IV
After Ertogrul’s death there was an amazing change. Osman and his villagers began to attack their neighbours, extend their boundaries, and form a state. We cannot go on to a consideration of these events without mentioning some traditions of this period which furnish us with a clue to the explanation of this sudden change of a very small pastoral tribe, leading a harmless sleepy existence in the valley of the Kara Su, into a warlike, aggressive, fighting people.
Osman once passed the night in the home of a pious Moslem. Before he went to sleep his host entered the room, and placed on a shelf a book, of which Osman asked the title. ‘It is the Koran,’ he responded. ‘What is its object?’ again asked Osman. ‘The Koran’, his host explained, ‘is the word of God, given to the world through his prophet Mohammed.’ Osman took the book and began to read. He remained standing, and read all night. Towards morning he fell asleep exhausted. An angel appeared to him, and said, ‘Since thou hast read my eternal word with so great respect, thy children and the children of thy children shall be honoured from generation to generation.’[20]
In Itburnu, a village not far from Eski Sheïr, and also not far from Sugut, lived a Moslem cadi, who dispensed justice and legal advice to those of his faith in that neighbourhood. He had a daughter, Malkhatun, whose hand was demanded in marriage by Osman. But the sheik Edebali, for a period of two years, persisted in refusing his consent to this union.[21] Finally, Osman, when sleeping one night in the home of Edebali, had a dream.
He saw himself lying beside the sheik. A moon arose out of the breast of Edebali, and, when it had become full, descended and hid itself in his breast. Then from his own loins there began to arise a tree which, as it grew, became greener and more beautiful, and covered with the shadow of its branches the whole world. Beneath the tree he saw four mountain ranges, the Caucasus, the Atlas, the Taurus, and the Balkans. From the roots of the tree issued forth the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Danube, covered with vessels like the sea. The fields were full of harvests, and the mountains were crowned with thick forests. In the valleys everywhere were cities, whose golden domes were invariably surmounted by a crescent, and from whose countless minarets sounded forth the call to prayer, that mingled itself with the chattering of birds upon the branches of the tree. The leaves of the tree began to lengthen out into swordblades. Then came a wind that pointed the leaves towards the city of Constantinople, which, ‘situated at the junction of two seas and of two continents, seemed like a diamond mounted between two sapphires and two emeralds, and appeared thus to form the precious stone of the ring of a vast dominion which embraced the entire world.’ As Osman was putting on the ring he awoke.[22]
When this dream was told to Edebali, he interpreted it as a sign from God that he should give his daughter to Osman in order that these wonderful things might be brought about for the glory of the true faith. So the marriage was arranged.[23]
That Osman and his people were good Moslems themselves, and of Moslem ancestry, is not questioned by the Ottoman and Byzantine writers, and seems to have been accepted as a matter of fact by the European historians who have written upon the history of the Ottoman Empire.[24] But it seems very clear that Osman and his tribe, when they settled at Sugut, must have been pagans. There is no direct mention, in any historical record, of the conversion to Islam of the tribes from the Khorassan and other transoxanian regions which, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, appeared on the confines of Asia Minor. The earlier Turkish invaders entered the country only after they had already for generations been in contact with Arabic Islam. Although they displayed no great knowledge of or zeal for their religion and were free from the fanaticism of the Saracens, the Seljuks were certainly Moslems.
But the Turks of the later immigration, from whom Osman sprang, had never come to any great extent under the influence of Islam, even though they had settled for some generations on the frontiers of Persia. If we accept the testimony of the Osmanlis themselves concerning their descent from Soleiman Shah, who had left Mahan with fifty thousand families, we have a clear indication of their being non-Moslems from Neshri’s account of the dispersion of this horde after the death of Soleiman Shah. He says that some were ancestors of the Syrian Turcomans and others of all the wandering tribes in Rum—the habitual nomads of his own day. The testimony of travellers from the twelfth century onwards is overwhelming in support of the pagan character of these tribes.[25]
The various Turkish tribes which entered Asia Minor at the same time as that of Osman, and had penetrated into the western part of the peninsula, soon found themselves in a Moslem atmosphere. They were few in number. Nothing was more natural for them than to adopt the faith of their Seljuk kinsmen. This they did, for exactly the same reason that the Bulgarians, although they had originally a tendency towards Islam, adopted Christianity.[26] It was so natural that it passed without comment. These Turks were primarily warriors, indifferent to deep religious feeling and conviction. So they could take on a new faith—if we can say that they ever had a faith before—without any trouble or without any noise being made over it. Between 800 and 1000 the Seljuks changed their religion three times.[27] At the sack of Mosul, in 1286, the Turks and Turcomans made no distinction between Moslem and Christian, massacring the men and carrying off the women of both sects alike.[28]
The tractability of the Turks, as of the Tartars and Mongols, in the matter of religion was noted by every traveller, and was so well known in western Europe that strenuous efforts were made by the popes at various times from Djenghiz Khan to Gazan Khan to bring these Asiatic hordes into the Christian fold. A united Christendom, even a united Rome, might have seen its missionary work crowned with success.
Of the village and castle chieftains with whom Osman at the beginning of his career lived on friendly terms, almost every one was a Christian. His lot was cast with them. He was cut off from the decaying Seljuk dominion of Konia. He had practically no intercourse with the other Turkish emirs of Asia Minor.[29] His only serious foes were the Mongols, pagans like himself, who had, at the very year of his birth, given what seemed a death-blow to Islam in destroying the Khalifate at Bagdad in 1258, and who were, when Osman began his active career, plotting with the Franks of the Holy Land to aid them against the Egyptian sultanate—the last strong bulwark of Islam.
We see, then, the tremendous importance of these dreams of Osman, of his meeting with Edebali, and of his marriage with Malkhatun. We cannot regard these events in any other light than as recording, in a truly Oriental way, his conversion to Islam. The interpretation of the dream of the Holy Book strikes one immediately. Except in Seadeddin, the religious significance of the moon and tree dream is overshadowed by the romance of Osman and Malkhatun. Let us give to sheik Edebali his proper place in history as the great missionary of Islam, who found for his faith in its hour of dire need a race of swordbearers worthy of the task of reconstituting the Khalifate and of spreading once more the name of Mohammed in three continents.
It was the conversion of Osman and his tribe which gave birth to the Osmanli people, because it welded into one race the various elements living in the north-western corner of Asia Minor. The new faith gave them a raison d’être. This conversion, and not the disappearance of the Seljuks of Konia,[30] is the explanation of the activity of Osman after 1290, as in sharp contrast with the preceding fifty years[31] of easy, slothful existence at Sugut.
Ertogrul and Osman, village chieftain at Sugut, had lived the life of a simple, pastoral folk, with no ambition beyond the horizon of their little village. No record exists of any battle fought, of any conquest made. Turks had already made their appearance in raids against the coast cities of Asia Minor, upon the islands of the Aegaean Sea, and even in the Balkan peninsula. But they were not the Turks of Osman. Until the students of the later Byzantine Empire, and of the Italian commercial cities in their relations with the Levant, make a clear distinction between Turk and Osmanli, there will always be confusion upon this point. Ertogrul had about four hundred fighting men.[32] There is no reason to believe that Osman had more. His relations with his neighbours were those of perfect amity.[33] There is no question of believer and unbeliever.
Suddenly we find Osman attacking his neighbours and capturing their castles. During the decade from 1290 to 1300 he extends his boundaries until he comes into contact with the Byzantines. His four hundred warriors grow to four thousand. We begin to hear of a people called, not Turks, but Osmanlis, after a leader whose own name first appears at the same time as that of his people.[34] They are foes of Greeks and Tartars alike. They are definitely allied to Islam. They possess a missionary spirit and a desire to proselytize such as one always finds in new converts. Their unity among themselves, and their distinctively different character from that of the other Turks of Asia Minor, becomes, during the first sixty years of the fourteenth century, so marked that Europe is forced to recognize them as a nation. Being more in the presence of Europe than the other groups of Asia Minor, the Europeans begin to call them simply Turks, and to take them as representing all the Turks of Anatolia.
But they had never called themselves Turks until they got the habit of doing so through the influence of European education upon their higher classes, and because of the awakening since 1789 of the sentiment of nationality among the subject Christian races. Mouradjea d’Ohsson, who understood the Osmanlis better than any other European writer of his day, wrote in 1785: ‘The Osmanlis employ the term “Turk” in referring to a coarse and brutal man. According to the Osmanlis, the word Turk belongs only to the peoples of the Turkestan and to those vagabond hordes who lead a stagnant life in the deserts of the Khorassan. All the peoples submitted to the Empire are designated under the name “Osmanlis”, and they do not understand why they are called Turks by Europeans. As they attach to this word the idea of the most marked insult, no foreigner in the Empire ever allows himself to use it in speaking to them.’[35]