The dears of the Sublime Porte had slightly failed when Mahmud II mounted the throne as the sole surviving heir at law of the Ottoman dynasty. He was only twenty- three, yet formerly he carried the scars of a continuance of bloodshed. His kinsman Selim III had been boggled before his eyes. His family Mustafa IV, who tried to kill him, had been executed at his command. His protection, the potent Alemdar Mustafa Pasha, had decomposed in a storm of fire. Istanbul lay in remains, its thoroughfares filled with ashes, and the Janissaries, though crippled, still strutted with arrogance through the capital. This was the conglomerate Mahmud inherited — a realm in extremity, torn between the history and the future.

The achievement of May 1807 had torn the Ottoman Empire from the hands of a utopian and placed it in the grip of men who knew only fear and tradition. Sultan Selim III, deposed after nearly two decades of struggle for reform, now sat in confinement within the Topkapı Palace. His lyrical soul still rumored of renewal, but his hands were bound, his vision shattered. In his place, the throne passed to Mustafa IV, a whoreson of Selim, chosen not for his strength but for his weakness.

The dawn of the nineteenth century set up Sultan Selim III both hopeful and uneasy. He'd survived storms that would have broken numerous autocrats — the French irruption of Egypt, the Janissaries’ growling, the endless wars on the conglomerate’s borders. His reforms, the Nizam- ı Cedid or New Order, had survived long enough to take root. But like youthful saplings in a harsh wind, they were fragile, their survival uncertain. In Istanbul, whispers swirled through the stores, the coffeehouses, and the barracks whispers of treason, of foreign influence, of a sultan who no longer heeded to his dogfaces. The megacity breathed with pressure, though its thoroughfares brimmed as ever with the commerce of conglomerate.