journey he arrived back at Pest in May 1864. He went to London to arrange the English-language publication of his book about the travels. "Travels in Central Asia" and its Hungarian counterpart "Közép-ázsiai utazás" were published in 1865. Thanks to his travels Vámbéry became an internationally renowned writer and celebrity. He became acquainted with members of British social elite. The Ambassador of Austria in London gave him a letter of recommendation to the Emperor, who received him in an audience and rewarded Vámbéry's international success by granting him professorship in the Royal University of Pest. Vámbéry became known also as a publicist, zealously defending British policy in the East as against that of the Russians. He was widely celebrated at his 70th birthday in March 1902, receiving greetings from academic institutions all over Europe. The British King Edward VII appointed him an Honorary Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, his house order, followed by a letter where Vámbéry was appreciated as "so good and constant a friend to England". In 2005 the National Archives at Kew, Surrey, made files accessible to the public, and it was revealed that Vámbéry had been employed by the British Foreign Office as an agent and spy whose task it was to combat Russian attempts at gaining ground in Central Asia and threatening the British position on the Indian sub-continent. He advocated the theory of close Turkic-Hungarian linguistic and ethnic relationship, and his publications on the subject provoked a harsh scientific and public debate in Hungary, remembered as the "Ugric-Turk War". Vámbéry argued that the large number of similarities between Turkic languages and Hungarian pointed to a shared origin of these languages and peoples in Northern Asia. His strongest evidences were the large corpus of ancient Turkish words in Hungarian word-stock (300–400 for a minimum, and even more with good alternative Turkic etymologies), and the strong typological similarity of Hungarian and Turkic languages. In his opinion Hungarian is a contact language, more precisely a mixed language, and a fruit of the intermingling of early Hungarians with Turkic peoples; as a result of this merger, the Hungarian language got a unique, distinctly dual (Ugric AND Turkic) character. (The intriguing problem of Turkic-Hungarian language relations is far from settled even after centuries of research.) Vámbéry was not the first to suggest such mixed origin; the German linguist and Orientalist Wilhelm Schott (1802–1889) was a proponent of Finn-Turk-Hungarian