough a shot to do it with the moonlight, and continued 'till dawn). Thankfully with time Sandokan smarted up, to the point that by ''Yanez's Revenge'' he kept [[PlagueMaster an expert of biological weapons]] in case the British Empire decided to invade his new country or some idiot tried to dethrone Yanez (said idiot saw his army literally shit itself to death when the expert caused a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera Cholera]] epidemics. Sandokan and Yanez's troops were vaccinated).

** Sandokan has the habit of boasting he could do something apparently impossible... And then do it. Among these boasts, the most notable are his casual mention he felt capable of killing a tiger (that was when he found that 'present' for Marianna: he told it to lord Guillonk, then his host, who promptly invited him to a tiger hunt), notable because he was still recovering from being shot and nearly drowning, or his boast he alone was more than enough to thwart the pursue from a British gunship (he crippled it with a single grenade on a paddlewheel, after waiting for dawn to show the enemy crew his wife as added insult), notable not only for the fact that a single man defeated a ''warship'' but because Yanez's reaction (he was quite annoyed at Sandokan for waiting so long, giving the enemy the chance to sink them with a lucky shot) implied it's almost normal occurrence.

** Sandokan is at the wrong end of the very first example of the series: in ''The Pirates of Mompracem'' he has a run-in with a British steam-powered warship, who would use her superior firepower to massacre the pirates from distance and the steam propulsion to keep the distance and avoid a boarding that would have given victory to Sandokan. It's mentioned that Sandokan and his pirates started cursing and telling very unkind things at the ship the first time she pulled this.

* TheEmpire: The UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire is a frequent early opponent of Sandokan due him being a very successful pirate.
** It is implied that, after Sandokan's ''epic'' RoaringRampageOfRevenge in ''The King of the Sea'', he and the British Empire have an informal agreement that allows Sandokan and Yanez to do as they wish (even buying weapons from them) as long as they won't damage the British interests (Yanez even carved out a nice empire for himself right in the real-life Raj, with the Brits not interfering because he had deposed a corrupted prince and opened his country to trade).
** The novels ''The Mystery of the Black Jungle'' and ''The Two Tigers'' are explicitly set in the British-ruled India, the first in Bengal under the rule of the East India Company and the latter around India as the Uprising of 1857 raged. In these novels Salgari shows the British rule as ambivalent: on one hand the British are opening the country to trade and industrialization and hunt down dangerous animals, thus improving the life conditions of the people, and fight barbaric customs as the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_%28practice%29 Sati]] (also known as Widow Burning) and the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee Thuggee cult]] (we are even shown East India Company troops affiliated with the Thuggee Department storming the Thuggee headquarter); on the other hand there is imperial arrogance that causes various abuses and the Uprising of 1857 with all of its devastation, culminating in the vivid description of the massacre of Delhi's population at the hands of British ''European'' troops.

* FightingForAHomeland: Sandokan and the survivors of the Tigers of Mompracem in ''Quest for a Throne'', ''Sandokan Fights Back'' and ''Return to Mompracem'': after being chased out of Mompracem in ''The King of the Sea'', the Tigers search for a place to call home. Subverted in the end: while they conquered [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assam Assam]] in ''Quest for a Throne'' (it happened that Yanez's wife had a claim to that throne) and took back Sandokan's ancestral homeland in ''Sandokan Fights Back'', they can't find a place to call home, and as soon as the British gives away Mompracem they reconquer it from the Sultan of Brunei.

** We have the Tiger of Malaysia (Sandokan), the Hunter of Tigers and Snakes of the Black Jungle (Tremal Naik), the Tiger of India (Suyodhana), and the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Head Hunters]] (a nickname of the Dayak people, who, before being stopped by retaliations from the British and the Dutch, had the habit to raid places with the only purpose of cutting heads).

** At first baronet William Rosenthal seems to be just an obnoxious and racist young noble who planned to make a career in the Royal Navy thanks to his nobility and hated lord Guillonk's guest (actually Sandokan, found near dead and healed by Guillonk and family after a bad run-in with a British cruiser) because he wasn't English. He's in fact obnoxious and a little racist even for the European norm of the time, but he's the captain of the cruiser that had nearly killed Sandokan, and that didn't actually hate him until he realized ''where'' he had already seen him. There's even a good chance he had been the one who actually wounded Sandokan in that battle...
** Sindhia, the Rajah of Assam and Surama's cousin who sold her to the Thuggee. He's initially presented as an idiot and a borderline madman, depending on his adviser Teotokris for actual rule. Yet he easily disposed of his predecessor by duping him into not killing him immediately and giving him a gun, and upon breaking out of the asylum he had been sent after being deposed he practically dethroned Yanez by stealing him most of his popular support and building an army under his nose, only losing due Sandokan showing up with a PlagueMaster. Also, comparing the approximate date of his accession to the Assam throne with RealLife events, he actually ''extended'' his dominion, somehow taking back the whole Assam from the British East India Company (who had come to conquer the whole Assam and restored the previous dinasty in Upper Assam only).

* RoaringRampageOfRevenge: Sandokan's reason for being a pirate is to take revenge on those who financed the murderer of his father. The second part of ''The King of the Sea'' is one such rampage against the British trade in revenge for the British unprovoked attack and conquest of Mompracem, and ''Sandokan Fights Back'' actually has Sandokan returning to his ancestral home to kill his father's murderer and take back his throne.

** The choice of Assam as Surama's homeland is another example: exactly in the period where the rajah would have massacred his entire family save for Sindhia (who duped him into giving him a gun and did the obvious thing) and Surama herself (who Sindhia sold to the Thuggee), Upper Assam was ruled by Purandar Singha, a notably corrupt, incompetent, stupid and possibly crazy king who had been installed by the British only to be deposed for failing to pay the Revenue, exactly the kind of character who could have pulled the massacre enacted by the unnamed rajah of Assam.

* GenreSavvy: The British military and everyone affiliated to them. Everyone else will face Sandokan with superior numbers, melee weapons and a few guns and get slaughtered, but they ''always'' attack with as much firepower as they can and use the fact their ships are ''steamers'' to avoid boardings (at least the first time Sandokan tried to board a cruiser. He never bothered again as he knew what would happen).
** In ''The Tigers of Mompracem'' Sandokan and Yanez hid in an enormous wood burning stove, with Yanez cackling because nobody would ever think to search the Tiger of Malaysia in it. His hilarity ceased when he heard the British soldiers wondering out loud if the stove was big enough to let a man hide inside, and he went in full OhCrap mode when they agreed that the stove was most probably too small but it was better check anyway (they only escaped due the horrible lighting inside it).

* AnimalMotifs: A lot. Apart the tiger motif, explicitly used with Sandokan (the Tiger of Malaysia), Yanez (sometimes called the White Tiger, as he's a white man and Sandokan's [[BashBrothers brother in everything but blood]]), their pirates (the Tigers of Mompracem) and Suyodhana (the Tiger of India. Bonus point for him and Sandokan having been represented with the bodies of actual tigers in the cover of the first edition of ''The Two Tigers'') and implicitly for Marianna (implied by Sandokan's flag, that changed from a single head of tiger in red field in ''The Tigers of Mompracem'' to three heads of tiger in the other novels, representing Sandokan, Yanez and the now late Marianna), UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire has both a lion and leopard motif, to the point that Sandokan and Yanez often use 'lion' and 'leopard' in place of 'Englishman'.

* CombatPragmatist: Sandokan may be a badass, but he and his men will bring along overwhelming firepower every time they can. It's not clear who is more pragmatic between Sandokan and Yanez: in ''The King of the Sea'' the latter bought the eponymous ship, an ironclad warship that outgunned anything the Royal Navy had in the Indian Ocean, and managed to equip it with a MadScientist who claimed having invented a RayGun that could blow up the magazines of opposing ships (when tested, his device worked); the former showed up in ''Yanez's Revenge'' with a small army of Dayaks (also known as [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast head hunters]]) armed with repeating rifles, [[MoreDakka a dozen machine guns]] and [[PlagueMaster a scientist specialized in biological warfare]].

** Marianna. She can be kidnapped, as her physical strength is that of a young and very short woman, but she knows how to use guns (normally a muzzle-loader hunting carbine, but she even manned a ''cannon'', in the tv movies), and has no qualms at using them. Heck, her first reaction at Sandokan announcing his intention to kill a tiger with a knife to gift her the skin was to grab a gun to try and ''hunt down the tiger to prevent Sandokan from risking his life''. Part of why she fell for Sandokan was that he was the first man other than her uncle (who taught her how to shoot) who accepted that side of her.

* MightyWhitey: Various examples, including the historical character of James Brooke. Yanez is the most prominent, both for being the co-protagonist and the only white man who was captured by the Tigers of Mompracem and lived without paying a ransom.
** Yanez's improbable survival of his initial encounter with the pirates is [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] when he himself explains Kammamuri that the Tigers of Mompracem never spare white men and Kammamuri notes that Yanez, while white, has just led the pirates that attacked the ship he was on. [[HandWaved Yanez replied he was a special case]].

** ChildSoldier: Marianna first embarked on a warship when she was 10, and stayed there until she was 13. It's implied that lord Guillonk settled down with her because [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone he had suddenly realized what he had done]].

* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: We have the Tiger of Malaysia (Sandokan), the Hunter of Tigers and Snakes of the Black Jungle (Tremal Naik), the Tiger of India (Suyodhana), and the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Head Hunters]] (a nickname of the Dayak people, who, before being stopped by retaliations from the British and the Dutch, had the habit to raid places with the only purpose of cutting heads).

* ThePiratesWhoDontDoAnything: The Tigers of Mompracem stopped raiding commerce sometime between ''The Pirates of Malaysia'' and ''The Two Tigers'', resuming in ''The King of the Sea'' only because the Royal Navy decided to kick them out of Mompracem. After ''The King of the Sea'' they don't do the pirate job anymore save for a single boarding in ''Return to Mompracem''.

* RememberTheNewGuy: Sambigliong, a Tiger of Mompracem that debuted in ''The Pirates of Malaysia'' and Sandokan's third in command since that novel, is mentioned as one of the then-unnamed pirates that ambushed lord Guillonk in ''The Tigers of Mompracem''. This is particularly notable because there already was a named character, Juioko, known to have taken part to that ambush and survive the fall of Mompracem, but him and the other named pirates would not be mentioned anymore.

* ShownTheirWork: Salgari traveled very little, but was ''very'' well documented, and his descriptions of ships, locations and societies showed it (he did a couple errors, but one of them, the lake near Mount Kinabalu, was commonly thought to exist at the time, and the area would be fully explored only after his death). Made more impressive by the fact internet didn't exist at the time and Salgari wasn't a professor, just a poor and overworked professional novel writer.

* ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill: Salgari ''loves'' this trope, and anyone with half a brain tend to bring as much firepower as they can. One example from ''The Pirates of Malaysia'': to fight Sandokan's single ship ''Pearl of Labuan'' (an oversized praho modified for superior speed and carrying more guns than normal prahos) James Brooke deployed four normal prahos (each with about three quarters of Sandokan's firepower) and his personal ship ''Royalist'', that was a match for ''Pearl''. It's hinted that James Brooke was improvising, and that he would have used more ships had he been faster at recognizing ''Marianna'' as a pirate ship or Sandokan slower at realizing what Brooke was doing.

* RedShirtArmy: Averted by the British military of all people. Their ground forces may have worn their famous red coats for most of the series (in real-life the Indian Army was switching to khaki in that very period, but most of them were still using red as late as ''The Two Tigers''), but they always show more competence than other Sandokan's enemies and the smarts to try and keep distance and use their superior firepower against Sandokan (who was firepower-heavy for a Indian Ocean pirate or warlord of his time, but never even close to the British military).

* AuthorAppeal: Salgari was a fierce opponent of colonialism. Whenever a colonial power appeared in his novels (both in the Sandokan series and the others series and stand-alone novels) they were shown either as {{Well Intentioned Extremist}}s who genuinely believed they were doing the right thing or greedy cowards.

* AuthorExistenceFailure: Salgari killed himself in 1911, after completing ''An Empire Crumbles'' (intended to be a single novel with ''The Brahman'' but published in two parts) and writing the first draft of ''Yanez's Revenge''. The two novels were published posthumously, and ''Yanez's Revenge'' contains a few plot holes.

** Kammamuri often remarks he's a Maratha. The Maratha Confederacy was the dominant power in India until the end of the Anglo-Maratha Wars (in which they still gave the East India Company a run for their money before ceding their preminence), and they still were a major force in the Uprising of 1857, with the British openly admitting their most dangerous foe were Rani Lakshmibai, queen of Jhansi, and general Tatya Tope, both Maratha, and with the ending narration of ''The Two Tigers'' openly declaring that the Uprising fall of Delhi did not end with the fall of Delhi but with the death in battle of the Rani of Jhansi.

* ButNotTooForeign: Marianna's mother was half-Italian, and Marianna herself was born in Naples.

* CashCowFranchise: Became one after Salgari's death, as the editor had other authors (including Salgari's son Omar) write other Sandokan novels.

** Sandokan's named ships have meaningful names. His ship in ''The Pirates of Malaysia'', the ''Pearl of Labuan'', is named after his now late wife Marianna Guillonk, also known as the Pearl of Labuan for her beauty. The ship that replaced ''Pearl of Labuan'' in ''The Two Tigers'' is named ''Marianna'', as Yanez's ship in ''The King of the Sea'' (that novel made clear there were two identical ships named ''Marianna'' in Sandokan's fleet). The novel ''The King of the Sea'' has a magnificent example: Yanez and Sandokan get the chance to buy the ''Nebraska'', an American-built ironclad warship superior to anything else in the Indian Ocean that had been built for a sultan (who had already paid it) and [[WhatAnIdiot refused by his successor]], and renamed it ''King of the Sea'' to express their intention to rule on the routes of the Indian Ocean until the British and [[spoiler: Suyodhana's son]] begged for mercy or they got sunk.

* CoolBoat: Many ([[JustifiedTrope after all, the series is mostly set at sea]]), but the ships of the Tigers of Mompracem in general and Sandokan and Yanez' personal ships in the thir, fourth and fifth novel (the ''Marianna'' in "The Pirates of Malaysia" and the two ''Pearl of Labuan'' in "The Two Tigers" and "The King of the Sea") take the cake, being the fusion of the traditional Malesian ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proa proas]]'' (spelled ''praho'' in the series) with European shipbuilding techniques to obtain ships far faster, better armed and tougher than any sailing vessel of similar size.

** ProperlyParanoid and SeenItAll: the Tigers are CrazyPrepared because they have seen or read what modern (for the time) technology could do and expect the Royal Navy to attack them in any moment (even when they have no more reason to do it), and tend to collect anything that could be useful, like the ''King of the Sea'' (bought by Yanez when he encountered her by chance) or a mad scientist claiming his electrical device can blow up enemy ships' magazines (guess what blew up that ship...), even if they don't really believe in it (the mad scientist. Yanez was skeptical, but suggested to keep him just in case). They also tend to not be surprised when Sandokan shows off (the most surprise he ever got from him was mild astonishment the first time he broke some chains and a question about overkill when he resorted to biological warfare to help Yanez).
*** The Royal Navy too. One of their officers, after having captured Sandokan and put him in chains, approached him with two rifle-armed sailors and fully armed, even without knowing that Sandokan had broken the chains just to prove he could to one of his pirates captured with him. When Sandokan [[FakingTheDead faked his death]], the lieutenant was willing to throw the body in the sea to prevent it being desecrated, but he first had the ship's surgeon check if he was really dead (he wasn't, but the poison was very good at making appear he was).
*** Even the lowly soldiers of the British Empire are this. That time Sandokan and Yanez hid in a stove, a group of soldiers looked at the stove, concluded it was too small for two grow men to hide in it, and then checked anyway for good measure. If it wasn't for the horrible lighting, Sandokan and Yanez would have died then and there, not by the hand of some formidable warrior but shot by some lowly soldiers who used their brains.
* CrossOver: ''The Pirates of Malaysia'' is this, providing the first meeting between the Tigers of Mompracem (from the novel with the same name) and Tremal Naik, Kammamuri, Darma (the tiger) and Ada Corishant (from ''The Mystery of the Black Jungle'').

* ExecutiveMeddling: The very reason we have a Sandokan saga instead of a Tremal Naik saga: reprints of ''The Tigers of Mompracem'' had outsold ''The Mystery of the Black Jungle'' by a fair margin, so the publisher asked Salgari to bring him back.

** SmallGirlBigGun: Marianna is stated to be of very short stature, and in the Italian tv movies she has manned a CANNON.

* TheRedBaron: Sandokan, Suyodhana, Tremal Naik and James Brooke are known as the Tiger of Malaysia, the Tiger of In
** ia, the Hunter of Tigers and Snakes of the Black Jungle and the White Rajah of Sarawak.

# ''The Tigers of Mompracem'' ("Le Tigri di Mompracem"; it's sometimes listed as third in the series, as it was published in volume after ''The Mistery of the Black Jungle'' and ''The Pirates of Malaysia'')
# ''The Mistery of the Black Jungle'' ("I Misteri della Giungla Nera"; originally a stand-alone novel with Tremal Naik as protagonist, was retroactively incorporated in the series after ''The Pirates of Malaysia'')

* CanonWelding: ''The Tigers of Mompracem'' was originally a stand-alone story, and ''The Mistery of the Black Jungle'' meant to start a novel series. Then the publisher asked Salgari to write another novel with Sandokan, and Salgari welded the two novels in the same canon.

* CrossOver: ''The Pirates of Malaysia'' is this, providing the first meeting between the Tigers of Mompracem (from the novel with the same name) and Tremal Naik, Kammamuri, Darma (the tiger) and Ada Corishant (from ''The Mistery of the Black Jungle'').

* DemotedToExtra: Tremal Naik was the protagonist in his first appearance in ''The Mistery of the Black Jungle'', but became a secondary character since ''The Pirates of Malaysia''.

** The novels ''The Mystery of the Black Jungle'' and ''The Two Tigers'' are explicitly set in the British-ruled India, the first in Bengal under the rule of the East India Company and the latter around India as the Uprising of 1857 raged. In these novels Salgari showed both the good and the bad of the British rule: on the good side there are the British opening the country to trade and industrialization and hunting down dangerous animals, improving of a discrete margin the life conditions of the people, and fighting barbaric customs as the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_%28practice%29 Sati]] (also known as Widow Burning) and the suppression of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee Thuggee cult]] (we are even shown East India Company troops affiliated with the Thuggee Department storming the Thuggee headquarter); on the bad side there is the imperial arrogance that caused various abuses and the Uprising of 1857 with all of its devastation, culminating in the vivid description of the massacre of Delhi's population at the hands of British ''European'' troops.
* ExecutiveMeddling: The very reason we have a Sandokan saga instead of a Tremal Naik saga: reprints of ''The Tigers of Mompracem'' had outsold ''The Mistery of the Black Jungle'' by a fair margin, so the publisher asked Salgari to bring him back.

* {{Mooks}}: Various, depending on the novel. Bonus point for the Thuggee cultists in ''The Mistery of the Black Jungle'' and ''The Two Tigers'' for being the origin of the word 'thug' and actually be called thugs by the author.

** The novels ''The Mystery of the Black Jungle'' and ''The Two Tigers'' are explicitly set in the British-ruled India, the first in Bengal under the rule of the East India Company and the latter around India as the Uprising of 1857 raged. In these novels Salgari showed both the good and the bad of the British rule: on the good side there are the British opening the country to trade and industrialization and hunting down dangerous animals, improving of a discrete margin the life conditions of the people, and fighting barbaric customs as the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_%28practice%29 Sati]] (also known as [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Widow Burning]]) and the suppression of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee Thuggee cult]] (we are even shown East India Company troops affiliated with the Thuggee Department storming the Thuggee headquarter); on the bad side there is the imperial arrogance that caused various abuses and the Uprising of 1857 with all of its devastation, culminating in the vivid description of the massacre of Delhi's population at the hands of British ''European'' troops.

* TheEmpire: UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire. A frequent early opponent of Sandokan due him being a very successful pirate. It's implied that, after Sandokan's ''epic'' RoaringRampageOfRevenge in ''The King of the Sea'', he and the British Empire have an informal agreement that allows Sandokan and Yanez to do as they wish (even buying weapons from them) as long as they won't damage the British interests (Yanez even carved out a nice empire for himself right in the real-life Raj, with the Brits not interfering because he had deposed a corrupted prince and opened his country to trade).
** The novels ''The Mistery of the Black Jungle'' and ''The Two Tigers'' are explicitly set in the British-ruled India, the first in Bengal under the rule of the East India Company and the latter around India as the Uprising of 1857 raged. In these novels Salgari showed both the good and the bad of the British rule: on the good side there are the British opening the country to trade and industrialization and hunting down dangerous animals, improving of a discrete margin the life conditions of the people, and fighting barbaric customs as the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_%28practice%29 Sati]] (also known as [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Widow Burning]]) and the suppression of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee Thuggee cult]] (we are even shown East India Company troops affiliated with the Thuggee Department storming the Thuggee headquarter); on the bad side there is the imperial arrogance that caused various abuses and the Uprising of 1857 with all of its devastation, culminating in the vivid description of the massacre of Delhi's population at the hands of British ''European'' troops.

* UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire: A frequent early opponent of Sandokan due him being a very successful pirate. It's implied that, after Sandokan's ''epic'' RoaringRampageOfRevenge in ''The King of the Sea'', he and the British Empire have an informal agreement that allows Sandokan and Yanez to do as they wish (even buying weapons from them) as long as they won't damage the British interests (Yanez even carved out a nice empire for himself right in the real-life Raj, with the Brits not interfering because he had deposed a corrupted prince and opened his country to trade).
** The novels ''The Mistery of the Black Jungle'' and ''The Two Tigers'' are explicitly set in the British-ruled India, the first in Bengal under the rule of the East India Company and the latter around India as the Uprising of 1857 raged. In these novels Salgari showed both the good and the bad of the British rule: on the good side there are the British opening the country to trade and industrialization and hunting down dangerous animals, improving of a discrete margin the life conditions of the people, and fighting barbaric customs as the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_%28practice%29 Sati]] (also known as [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Widow Burning]]) and the suppression of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee Thuggee cult]] (we are even shown East India Company troops affiliated with the Thuggee Department storming the Thuggee headquarter); on the bad side there is the imperial arrogance that caused various abuses and the Uprising of 1857 with all of its devastation, culminating in the vivid description of the massacre of Delhi's population at the hands of British ''European'' troops.

* {{Flynning}}: {{Averted}} in the books (not so much in the adaptations): sword and knifw fights are short and tend to end with someone stabbed in the guts or the chest, and when Sandokan fights a tiger with a knife he doesn't wrestle the beast (as happens in other series where someone knife-fights a dangerous animal) but rushes it while it's distracted before stabbing it the heart.

* GreatWhiteHunter: A few tiger hunts are shown. Sandokan, Tremal Naik and Kammamuri fail to qualify due not being white (even if Tremal Naik used to hunt tigers for a living), but we still have lord Guillonk, Yanez (who will ''mock the tiger'' before shooting it if he deems it safe), ''Marianna'', and others.

* MeaningfulName: Sandokan's named ships have meaningful names. His ship in ''The Pirates of Malaysia'', the ''Pearl of Labuan'', is named after his now late wife Marianna Guillonk, also known as the Pearl of Labuan for her beauty. The ship that replaced ''Pearl of Labuan'' in ''The Two Tigers'' is named ''Marianna'', as Yanez's ship in ''The King of the Sea'' (that novel made clear there were two identical ships named ''Marianna'' in Sandokan's fleet). The novel ''The King of the Sea'' has a magnificent example: Yanez and Sandokan get the chance to buy the ''Nebraska'', an American-built ironclad warship superior to anything else in the Indian Ocean that had been built for a sultan (who had already paid it) and [[WhatAnIdiot refused by his successor]], and renamed it ''King of the Sea'' to express their intention to rule on the routes of the Indian Ocean until the British and [[spoiler: Suyodhana's son]] begged for mercy or they got sunk.

** Yanez's improbable survival of his initial encounter with the pirates is [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] when he himself explains Kammamuri that the Tigers of Mompracem never spares white men and Kammamuri notes that Yanez, while white, has just led the pirates that attacked the ship he was on. [[HandWaved Yanez replied he was a special case]].

* MoreDakka: The main advantage of the British.

* NotSoHarmlessVillain: At first baronet William Rosenthal seems to be just an obnoxious and racist young noble who planned to make a career in the Royal Navy thanks to his nobility and hated lord Guillonk's guest (actually Sandokan, found near dead and healed by Guillonk and family after a bad run-in with a British cruiser) because he wasn't English. He's in fact obnoxious and a little racist even for the European norm of the time, but he's the captain of the cruiser that had nearly killed Sandokan, and that didn't actually hate him until he realized ''where'' he had already seen him. There's even a good chance he had been the one who actually wounded Sandokan in that battle...

* TheRedBaron: Sandokan, Suyodhana, Tremal Naik and James Brooke are known as the Tiger of Malaysia, the Tiger of India, the Hunter of Tigers and Snakes of the Black Jungle and the White Rajah of Sarawak.

* [[SpotlightStealingSquad Spotlight-Stealing Character]]: Yanez had a role as big if not bigger than Sandokan from ''The King of the Sea'' to ''An Empire Crumbles'', with ''The Brahman'' and ''An Empire Crumbles'' actually having him as the declared protagonist. Ironically, ''Yanez's Revenge'' is the novel in which Sandokan takes back the spotlight.
* [[TalkToTheFist Talk to the Carbine]]: In ''The King of the Sea'' the alleged [[TheDragon Mecca's Pilgrim]] was ordering the escaping Tigers of Mompracem to surrender when Yanez, happy to see him, shot him in the chest.

* [[WhereTheHellIsSpringfield Where the Hell Is Mompracem?]]: Salgari chose Sandokan's base on an old map, but the island isn't shown on maps since before Salgari started writing, and the main candidate of Keraman is mentioned in the novels as a separate island.

* WorthyOpponent: James Brooke is the only one of Sandokan's enemies to conquer this honour, having actually won his initial battle with the Tiger of Malaysia and protected his subjects from colonialism.

*** This is how Kammamuri first met Yanez: the ship he was traveling with shipwrecked on Mompracem, and when the pirates attacked he outlived the crew and fought back with incredible valor, prompting Yanez to recall the pirates and asking him to join.

* BadassBoast: Sandokan has the habit of boasting he could do something apparently impossible... And then do it. Among these boasts, the most notable are his casual mention he felt capable of killing a tiger (that was when he found that 'present' for Marianna: he told it to lord Guillonk, then his host, who promptly invited him to a tiger hunt), notable because he was still recovering from being shot and nearly drowning, or his boast he alone was more than enough to thwart the pursue from a British gunship (he crippled it with a single grenade on a paddlewheel, after waiting for dawn to show the enemy crew his wife as added insult), notable not only for the fact that a single man defeated a ''warship'' but because Yanez's reaction (he was quite annoyed at Sandokan for waiting so long, giving the enemy the chance to sink them with a lucky shot) implied it's almost normal occurrence.

* BashBrothers: Sandokan and Yanez. Completely different in personality, but they'd die before leaving the other in trouble. Bonus points for actually calling each other brothers.

* AnimalMotifs: [[CaptainObvious A lot]]. Apart the tiger motif, explicitly used with Sandokan (the Tiger of Malaysia), Yanez (sometimes called the White Tiger, as he's a white man and Sandokan's [[BashBrothers brother in everything but blood]]), their pirates (the Tigers of Mompracem) and Suyodhana (the Tiger of India. Bonus point for him and Sandokan having been represented with the bodies of actual tigers in the cover of the first edition of ''The Two Tigers'') and implicitly for Marianna (implied by Sandokan's flag, that changed from a single head of tiger in red field in ''The Tigers of Mompracem'' to three heads of tiger in the other novels, representing Sandokan, Yanez and the now late Marianna), UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire has both a lion and leopard motif, to the point that Sandokan and Yanez often use 'lion' and 'leopard' in place of 'Englishman'.

** Italian media of the time tended to praise brawn over brain. Salgari had the habit of thrusting Sandokan into situations where Yanez's smarts were more useful than his considerable strength and skill, and in ''The Tigers of Mompracem'' used Marianna and Yanez to call him an idiot when he decided to kill a tiger with a knife (Marianna tried and shot the tiger to prevent Sandokan from facing a tiger in melee combat, and told him to his face) and wait the dawn to crippe a British cruiser because he wanted to show off his wife (Yanez pestered him to hurry up and shoot the damn cruiser, as he was good enough a shot to it with the moonlight, and continued 'till dawn). Thankfully with time Sandokan smarted up, to the point that by ''Yanez's Revenge'' he kept [[PlagueMaster an expert of biological weapons]] in case the British Empire decided to invade his new country or some idiot tried to dethrone Yanez (said idiot saw his army literally shit itself to death when the expert caused a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera Cholera]] epidemics. Sandokan and Yanez's troops were vaccinated).

Sandokan is the [[CharacterTitle eponymous protagonist]] of a series of novels from Italian writer Emilio Salgari. Set in and around the Indian Ocean, the novels [[ProtagonistTitle tell Sandokan's story]], starting from his pirate career to avenge his father, a Bornean rajah [[YouKilledMyFather killed by a British-sponsored white man]]. Alongside him we find Yanez de Gomera ([[MightyWhitey the only white man of Sandokan's pirate gang and his second in command]]), Tremal Naik (a former professional tiger hunter fighting the Thuggee cult), Kammamuri (Tremal Naik's servant), and Sambigliong (the most important of the pirates after Sandokan and Yanez).

Sandokan is the [[CharacterTitle eponymous protagonist]] of a series of novels from Italian writer Emilio Salgari. Set in and around the Indian Ocean, the novels [[CaptainObvious tell Sandokan's story]], starting from his pirate career to avenge his father, a Bornean rajah [[YouKilledMyFather killed by a British-sponsored white man]]. Alongside him we find Yanez de Gomera ([[MightyWhitey the only white man of Sandokan's pirate gang and his second in command]]), Tremal Naik (a former professional tiger hunter fighting the Thuggee cult), Kammamuri (Tremal Naik's servant), and Sambigliong (the most important of the pirates after Sandokan and Yanez).

* WorldOfBadass: This is a world where the two guys who used to hunt tigers for a living aren't the most dangerous guys around, what would you expect?

** Kammamuri often remarks he's a Maratha. The Maratha Confederacy was the dominant power in India until the end of the Anglo-Maratha Wars (in which they still gave the East India Company a run for their money before ceding their preminence), and they still were a major force in the Uprising of 1857, with the British openly admitting their most dangerous foe were Rani Lakshmibai, queen of Jhansi, and general Tatya Tope, both Maratha and mentioned in ''The Two Tigers'' as the driving force (to the point the war is said to truly end not with the disaster of the fall of Delhi but the death in battle of the Rani of Jhansi).

* BadassBoast: Sandokan has the habit of boasting he could do something apparently impossible... And then do it. Among these boasts, the most notable are his casual mention he felt capable of killing a tiger (that was when he found that 'present' for Marianna: he told it to lord Guillonk, then his host, who promptly invited him to a tiger hunt), notable because he was still recovering from being shot and nearly drowning, or his boast he alone was more than enough to thwart the pursue from a British ironclad (he crippled it with a single grenade on a paddlewheel, after waiting for dawn to show the enemy crew his wife as added insult), notable not only for the fact that a single man defeated a ''warship'' but because Yanez's reaction (he was quite annoyed at Sandokan for waiting so long, giving the enemy the chance to sink them with a lucky shot) implied it's almost normal occurrence.
*** Kammamuri often remarks he's a Maratha. The Maratha Confederacy was the dominant power in India until the end of the Anglo-Maratha Wars (in which they still gave the East India Company a run for their money before ceding their preminence), and they still were a major force in the Uprising of 1857, with the British openly admitting their most dangerous foe were Rani Lakshmibai, queen of Jhansi, and general Tatya Tope, both Maratha.

Sandokan is the [[CharacterTitle eponymous protagonist]] of a series of novels from Italian writer Emilio Salgari. Set in and around the Indian Ocean, the novels [[CaptainObvious tell Sandokan's story]], starting from his pirate career to avenge his father, a Bornean rajah [[YouKilledMyFather killed by a British-sponsored white man]]. Alongside him we find Yanez de Gomera ([[MightyWhitey the only white man of Sandokan's pirate gang and his second in command]]), Tremal Naik (a former [[{{Badass}} professional tiger hunter]] fighting the Thuggee cult), Kammamuri (Tremal Naik's servant), and Sambigliong (the most important of the pirates after Sandokan and Yanez).

* {{Badass}}: Many, but Sandokan is the biggest. His idea of a good present for a woman is the skin of a tiger he hunted personally. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGQ0epxHd8I This is how he got the skin]].
** Suyodhana and Tremal Naik come close to Sandokan. Tremal Naik first appeared as making a living from ''hunting tigers with knives and traps'' (Salgari often refers to him as [[TheRedBaron The Hunter of Tigers and Snakes of the Black Jungle]] even after he changed jobs), and Suyodhana bested Tremal Naik in single combat and gave Sandokan a run for his money in a knife fight.
** BadassBoast: Sandokan has the habit of boasting he could do something apparently impossible... And then do it. Among these boasts, the most notable are his casual mention he felt capable of killing a tiger (that was when he found that 'present' for Marianna: he told it to lord Guillonk, then his host, who promptly invited him to a tiger hunt), notable because he was still recovering from being shot and nearly drowning, or his boast he alone was more than enough to thwart the pursue from a British ironclad (he crippled it with a single grenade on a paddlewheel, after waiting for dawn to show the enemy crew his wife as added insult), notable not only for the fact that a single man defeated a ''warship'' but because Yanez's reaction (he was quite annoyed at Sandokan for waiting so long, giving the enemy the chance to sink them with a lucky shot) implied it's almost normal occurrence.

* CombatPragmatist: Sandokan may be a {{Badass}}, but he and his men will bring along overwhelming firepower every time they can. It's not clear who is more pragmatic between Sandokan and Yanez: in ''The King of the Sea'' the latter bought the eponymous ship, an ironclad warship that outgunned anything the Royal Navy had in the Indian Ocean, and managed to equip it with a MadScientist who claimed having invented a RayGun that could blow up the magazines of opposing ships (when tested, his device worked); the former showed up in ''Yanez's Revenge'' with a small army of Dayaks (also known as [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast head hunters]]) armed with repeating rifles, [[MoreDakka a dozen machine guns]] and [[PlagueMaster a scientist specialized in biological warfare]].

* GreatWhiteHunter: A few tiger hunts are shown. Sandokan, Tremal Naik and Kammamuri fail to qualify due not being white (even if Tremal Naik [[{{Badass}} used to hunt tigers for a living]]), but we still have lord Guillonk, Yanez (who will ''mock the tiger'' before shooting it if he deems it safe), ''Marianna'', and others.

** Sandokan too is a fan, and in one occasion brought with himself a few [[CoolGuns/MachineGuns Maxim machine guns]].