Notwithstanding the tribal hatred recently shown for each other by a handful of English and Turkish football fanatics, nobody who has travelled in Turkey or taken a holiday in that country can have failed to notice the courtesy and generosity with which visitors are invariably treated. Indeed, one of the things which attracts visitors to the place, according to widely-used modern guidebook, is simply the ancestors two or three hundred years ago, at a time when rather fewer westerners crossed their borders and when the sprawling Ottoman Empire still posed a much more serious threat to Europe than modern Turkey does today?