Lords of the horizons a history of the Ottoman Empire
Jason Goodwin

The early warriors flung a net as fine as filigree, as strong as iron, across a vast era-yet they were never a separate nation. This is a book about a people who do not exist, whose name does not describe a place, whose language nobody speaks. Lords of the horizons irresistibly evokes the strange, dynamic empire created form the thirty sux nations of the Balkans and the Black Sea and the Middle East, its faith Islam, its ceremony Byzantine, its dignity Persian, its wealth Egyptian, its letters Arabic.