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"In 1835 the word "Turkey" was political shorthand, not an official name. The Ottoman Empire, like Saudi Arabia today, was named after a man, in this case Osman I, the Turkish gazi, or warrior, who founded the dynasty in 1299. Several nicknames identified the Empire and its sultan, including the Grand Turk and the Grand Seigneur, but commonly the central government was referred to as the Sublime Porte, or simply the Porte, after the gate which led into the inner reaches of the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople. The Osmanlis, as the Ottomans were also called, had once ruled a vast empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the gates of Vienna, but by 1835 they were in retreat. In Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula the Turks' authority, loosely applied, remained, but in Egypt, nominally a part of the Empire, an Albanian soldier-of-fortune named Mohammed Ali had taken power, established a de facto independence and, after aiding the Sultan in the Greek War of Independence (1821-28), had extended his authority into the Ottoman provinces of Palestine and Syria. When his troops invaded Anatolia and routed the Ottomans at Konya in 1832, only the intervention of the Russian fleet kept the Egyptians from taking Constantinople. By the time Dr. and Mrs. Grant arrived in Turkey, everyone knew that another war between Mohammed Ali and the Ottoman sultan, Mahmud II, was inevitable."
--Fever and Thirst, Chapter 2
