The Rise of the House of Osman

Around 699 AH (1299 CE), by the conventional reckoning, the small frontier principality that would become the Ottoman empire took shape under Osman, the eponymous founder of the house of Osman, in the hill country of Bithynia in northwestern Anatolia, with its base at Sogut. After the Seljuk sultanate of Rum broke apart under Mongol pressure, Anatolia fragmented into many small Turkish principalities, the beyliks, and the Ottomans began as one of the smallest of these, on the very edge of the Turkish world where it met the lands of the shrinking Byzantine empire. What set this frontier apart was its character as a march, a porous borderland of raiders and settlers, ghazi warriors and wandering dervishes, where Turk and Greek and Muslim and Christian lived, fought, and traded in close contact, and where a vigorous frontier lord could gather followers and push the border forward. From this modest beginning, with little to distinguish it at first from its neighbours, the house of Osman grew with remarkable speed: within two generations it had crossed into Europe, within a century and a half it would take Constantinople, and it would rule for six centuries as one of the great empires of world history. The origins are wrapped in later legend, for the earliest Ottoman chronicles were written long after the event, and the symbolic founding date of 1299 is a convention rather than a documented moment; the contemporary evidence is mostly Byzantine. This scene depicts those humble beginnings: the wooded frontier hills of Bithynia, a modest fort and market town, the ghazi cavalry of the marches riding out, a Byzantine church on the Christian side of the border, and the mixed borderland society in which the dynasty arose, the small seed from which the Ottoman empire would grow.