The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire; a history of the Osmanlis up to the death of Bayezid I (1300-1403)

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

TERRITORIES DEPENDING ON OUTSIDE STATES

At the mouth of the Gulf of Smyrna, on the northern promontory, was the Genoese self-governing colony of Phocaea (46), of which much has been said in the chapter on the reign of Orkhan. Phocaea had many vicissitudes, but maintained its independence as a Latin colony throughout the fourteenth century, and knew how to turn aside the possible aggression of Timur. It was never even temporarily dependent upon the Osmanlis.[793]

Smyrna (47) was wrested from the emir of Aïdin by the crusaders of 1344, and, for the rest of the fourteenth century was a Christian city, independent of the Osmanlis and the Turkish emirs alike. It was Timur who brought it again under Moslem control. But it did not pass to the Osmanlis for many years after this reconquest.

The Byzantines, after they had been driven out of Bithynia and Mysia, managed to maintain Philadelphia (48), through their friendship with Sarukhan, until the end of Murad’s reign.

The Cypriotes (49) exercised a powerful influence in the southern portions of Asia Minor throughout the fourteenth century. As we have seen, they held Adalia for some years. In 1360, the emirs of southern Anatolia were so divided and opposed to each other, and needed so greatly the help of Cyprus against the Karamanians, whom they feared much more than the Osmanlis, that they became for many years tributary to Cyprus.[794] The Cypriotes were also interested in Cilicia.

In 1327, the year after Osman’s death, the power of the Mongols (50) reached for a few years the Mediterranean. After Bahadur Khan’s death, in 1335, the Mongol Empire was divided up. Suzerainty in Asia Minor fell to the Sultan of Irak (Persia), who, until Timur’s coming, fought with the Karamanians for some of the most important cities of eastern Anatolia. When Ibn Batutah went through the peninsula, Erzerum, Erzindjian, Sivas, Caesarea, Amassia, Nigdeh, and Ak Seraï were ‘cities of the Sultan’.[795]

The chevaliers of Rhodes (51) did not come into Asia Minor until 1310, when they won from the Turks and Greeks the island which was to give them their most commonly used name. They were continually in conflict with Tawas, Alaïa, Adalia, Tekke, Menteshe, Fukeh, and Aïdin. But they never came into contact with the Osmanlis until after the fall of Constantinople. On the mainland, the chevaliers helped to take Smyrna in 1344, and defended it against the Turks for sixty years. They wrested Ayasoluk from Aïdin for a while about 1365. Several times they gained a foothold in Fukeh and Menteshe, and in the last year of the century established a fortress at Halik (Halicarnassus).[796]

The Mamelukes of Egypt (52) were not only interested in Cilicia, and held that country from 1360 to 1379, and at other times, but also invaded Karamania on different occasions. They reached Konia at the end of the thirteenth century, the beginning of the fifteenth century, and again, under Ibrahim pasha, twice in the third decade of the nineteenth century. During the reign of Murad I, the Egyptians called Cilicia up to the Taurus Bab-el-Mulk, the Royal Gateway. Konia was entered by an Egyptian Sultan in 1418. The Karamanians of that day, who, according to the Ottoman historians, were vassals of the Osmanlis, had no interest in or fear of Mohammed I. They were engaged in a civil war which led to Egyptian intervention.[797] If Konia and the rest of Karamania was under the Osmanlis, why was there not Ottoman intervention in the quarrel between Mohammed and Ali for the Karamanian throne?

Last of all, the Catalans (53), whose history is given in the chapter on Osman, did not all leave Asia Minor with the ‘Grand Company’. Throughout the reign of Orkhan the principality established at Cyzicus left its traces in the Marmora and Dardanelles coast and hinterland. Nothing more strikingly illustrates the lack of Ottoman activity in Asia Minor during Orkhan’s day, even at the very threshold of Bithynia, than the fact that he left the Catalans in possession of Bigha at his death. Murad, in 1363, although his presence was urgently needed on the Maritza to defend his new conquest of Adrianople against a Serbian invasion, was compelled to delay for months to eject the Catalans from Bigha.[798]