By the end of 1918, after four increasingly grim years of warfare, revolution was in the air across Europe. Thrones wobbled; rulers abdicated. In the space of months, the great, centuries-old dynasties of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns were all toppled from power.
At the eastern edge of the continent lay the vast, ancient empire that the Ottoman sultans had built up since the 14th century. At its height, around 1700, it had stretched across north Africa, Arabia, Mesopotamia and around the Black Sea, also encompassing Greece, the Balkans and the Danube valley, stopping just short of Vienna. But in the course of the 19th century, as its economic and military power declined, many of its outermost lands were lost to conquest or insurrection. Local nationalist movements, and rival colonial powers such as Russia, Britain and Austria-Hungary, stripped away Greece, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Macedonia, the lands around the Black Sea, and all of its African possessions. When the Ottomans sided with Germany in the first world war, the British and French gradually captured all of the Middle East. After the war, humiliatingly, they even occupied Istanbul itself.
