Like so many cherished national traditions, the fez owed its popularity to the efforts of a nineteenth-century reformer. Sultan Mahmud II was one of a series of modernising Ottoman rulers who worked to end the stagnation into which their state had slumped in the eighteenth century. Conflicts with foreign powers had steadily diminished imperial territory, while populations at the periphery became increasingly difficult to govern. Once the terror of the European powers, the Ottomans’ star app...
