Mahmoud Ezzedine/Matthew Thatcher

Ezzedine is one of the novel's two central protagonists. He is a Turkish doctor living in Constantinople with his wife, Saruca, and their son, Ismail, and attending to the sultan and his family when the novel begins. He is asked to accompany an ambassador on a mission of diplomacy to England, and once there, he is betrayed by the ambassador's chief advisor, Cafer bin Ibrahim, and then attends to an English nobleman, Baron Moresby, while he is having a seizure during a palace soiree. These two inciting incidents put Ezzedine on a path to be manipulated and used by numerous characters throughout the novel. Queen Elizabeth asks the ambassador if she can send Ezzedine home with Baron Moresby to Cumberland and Ezzedine feels he must agree to this arrangement because the request was made by the queen and because he was threatened by bin Ibrahim...