A tour de force of accessible scholarship The GuardianImpressive ... It is a complicated story that still reverberates and Gingeras narrates it with lucid authority New StatesmanThe Ottoman Empire had been one of the major facts in European history since the Middle Ages. Stretching from the Adriatic to the Indian Ocean the Empire was both a great political entity and a religious one with the Sultan ruling over the Holy Sites and as Caliph the successor to Mohammed.Yet the Empires fateful decision to support Germany and AustriaHungary in 1914 doomed it to disaster breaking it up into a series of European colonies and what emerged as an independent Saudi Arabia.Ryan Gingerass superb new book explains how these epochal events came about and shows how much we still live in the shadow of decisions taken so long ago. Would all of the Empire fall to marauding Allied armies or could something be saved In such an ethnically and religiously entangled region what would be the price paid to create a cohesive and independent new state The story of the creation of modern Turkey is an extraordinary bitter epic brilliantly told here.