Since Lawrence was more intent on such extra-curricular activities, or on escape into Morris country, than on his lectures, he was amazingly fortunate that in 1908 the History Examiners introduced the option of presenting a thesis on any question connected with a special subject. Lawrence realized that if he chose ‘Military History and Strategy’ as his special subject, he could present a thesis on crusader castles which would deploy all his hard-earned knowledge of medieval defensive warfare. In summer 1907 he had made his second cycling tour of France with Beeson, and now, in summer 1908, he decided to make a third tour to look at the crusader castles he had missed, and to glimpse some of the cathedrals which had so inspired William Morris in the 1850s. This would be his most ambitious expedition yet: he would ride all the way across France to the Mediterranean, and this time he would do it alone.

He arrived at Le Havre in mid-July, and battled in violent hailstorms through Gisors to Compiиgne, and from there to Provins, near Paris, where he discovered a unique twelfth-century keep and ruined town walls, which almost defied his cerebral game of attack-defence. He wandered around them for hours trying to puzzle out what the designer had intended, and came to the conclusion that they had been built as an experiment: ‘… the keep would have been almost incapable of defence,’ he decided, ‘yet in spirit it is half a century ahead of its time.’³¹ Living on bread, milk, peaches and apricots, he rode into Champagne, where the weather became ‘fearfully hot’. His days followed a strict regime: up at dawn, he would reach his castle usually by midday, and investigate it for a couple of hours. In the afternoon he would ride on, reaching his hotel by seven or eight in the evening. The sheer imperative of the journey soon eclipsed even his joy in reaching the castles, though he would occupy his mind in composing whole pages of his projected thesis as he pedalled. The Champagne country was stunningly beautiful and he felt himself filling with energy as he cycled, through cherry-orchards and across sparkling streams, past fields of ripe golden barley and wheat. He watched peasants advancing to the harvest in cohorts, their sickles flashing like swords in the sun, the great wains of hay being drawn by bilious-white oxen. Steadily he made his way south, and by late July he was steering a course beneath the austere volcanic plugs of the Auvergne, past gardens enclosed with massive dry-stone walls, toiling up thousands of feet and consoling himself with the thought that such agony as his was undreamed of in classical times – a combination of the tortures of Sisyphus, who had to roll a great stone endlessly uphill, of Tantalus, who was condemned to grasp at fruit just beyond his reach, and of Theseus, who was forced to remain forever sitting. His reward was a 4,000 foot free-wheel descent into the Rhфne valley, so perilous and exciting that he felt sick when he reached the bottom. He rode on through Provence and the lovely but mosquito-infested marshlands of the Camargue, where he contracted his first dose of the malaria which would plague much of his life. At last, he arrived at the lonely, olive-covered mountain of Les Baux, from where he looked down a precipice and far across a plain. Suddenly, as he watched, the sun leapt from behind a cloud, illuminating a silvery shimmer. It was one of the most thrilling moments of his life, and he celebrated it in a way that only an Oxford man of that era would have done, screaming out the words of Xenophon, so loudly that it disturbed the nearby tourists: ‘Thalassa! Thalassa! The Sea! The Sea!’

4. The Sultan Drank Tea as Usual

Young Turks’ Revolution 1908

As Lawrence had cycled southwards to the Mediterranean that July, news of a coup d’йtat in Turkey seemed to leap at him out of the headlines. One day the newspapers would confirm that a revolution was taking place, and another they would assure their readers that all was calm, and ‘the Sultan drank tea as usual’. On 23 July he wrote to his mother asking desperately for clarification: ‘it might well be important,’ he said.¹ What was actually taking place was the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire, the tottering giant which had dominated the Middle East and eastern Europe for nearly 500 years. On 22 July, a handful of young Turkish officers had taken control of the Ottoman 3rd Army in Europe. On 24 July they offered the Padishah Sultan, Abd al-Hamid II, an ultimatum: either grant a constitution or step down. Whichever path he chose, the tyrant’s power was effectively at an end.

They called him ‘Abdul the Damned’, ‘The Red Sultan’, ‘Abdul the Bloody’, and for years he had presided over a corrupt and oppressive empire that stretched from the sands of the Sahara to the Persian hills. Behind the grim walls of his Yildiz Palace, surrounded always by a horde of eunuchs, dwarfs, deaf-mute chamberlains and Circassian dancing-girls, the Padishah had run his domain through a vast network of spies and spies-upon-spies connected to him by thousands of miles of telegraph wires. The palace was itself a dark icon of his monumental paranoia, for he rarely ventured beyond its limits, and even within them had constructed a warren of secret passageways whose plan was known only to himself. So unpredictable were Abd al-Hamid’s rages that even seasoned courtiers were seen to quake in his presence. His food was tasted by a corps of professional poison-snoopers, his cigarettes puffed first by a eunuch, his milk brought in sealed bottles from specially guarded cows. He had secreted thousands of revolvers about the palace, a brace of them above the Imperial bath, and had twice shot dead innocent bystanders who had startled him – one of them rumoured to have been his own daughter. His administration had become such a travesty that his chosen advisers included a circus clown, a bootblack, a Punch and Judy man, the son of one of his cooks, and a slave he had bought on the open market. ‘Abdul the Damned’ had lost all touch with reality: the Ottoman Empire was rotten to the core, and only the slightest push was required to set it rocking. That push was provided by the keen young firebrands of the CUP – the ‘Committee of Union and Progress’ – who were mostly army officers trained in the Sultan’s own military academies. Their aim was to reduce the Padishah to a figurehead. Abd al-Hamid, who believed he could strike back later, decided to granted a constitution, and for almost the first time in living memory, the streets of Stamboul were filled with cheering crowds.

Among those celebrating the Padishah’s reduction was the Sharif Hussain ibn Ali, a senior member of the Hashemite family of the Hejaz in western Arabia – the Holy Land of Islam. Exiled in Stamboul under close surveillance by the tyrant’s spies, the Sharif had never forgiven the Sultan for having ordered the murder of his uncle, who had been stabbed to death brutally in a Jeddah street in 1880. Hussain had continued to scheme and plot against the government, until, in 1893, the Sultan had finally ordered him to Stamboul with all his family – which had then included three small sons. He must have disembarked from his ship with some trepidation, for he was well aware that critics of the Red Sultan were in the habit of finding themselves stitched into a sack and dropped into the Bosphorus on moonless nights. The Sultan had even had his own brother confined to a cell for twenty years. To his surprise, perhaps, Hussain had been allowed to live quietly, and for fifteen years he had wisely bided his time, never losing sight of his determination to return to Arabia as Emir of Mecca. He was much respected by those who met him – opinionated, domineering, determined, but extremely polite. In 1908 he was about fifty-five, a small, hard man with a bushy beard and eyes as wide and cold as a vulture’s. He had delicate hands and fine-drawn features which lent him an exquisite air of grace, and he wore his black jubba cloak and tight Meccan turban with the simple dignity appropriate to his patrician status. A conservative of the old school who spoke Turkish more readily than he spoke Arabic, he was renowned for his religious scholarship, his knowledge of international affairs, his love of poetry and his encyclopedic knowledge of natural history. His people, the Hashemites, were the most revered family in Islam, able to trace their descent back over thirty-seven generations to the Prophet Mohammad himself, through his daughter Fatima. They were the traditional stewards of Mecca and Medina, the sacred cities of Islam – cities whose possession was of crucial symbolic value to the Sublime Porte. Though Ottoman Sultans had been considered Caliphs or ‘Successors’ of the Prophet for 200 years, Abd al-Hamid had been the first to use the tide officially. His empire was crumbling, and he had played the Islamic card in a last desperate attempt to rally the disparate peoples within its borders. He was terrified of internal revolt. In 1888, unrest among the Armenians had provoked a knee-jerk reaction. His armies had moved in and butchered them systematically, men, women and children, village by village, in a resolute attempt to wipe them out. While the Armenians were a Christian minority, however, the Arabs were not only brother Muslims, but comprised almost half the Empire’s population – 10Ѕ million out of 22 million, actually outnumbering the 7Ѕ million ethnic Turks. The Sultan decided to court them. He invoked Islamic sentiment, built mosques, endowed Islamic schools, and promoted Arabs to high office. In 1901 he had inaugurated construction of the Hejaz railway, ostensibly to facilitate the Haj – the sacred pilgrimage to the two Holy Cities, which every Muslim was enjoined to take at least once in his life. It was not coincidental, of course, that the railway also strengthened his control over these cities, which were a vital part of his Islamic faзade. Officially, the Hejaz was run by the senior member of the Hashemite family, who was appointed Emir or Prince of Mecca. By manipulating the rivalries between the three branches of the family whose menfolk were eligible to be Emir – a game so Byzantine in its wheels within wheels as to be almost incomprehensible to anyone outside it – the Sultan had successfully managed to gain hegemony over the post. On taking power, the CUP dismissed the incumbent Emir as corrupt and, after some deliberation, appointed Hussain in his place. The Young Turks wanted in the Hejaz someone who would bow to his masters and preserve the status quo, and Hussain’s prudence and respectability over the past decade and a half had convinced the government that he was such a man. It must have struck the Sharif as something of an irony that he, who had been exiled for fifteen years as a dangerous subversive, should now be chosen for his conservatism.