In this book, historian Daniel Goffman uses a wealth of English and Ottoman primary sources to re-create the lives of some of the Englishmen who adapted - or failed to adapt - to life, commerce, and politics in the Ottoman Empire during the turmoil of the civil wars and interregnum at home.

Henry Hyde, a royalist adventurer skilled in manipulating Ottoman society to his own ends, ultimately lost the political game, and with it, his head. Sir Sackvile Crow, Charles I's ambassador in Istanbul, tried to aid his king and brought the English civil war spilling into the Levant. Crow's struggle against his ambassadorial successor, Sir Thomas Bendysh, enmeshed the English Levant Company, parliament, the king, and a host of Ottoman statesmen and officials.

In the name of loyalty and ideology, Englishmen battled in the streets and markets of Istanbul, Izmir, and Aleppo for control of the company's men and assets.

In playing out the dramas of intrigue, shifting allegiances, and self-interest in which these men and their compatriots became embroiled, Goffman shows how Englishmen in the Ottoman Empire during the mid-seventeenth century accommodated themselves to a profoundly foreign society. Together, they fused themselves into the great diversity that was the Ottoman realm and laid the groundwork for a commercial and diplomatic network that their successors would forge into a great empire in Asia.