This is an evocation of the power of the Ottoman Empire, which swelled and declined over a period of six centuries, rising from a dusty fiefdom in the foothills of Anatolia to a power which ruled on the Danube and the Euphrates. The royal line bent, but never broke, from Osman, born in a desert tent around 1280, to Abdul Mecid, who died in a Paris flat in 1942. For 300 years the Empire held sway amid murmurs of imminent collapse. At its height Istanbul had the wealthiest court in Europe, whose aid was sought by Indian princes and French kings. Its religion was Islamic (but its subjects largely not), its ceremony Byzantine, its dignity Persian, its wealth Egyptian, its alphabet Arabic, its aesthetic Dalmatian, its cruelty and gallantry all its own - and excessive. The decline was prodigious, protracted, and total: after World War I the Ottoman Empire was no more. The book charts its history from the first campaigns to the Charge of the Light Brigade, from the Crusades to the Dardanelles, and aims to bring to life details of Ottoman life: caravans carrying parcels of spice and bags of gold, Western emissaries witnessing executions, distant sentries on far frontiers, jewels, meals, shadow plays and stray dogs.