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W.

W. Empire pod UK.com. Hello and me, welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan and me William Derempeel.

Now this is the exciting start of our second series.

We've spent the first 20 episodes of Empire talking about the British in India and I promise I know a lot of you

were really enamored with that subject and so are we it's what we love we will be

circling back to that in the future but for our second series we've chosen the Ottoman Empire and

to explain it and we're going all the way back to the Romans aren't we?

To the Romans and particularly to Byzantine to the Romans, Romans, particularly to Byzantium, to the founding of the city of Constantinople by

Constantine in the fourth century, and rocketing forward to the eruption of the Turks into Anatolia in the 11th century and then the death grapple

between the Turks and the Byzantine with the famous siege of Constantinople in 1453.

So we're doing the Ottomans and William Dal Rumpel, why should we care about the Ottomans?

Just as quite a lot of contemporary conflicts, misunderstandings, tensions in the world

can be explained if you understand the story of the British Empire in India.

So an awful lot of the conflicts in the world

and most of those in the Middle East can be explained if you know a little bit of Ottoman history.

What William is saying is absolutely right. This is why the

Ottomans are important, relevant and interesting. So if you think that there is

one fisher that lies between India and Pakistan which has now created two nuclear states which are pointing at each

other and arguably could point elsewhere.

...