Ow, my brain.

Ow, ow. What possessed me to think I could research 18th Century Romania and the Ottoman Empire at the same time? A hopeless naivety towards the available source material, I suspect. There’s too much on Istanbul and not enough on Bucharest, and I’m never going to get a handle on just enough of it to fit in a book.

But the Romanians have the prettiest names in the world – Constantin Brancoveanu? Lovely.