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within the empire. It was not only that Egypt and Cyprus were in fact governed by Britain, which had occupied them in the late nineteenth century; and that the sheikhdoms along the Gulf coast were under British control. Lebanon, a separate canton under arrangements established in 1864, was governed by a Christian military governor directly serving under the Porte which, however, was obliged to act only in consultation with six European powers. Russia and France reserved to themselves the right to protect, respectively, the Orthodox and Catholic populations of the empire; and other powers also asserted a right to intervene in Turkish affairs on behalf of the groups they sponsored.
    What was more than a little unreal, then, was the claim that the Sultan and his government ruled their domains in the sense in which Europeans understood government and administration. What was real in the Ottoman Empire tended to be local: a tribe, a clan, a sect, or a town was the true political unit to which loyalties adhered. This confused European observers, whose modern notions of citizenship and nationality were inapplicable to the crazy quilt of Ottoman politics. Europeans assumed that eventually they themselves would take control of the Ottoman domains and organize them on a more rational basis. In the early years of the twentieth century it was reasonable to believe that the days of Turkish dominion were numbered.
    By 1914 the much-diminished Ottoman Empire no longer ruled North Africa or Hungary or most of southeastern Europe. It had been in a retreat since the eighteenth century that finally looked like a rout. For decades, in the Ottoman army and in the schools, discontented men had told one another in the course of clandestine meetings that the empire had to be rapidly changed to meet the intellectual, industrial, and military challenges of modern Europe. Stimulated but confused by the nationalism that had become Europe’s creed, intellectuals amongst the diverse Turkish-speaking and Arabics-peaking peoples of the empire sought to discover or to forge some sense of their own political identity.
    In the final years before the outbreak of the First World War, obscure but ambitious new men took power in the Ottoman Empire, relegating the Sultan to a figurehead position. The new men, leaders of the Young Turkey Party, were at once the result and the cause of ferment in Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, as they tried to meet the challenge of bringing Turkey’s empire into the twentieth century before the modern world had time to destroy it.
    II
    Constantinople—the city originally called Byzantium and today known as Istanbul—was for more than eleven centuries the capital of the Roman Empire in the East, and then for more than four centuries the capital of its successor, the Ottoman Empire. Like Rome, Constantinople was built on seven hills and, like Rome, it was an eternal city: its strategic location gave it an abiding importance in the world’s affairs.
    Constantinople is a collection of towns located principally on the European side of the great waterway that links the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, at a point where the channel separating Europe from Asia narrows to widths of as little as a half-mile. The site is a natural fortress, difficult to conquer or even to attack. A bay some four miles long, known as the Golden Horn, forms a magnificent natural harbor that provides shelter and protection for a defending fleet.
    In 1914 the population of Constantinople stood at about a million. It was a cosmopolitan and polyglot population: most residents of the city were Moslem, Greek, or Armenian, but there was also a considerable colony of European and other foreigners. A European influence was evident in the architectural style of the newer buildings, in the style of dress, and in such innovations as street lights.
    Rudimentary modernization had only just begun. In 1912 electric lighting had been introduced into Constantinople for the