Part 43 (1/2)

Greenback:

The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

For a recipe for the Greek fishermen's stew with tomatoes , go to my website at .

Western writers tend to imagine the harem as a perfumed bathhouse full of naked odalisques. In fact it was much more like an old-fas.h.i.+oned girls' boarding school, run as a department of the civil service; the baths may have been hot but the food was usually cold. Having been brought up with four sisters, a mother, a stepmother, grandmothers, and innumerable aunts and great-aunts, it took no great leap of the imagination to people the harem of Abdulmecid. My thanks and love to them all.

I drew on several excellent accounts of harem life, including Leyla Saz Hanimefendi's memoir The Imperial Harem of the Sultans (from which I borrowed the Ceremony of the Birth); Arabesque, the 1944 memoirs of HRH Princess Musbah Haidar; and Douglas Scott Brookes's invaluable The Concubine, the Princess and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem, from which I took the terrible engine.

While An Evil Eye is a work of fiction, Fevzi Ahmet happens to be a real person who rose to be Kapudan pasha and did make the astonis.h.i.+ng career move with the Ottoman fleet described in this book.

Thanks to Richard Goodwin for his own patient and indulgent reading; to Sarah Crichton at FSG and Julian Loose at Faber for forbearance and wise comment; to Charles Buchan and Sarah Chalfant at Wylie; to Krista Kaer for taking Yas.h.i.+m (and me) to Estonia.

As for the harem, my wife, Kate, is as trenchant a critic as the valide herself: I am grateful for all her suggestions. Harry, my youngest son, is among other things a skillful and prolific writer. I do my best to discourage him from pursuing that path, but he comes up with wonderful ideas and I plan to steal some of them for the next Yas.h.i.+m story. Especially the banditry.

This one, meanwhile, is for him.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Jason Goodwin fell under the spell of Istanbul while studying Byzantine history at Cambridge University. Following the success of his book A Time for Tea: Travels Through China and India in Search of Tea, he made a six-month pilgrimage across Eastern Europe to reach Istanbul for the first time, a journey recounted in On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul.

He later wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, described as ”a work of dazzling scholars.h.i.+p” in The New York Times Book Review. His books featuring Investigator Yas.h.i.+m have been translated into more than forty languages; the first, The Janissary Tree, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel in 2007. He lives with his wife and their four children in Dorset, England.

Jason Goodwin's Investigator Yas.h.i.+m Series.

The Janissary Tree.

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel.

This first book in the investigator Yas.h.i.+m series is a richly entertaining tale, full of exotic history and intrigue.

It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the Sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yas.h.i.+m, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world, an investigator who can walk with ease in the great halls of the empire, in its streets, and even within its harems-because, of course, Yas.h.i.+m is a eunuch. His investigation points to the Janissaries, who, for four hundred years, were the empire's elite soldiers. Crushed by the sultan, could they now be staging a brutal comeback? And can they be stopped without throwing Istanbul into political chaos?

To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here.

/thejanissarytree.