Had there been in Asia Minor in the latter half of the thirteenth century a predominant element, with an historical past and with a strong leader, we might have seen a revival of the sultanate of Konia. Or we might have seen a revival of Hellenism, a grafting, perhaps, on fresh stock, which would have put new foundations under the Byzantine Empire by a reconquest of the Asiatic themes. But the Mongols and the Crusaders had done their work too well. The Latins at Constantinople, and the Mongols in Persia and Mesopotamia, had removed any possibility of a revival of either Arab Moslem or Greek Christian traditions.
Sixty years of Latin rule at Constantinople, and in the lower portion of the Balkan peninsula, had demonstrated the futility of any further effort on the part of western Europe to inherit the Eastern Roman Empire. The Mongols, the strongest cohesive military power at that time in the world, had not been won to Christianity, and thus inspired with a desire to re-establish for themselves the succession of the Caesars in the Levant.[1] The Italians, imbued with the city ideal which had been so fatal to the ancient Greeks, and divided into factions in their cities, were beginning a bitter struggle for commercial supremacy in the East that was to lose its vital importance from the discoveries of Vasco da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan, and to render them impotent before the Osmanlis after centuries of misdirected energy and useless sacrifice. The last great crusade had passed by Asia Minor to spend itself in a losing fight against the one remaining Moslem power.
As in other critical periods of history, then, an entirely new people, with an entirely new line of sovereigns, must work out its destiny in this abandoned country, or—to state what actually did happen—must come, with a strength and prestige gained in Europe, to subdue it and to possess it.
From the eighth to the thirteenth centuries a number of new ethnic elements had entered Asia Minor. Except along the range of the Taurus and in the valleys of rivers which emptied into the Aegaean Sea, the Greek element, or more specifically, the Hellenic organization of imperial institutions, had gone back to the coast cities from which it had originally come. The progress of Moslem conquest, after driving before it into Asia Minor the more zealous and militant Armenian and Syrian Christians, had brought a considerable immigration, partly Syrian, partly Arab, and varying in faith. The earlier Turks, who came largely by way of Persia, with a period of settlement in that country, belonged to the great Seljuk movement. They were nominally Moslems, and very quickly became an indigenous element, because they had settled themselves permanently in every place that had been opened up to Turkish immigration by the Seljuk armies. So firmly rooted did they become that, when the fortunes of war allotted again temporarily some of the places which they inhabited to the Crusaders and to the Nicaean Byzantines, they did not dream of moving out. This was the best country they had ever seen and they had no intention of leaving it. When the Osmanlis captured Brusa and Nicaea, they found many Moslems who had been there for three generations. Simple-minded, tolerant of others, totally unconscious of the privileges as well as of the obligations of an organized society, the Turks of the earlier immigration neither opposed nor aided in the political changes which have so frequently been the lot of Asia Minor since their coming. This holds true of the Anatolian Turks of the present day, and will be so as long as they remain illiterate and uninstructed.
In the first quarter of the thirteenth century there was another great migration towards Asia Minor, towards rather than into the peninsula, because it partly scattered itself in the mountains of Armenia and partly turned southward, going over the Taurus and Amanus ranges into Cilicia and Syria. Some got as far as Egypt. The earlier Seljuk invasion had been that of settlers following a victorious army. This invasion was that of refugees fleeing before a terrible foe. For Djenghiz Khan and his Mongol horde had come out of central Asia, and all who could, even the bravest, fled before him. The lesson had been quickly learned that to resist him meant certain death. Because it was a migration of families, with all their worldly possessions, and because they had to hurry and did not know where they were going, the great bulk of them did not advance far.[2]
Most of the bands, after settling for some years in the mountains of Armenia and in the upper valley of the Euphrates, were tempted by the death of Djenghiz Khan to return home. The steep mountains and narrow valleys of Rum had dissuaded them from trying for better luck farther west. It was too much up hill and down dale for their cattle.[3] The resolute and adventurous pushed on into Asia Minor, although in doing so they must have lost or have left behind most of their women and children and flocks. For they were small warrior bands, bent upon enlisting in the army of Alaeddin Kaï Kobad, the last illustrious sultan of the Konia Seljuk line—illustrious because he had not yet met the Mongols and was looked upon by the fugitives as a possible saviour and avenger. Even if they had not the intention of putting themselves under the protection of Alaeddin when they set their faces westward, they must needs have come into contact with him. For of the two roads into Asia Minor from Armenia, the upper one lay through Sivas and Angora, and the lower through Caesarea, Akseraï, and Konia. Whichever route they took would lead them through the Seljuk dominions.
It is doubtful if Alaeddin viewed the appearance of these fighting bands with any other emotion than that of alarm. In spite of their undoubted skill as fighters, the Seljuk Sultan did not dare to enroll many of them in his army. If he were defeated in battle, or if he should die, he knew well that such vigorous mercenaries might upset his line. He could rely upon their fidelity neither against the Kharesmians with whom he was at that time fighting (many of them were from that Sultan’s country), nor against the Mongols with whom he must soon measure his strength. So he followed the policy dictated by prudence. Resisting the temptation of using them in his own army, he granted to their leaders as fiefs districts on the frontiers of his rapidly diminishing empire which were hardly his own to give, where they would have to work out their own salvation by mastering local anarchy in their respective ‘grants’, or, like the Israelites of Canaan, fight for what had been allotted to them, against the Byzantine Emperors of Nicaea.
Under these circumstances, the tribe of destiny would be that which occupied the grant nearest Constantinople and the remnant of the Byzantine Empire. The Turkish tribe which settled on the borders of Bithynia, either by the direction and with the permission of Alaeddin Kaï Kobad,[4] or independently of the Seljuks of Konia,[5] was that whose first historic chief was Osman, the father of the Osmanlis.
With the other Turkish tribes, which succeeded in establishing independent emirates, the Osmanlis did not come into contact until the reign of Orkhan. So it is unnecessary to trace their fortunes here.[6]