Henry Percy, known as Lord Warkworth until 1899, and thereafter known as Earl Percy after his father became the Duke of Northumberland, became a Conservative politician in 1895. That same year, he first visited Turkey, and returned in 1897. He published his experiences of the 1897 in the present work, relating his journey from Constantinople across northern Turkey to Lake Van, and on to Mosul and Aleppo. The work has become uncommon, as has Percy’s subsequent volume The Highlands of Asiatic Turkey (1901).