John Julius Norwich tells the dramatic story of the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, followed by the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the 15th Century. Using monuments in Istanbul to ...

Coffee must have been the secret weapon of Greek, Slav, and Albanian mercenary units, the stratioti, that fought together throughout Europe in the 15th to 18th centuries. The stratioti must have ...

Many may be surprised by the picture that Tonge paints. After all, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, Turkey has often been synonymous with the move towards secularisation, towards ...

It held the grave of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of Osman I, who founded the Ottoman Empire. In reality the connections have always been much deeper. For 400 years Syria was a province of the ...

At a recent lecture hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), Yasir Suleiman, professor of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Cambridge guided the audience through the ...