Istanbul was once Europe's largest city, and today Turkey is the fifth most visited country in the world. At its height the Ottoman Empire – the longest-lasting Islamic empire in history – stretched from the borders of Austria to the Persian Gulf, from the steppe to the Sudan.





This brilliant distillation traces Turkey's rich history from the rise of the Ottoman Empire to the emergence of the Turkish Republic in the early twentieth century, and on to the populist, authoritarian regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan today.





From conquest and religion to carpets, from popular music to the politics of headwear (fez or fedora?), Benjamin C. Fortna charts the ironies of Turkish history, caught between east and west, between secularism and theocracy, between the past of an empire that was home to many different cultures and a nation state bent on ethnic unity.