/> into a dim light of western history. One Boja, lord of Kashgar and Khan of

what the Chinese knew as the people of Thu-Kiu--probably the same name as

'Turk'--embraced Islam and forced it on his Mazdeist subjects; but other

Turkish tribes, notably the powerful Uighurs, remained intolerant of the

new dispensation, and expelled the Thu-Kiu en masse from their holding

in Turkestan into Persia. Here they distributed themselves in detached

hordes over the north and centre. At this day, in some parts of Persia,

e.g. Azerbaijan, Turks make the bulk of the population besides supplying

the reigning dynasty of the whole kingdom. For the Shahs of the Kajar

house are not Iranian, but purely Turkish.



This, it should be observed, was the western limit of Turkish expansion in

the mass. Azerbaijan is the nearest region to us in which Turki blood

predominates, and the westernmost province of the true Turk homeland. All

Turks who have passed thence into Hither Asia have come in comparatively

small detachments, as minorities to alien majorities. They have invaded as

groups of nomads seeking vacant pasturage, or as bands of military

adventurers who, first offering their swords to princes of the elder

peoples, have subsequently, on several occasions and in several

localities, imposed themselves on their former masters. To the first

category belong all those Turcoman, Avshar, Yuruk, and other Turki tribes,

which filtered over the Euphrates into unoccupied or sparsely inhabited

parts of Syria and Asia Minor from the seventh century onwards, and

survive to this day in isolated patches, distinguished from the mass of

the local populations, partly by an ineradicable instinct for nomadic

life, partly by retention of the pre-Islamic beliefs and practices of the

first immigrants. In the second category--military adventurers--fall, for

example, the Turkish praetorians who made and unmade not less than four

caliphs at Bagdad in the ninth century, and that bold condottiere, Ahmed

ibn Tulun, who captured a throne at Cairo. Even Christian emperors availed

themselves of these stout fighters. Theophilus of Constantinople

anticipated the Ottoman invasion of Europe by some five hundred years when

he established Vardariote Turks in Macedonia.



The most important members of the second category, however, were the

Seljuks. Like the earlier Thu-Kiu, they were pushed out of Turkestan late

in the tenth century to found a power in Persia. Here, in Khorasan, the

mass of the horde settled and remained: and it was only a comparatively

small section which went on westward as military adventurers to fall upon

Bagdad, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor. This first conquest was little

better than a raid, so brief was the resultant tenure; but a century later

two dispossessed nephews of Melek Shah of Persia set out on a military

adventure which had more lasting consequences. Penetrating with, a small

following into Asia Minor, they seized Konia, and instituted there a

kingdom nominally feudatory to the Grand Seljuk of Persia, but in reality

independent and destined to last about two centuries. Though numerically

weak, their forces, recruited from the professional soldier class which

had bolstered up the Abbasid Empire and formed the Seljukian kingdoms of

Persia and Syria, were superior to any Byzantine troops that could be

arrayed in southern or central Asia Minor. They constituted indeed the

only compact body of fighting men seen in these regions for some

generations. It found reinforcement from the scattered Turki groups

introduced already, as we have seen, into the country; and even from

native Christians, who, descended from the Iconoclasts of two centuries

before, found the rule of Moslem image-haters more congenial, as it was

certainly more effective, than that of Byzantine emperors. The creed of

the Seljuks was Islam of an Iranian type. Of Incarnationist colour, it

repudiated the dour illiberal spirit of the early Arabian apostles which

latter-day Sunnite orthodoxy has revived. Accordingly its professors,

backed by an effective force and offering security and privilege, quickly

won over the aborigines--Lycaonians, Phrygians, Cappadocians, and

Cilicians--and welded them into a nation, leaving only a few detached

communities here and there to cherish allegiance to Byzantine

Christianity. In the event, the population of quite two-thirds of the

Anatolian peninsula had already identified itself with a ruling Turki

caste before, early in the thirteenth century, fresh Turks appeared on the

scene--those Turks who were to found the Ottoman Empire.



They entered Asia Minor much as the earlier Turcomans had entered it--a

small body of nomadic adventurers, thrown off by the larger body of Turks

settled in Persia to seek new pastures west of the Euphrates. There are

divers legends about the first appearance and establishment of these

particular Turks: but all agree that they were of inconsiderable number--

not above four hundred families at most. Drifting in by way of Armenia,

they pressed gradually westward from Erzerum in hope of finding some

unoccupied country which would prove both element and fertile. Byzantine

influence was then at a very low ebb. With Constantinople itself in Latin

hands, the Greek writ ran only along the north Anatolian coast, ruled from

two separate centres, Isnik (Nicaea) and Trebizond: and the Seljuk kingdom

was run in reality much more vigorous. Though apparently without a rival,

it was subsisting by consent, on the prestige of its past, rather than on

actual power. The moment of its dissolution was approaching, and the

Anatolian peninsula, two-thirds Islamized, but ill-organised and very

loosely knit, was becoming once more a fair field for any adventurer able

to command a small compact force.



The newly come Turks were invited finally to settle on the extreme

north-western fringe of the Seljuk territory--in a region so near Nicaea

that their sword would be a better title to it than any which the feudal

authority of Konia could confer. In fact it was a debatable land, an angle

pushed up between the lake plain of Nicaea on the one hand and the plain

of Brusa on the other, and divided from each by not lofty heights,

Yenishehr, its chief town, which became the Osmanli chief Ertogrul's

residence, lies, as the crow flies, a good deal less than fifty miles from

the Sea of Marmora, and not a hundred miles from Constantinople itself.

Here Ertogrul was to be a Warden of the Marches, to hold his territory for

the Seljuk and extend it for himself at the expense of Nicaea if he could.

If he won through, so much the better for Sultan Alaeddin; if he failed,

vile damnum!



Hardly were his tribesmen settled, however, among the Bithynians and

Greeks of Yenishehr, before the Seljuk collapse became a fact. The Tartar

storm, ridden by Jenghis Khan, which had overwhelmed Central Asia, spent

its last force on the kingdom of Konia, and, withdrawing, left the Seljuks

bankrupt of force and prestige and Anatolia without an overlord. The

feudatories were free everywhere to make or mar themselves, and they spent

the last half of the thirteenth century in fighting for whatever might be

saved from the Seljuk wreck before it foundered for ever about 1300 A.D.

In the south, the centre, and the east of the peninsula, where Islam had

long rooted itself as the popular social system, various Turki emirates

established themselves on a purely Moslem basis--certain of these, like

the Danishmand emirate of Cappadocia, being restorations of tribal

jurisdictions which had existed before the imposition of Seljuk

overlordship.



In the extreme north-west, however, where the mass of society was still

Christian and held itself Greek, no Turkish, potentate could either revive

a pre-Seljukian status or simply carry on a Seljukian system in miniature.

If he was to preserve independence at all, he must rely on a society which

was not yet Moslem and form a coalition with the 'Greeks', into whom the

recent recovery of Constantinople from the Latins had put fresh heart.

Osman, who had succeeded Ertogrul in 1288, recognized where his only

possible chance of continued dominion and future aggrandizement lay. He

turned to the Greeks, as an element of vitality and numerical strength to

be absorbed into his nascent state, and applied himself unremittingly to

winning over and identifying with himself the Greek feudal seigneurs in

his territory or about its frontiers. Some of these, like Michael, lord of

Harmankaya, readily enough stood in with the vigorous Turk and became

Moslems. Others, as the new state gained momentum, found themselves

obliged to accept it or be crushed. There are to this day Greek

communities in the Brusa district jealously guarding privileges which date

from compacts made with their seigneurs by Osman and his son Orkhan.



It was not till the Seljuk kingdom was finally extinguished, in or about

1300 A.D. that Osman assumed at Yenishehr the style and title of a sultan.

Acknowledged from Afium Kara Hissar, in northern Phrygia, to the Bithynian

coast of the Marmora, beside whose waters his standards had already been

displayed, he lived on to see Brusa fall to his son Orkhan, in 1326, and

become the new capital. Though Nicaea still held out, Osman died virtual

lord of the Asiatic Greeks; and marrying his son to a Christian girl, the

famous Nilufer, after whom the river of Brusa is still named, he laid on

Christian foundations the strength of his dynasty and his state. The first

regiment of professional Ottoman soldiery was recruited by him and

embodied later by Orkhan, his son, from Greek and other Christian-born

youths, who, forced to apostatize, were educated as Imperial slaves in

imitation of the Mamelukes, constituted more than a century earlier in

Egypt, and now masters where they had been bondmen. It is not indeed for

nothing that Osman's latest successor, and all who hold by him,

distinguish themselves from other peoples by his name. They are Osmanlis

(or by a European use of the more correct form Othman, 'Ottomans'),

because they derived their being as a nation and derive their national

strength, not so much from central Asia as from the blend of Turk and

Greek which Osman promoted among his people. This Greek strain has often

been reinforced since his day and mingled with other Caucasian strains.



It was left to Orkhan to round off this Turco-Grecian realm in Byzantine

Asia by the capture first of Ismid (Nicomedia) and then of Isnik (Nicaea);

and with this last acquisition the nucleus of a self-sufficient sovereign

state was complete. After the peaceful absorption of the emirate of

Karasi, which added west central Asia Minor almost as far south as the

Hermus, the Osmanli ruled in 1338 a dominion of greater area than that of

the Greek emperor, whose capital and coasts now looked across to Ottoman

shores all the way from the Bosphorus to the Hellespont.