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In autumn 1898, he extended his Weltpolitik to the east, setting off with a large entourage (including eighty maids and servants), a new wardrobe of arabesque uniforms (boots, whips and veils feature prominently) to visit the sultan, Abdulhamid II, who had removed a short-lived liberal constitution to restore Ottoman autocracy over an empire that had lost most of its European provinces. Tiny, vigilant and neurotic, his beard reddened with henna, Abdulhamid was a skilled carpenter, pianist, operatic composer and champagne-quaffing fan of Sherlock Holmes novels and French theatre, and a technical modernizer. Now he presented himself as caliph, encouraging Islamic nationalism to unite his restless Arab and Turkish subjects. He murdered reformers, using a secret police based on his Russian neighbours’, and was an adept player of ethnic politics. Infuriated by Russian championing of Armenians and Bulgarians, Abdulhamid repressed a revolt by the Kurds, a Sunni mountain people spread across Ottoman Iraq and Syria, then armed Kurds in new Hamidiye regiments and unleashed them against Christians. He carefully watched the new Arab clubs that discussed the awakening of an Arab nation, hoping to project Ottoman power by building new railways to Baghdad and into Arabia.

There, two families, the Hashemites and the Saudis, rivals for three centuries, appeased Abdulhamid but deplored his power. Both would produce kings of many kingdoms; both rule into the twenty-first century. A Hashemite and a Saudi would remake the Arab world.

ABDULAZIZ – THE RETURN OF THE SAUDIS

In Mecca, the Hashemite amir, Ali Awn al-Rafiq, promoted by the sultan, was one of a family descended from Muhammad that had governed the holy city since Saladin – except between 1803 and 1818 when another family, the Saudis, had expelled them.

Knowing Hashemite prestige, Abdulhamid had noticed that the amir’s nephew Hussein was plotting against the amir and summoned him to Istanbul, where the secret police reported his meetings with his relatives, describing him as a ‘wilful recalcitrant person whose views on the rare occasions he consented to express them revealed a dangerous capacity for original thinking’. The sultan warned him to be careful but appointed him to the Council of State. Hussein, at home in the small oases of Arabia, the desert encampments (where he hunted with falcon and studied the fauna) and the coffee houses on the Bosphoros, was diminutive and obstinate, courtly, shrewd and aware of his lineage. He awaited his opportunity.

Across the peninsula in Kuwait, another extraordinary prince, Abdulaziz ibn Saud – known in the west as Ibn Saud – planned to regain his lost patrimony. Brought up in a world of conspiracy and chaos, his family, in partnership with the Wahhabi sect of Salafist purists, had already won and lost two kingdoms. In 1890, when he was fifteen, Abdulaziz had seen his father driven out of Riyadh by a rival, losing everything; but the refugees were granted asylum by their friends, the al-Sabah, once brigands in Iraq until, driven out by the Ottomans, they had seized Kuwait. These tiny Gulf fiefdoms, once controlled by Iran, were allied with the British viceroy of India, who cared little what happened within Arabia. Abdulaziz, aquiline, strapping and six foot four, an expert cameleteer and sharpshooter, was brought up partly by his aunt. ‘She loved me even more than her own children,’ he recalled. ‘When we were alone she told of the great things I’d do: “You must revive the glory of the House of Saud,” she told me again and again, her words like a caress.’

When he was twenty-six, Abdulaziz, wielding scimitar and Martini–Henry rifle, led a series of attacks into Nadj. In one raid, he and six men raided Riyadh where he murdered the governor and took the fortress. Abdulhamid sent troops to expel Abdulaziz, who was wounded but did not give up: he raided again, this time killing his rival and taking Nadj: the Saudis were back but Abdulhamid had plans to control Arabia with Willy’s help.