Karamania (21)
Until after the campaign of 1386, Karamania was a far more powerful emirate in Asia Minor than that of the Osmanlis. The Karamanlis were the actual successors of the Seljuks, and maintained themselves in Konia. While the Osmanlis were confined to a very small corner of Anatolia, the Karamanian dominions extended from the Euphrates and the Amanus to the Gulf of Adalia, on both slopes of the Taurus. Except in the maritime emirates of the Aegaean Sea, the Karamanlis and their emir were the great power in the peninsula of Asia Minor. Their independence was not broken by Bayezid, for they recovered their former glory after the intervention of Timur, and successfully withstood Mohammed I, Murad II, and Mohammed II. As in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the Karamanian emirs of the first half of the fifteenth century were allied by marriage with the house of Osman, but refused to do homage to the Ottoman sovereigns.[762]
Limits of space prevent mentioning here the many grounds upon which the Karamanians were able to and did keep their independence in the face of both Constantinople and Cairo. It was only at the end of the fifteenth century that we find the fiction of the Karamanian vassalage to the Osmanlis and of the connexion between the Seljuks and the Osmanlis appearing in the Ottoman chronicles, which on this count are, as I have pointed out elsewhere, wholly unreliable. It is astonishing that their version of the rise of the Osmanlis in Asia Minor has been accepted for so many centuries by western historians.[763]