The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (95 page)

²⁷⁶
Poor Abdul-Hamid was hurried with his family on board the German steamship
Lorelei
and returned to Istanbul, to spend his six remaining years in the Beylerbey Palace on the Bosphorus.
Return to text.

²⁷⁷
Alan Moorehead tells us that one of these was ‘subsequently torpedoed by a U-boat off Malta, and must have occasioned some surprise to the Germans. As the ship settled, her wooden turrets and her twelve-inch guns floated away on the tide.’
Return to text.

²⁷⁸
There is a superb account of the evacuation in Chapter XVII of Alan Moorehead’s
Gallipoli
, to which for this all too brief account of the campaign I am hugely indebted.
Return to text.

²⁷⁹
The official British historian went further still: ‘Seldom in history,’ he wrote, ‘can the exertions of a single divisional commander have exercised, on three separate occasions, so profound an influence not only on the course of a battle but, perhaps, on the fate of a campaign and even the destiny of a nation.’
Return to text.

²⁸⁰
‘One Colonel of the Royal Engineers was sick on the floor outside Allenby’s office after an interview; another officer had to be actually carried out of Allenby’s room, having collapsed on the floor before his desk.’ (Brian Gardner,
Allenby
, p. 177).
Return to text.

²⁸¹
Not many British officers during the Boer War, one suspects, would have written from South Africa asking to be sent a copy of A. N. Majestrat’s
L’Art du Croire, ou Préparation Philosophique à la Foi Chrétienne
.
Return to text.

²⁸²
A statement made on 2 November 1917 by Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, in a letter to Lionel, 2nd Baron Rothschild, a leader of British Jewry, informing him of British support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, provided that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.
Return to text.

²⁸³
How this promise accorded with the Sykes–Picot Agreement–or, later, with the Balfour Declaration–was never made entirely clear.
Return to text.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2007

Copyright © 2007 by John Julius Norwich

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Norwich, John Julius, 1929–

The Middle Sea : a history of the Mediterranean / John Julius Norwich.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Mediterranean Region—History. I. Title.

DE80.N67 2007

909'.09822—dc22                                                                                          2006026071

www.vintagebooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-38772-1

v3.0