Though it’s named for the city of Fez, Morocco, the fez is a man’s hat that dates back to ancient Phoenicia.  The Phoenicians were active traders and colonizers all over the Mediterranean, including in what is today Morocco, so it’s not surprising that the fez caught on there.  What is remarkable is that it’s still worn today. Like all fashions, the fez has come and gone in different parts of the world.  It disappeared from the eastern Mediterranean, where it originated, but was reintroduced centuries later.  The fez caught on in the Balkans sometime around the Renaissance, possibly inspired by a kind of military cap resembling the fez that was common in the Mediterranean at the time. In 1826 the fez got a real boost when Sultan Mahmud II banned the turban throughout the Ottoman Empire.  His thinking was that he wanted to modernize Turkey, and saw the turban as a symbol that separated east from west.  “Modernization” in 19th century Turkey often me...

When you think of croissants, what country comes to mind? If you’re like most people, you probably thought of France, and indeed, the French do make great croissants. They even gave us the word for them. But as famous as the French are for them, the croissant is not a French invention. The origin of the croissant is actually a ways to the east, in Austria. Specifically they were invented in Vienna, in 1683. That year, the city of Vienna was under siege by a massive Ottoman army composed of approximately 140,000 soldiers. To put this in perspective, the population of the Ottoman Empire at the time was somewhere around 11 million, which meant that more than one out of every hundred Ottoman citizens were in Austria for the siege of one city. Less than 300 years later, the United States would deploy roughly one out of every 100 citizens to fight World War II, across Europe and the Pacific, over a four-year span. The Ottoman Empire was investing the equivalent in blood and money t...

In 1798, Napoleon Buonaparte proposed a French invasion of Egypt and Syria.  Since he wasn’t emperor yet, he had to ask permission from the Directoire, which was a panel of five people who were running France in the late days of the French Revolution.  Napoleon’s pitch was that an invasion of Egypt would protect French interests and damage English trade, and also put France in a good position to start cutting deals with the princes of India, who were mostly under direct or indirect control of the English.  France and England were at war at this time, so it sounded good to the Directoire.  They gave him the troops and their blessing, however improbable Napoleon’s scheme was. The campaign in Egypt didn’t go as well as Napoleon had hoped.  His troops wound up fighting both the English and the Ottoman Empire.  Though they saw a lot of victories, Egypt was just too much to control, and those two empires were just too much to fight.  The invasion res...