The man of Constantinople

In commerce, as in love, everything is permissible. This is one of the principles that the "Man of Constantinople" adhered to, who was born in a weakened Ottoman Empire and became, thanks to his love for adventure and the strength of his ambition, one of the richest and most influential men in the world. This remarkable novel draws its material from real events and tells the astonishing journey of this adventurer, diplomat, businessman, and art lover. It reveals to us the secret of his tremendous rise and takes us through the winding alleys of Istanbul's bazaar, to the first oil fields in the Middle East, passing through Marseille, London, and Paris… where we encounter figures such as Emmanuel Nobel, César Ritz, and Winston Churchill. We also live with him through some historical upheavals and are captivated as we receive an everlasting lesson: knowledge is power. This beautiful lesson in life and history also brings us face to face with a question that troubled the "Man of Constantinople" and he posed it on his deathbed: what is beauty? So let us travel into this world of beauty and discover the wondrous world of the Portuguese writer José Rodrigues dos Santos, who is considered one of the greatest novelists in modern world literature and rightly nicknamed the "Portuguese Dan Brown."