1. That Osman was a prince of illustrious birth.
Chalcocondylas is responsible for the first and widest diffusion of this error in western Europe. He claims that Osman is the great-grandson of Duzalp, ‘chief of the Oghuzes’; grandson of Oguzalp, who, aspiring to succeed his father, reached ‘in a brief time the highest fame in Asia’; and son of Ertogrul, who, in 1298,[657] with his fleet, devastated the Peloponnesus, Euboea, and Attika.[658] Closely allied to the account of Chalcocondylas is that of Hussein Hezarfenn.[659] According to Ali Muhieddin,[660] Seadeddin,[661] and Hadji Khalfa,[662] the grandfather of Osman was Soleiman Shah, prince or bey of Mahan in the Khorassan, who was compelled to leave his country at the approach of Djenghiz Khan, and lived seven years in Armenia. As he was returning home, he was drowned in the Euphrates. Two of his sons, Ertogrul and Dundar, turned back into Asia Minor, and were, through the kindness of the Seljuk Sultan, Alaeddin I, given a residence near Angora, and, later, on the confines of Bithynia. Neshri places the time of residence in Armenia as 170 years, and declares that Soleiman Shah was leader of 50,000 families.[663] Practically all of the European historians who have written later than the publication in Europe of Chalcocondylas, Ali and Seadeddin have followed closely these authorities.[664]
The western writers, whose works appeared before the translation and publication of the eastern historians, or who followed earlier western authorities, are either vague or uncertain concerning the parentage of Osman,[665] or give an entirely different story of the rise of his family. He is supposed to be the son of a Tartar shepherd, called Zich,[666] who rises to fame at the court of Alaeddin I by defeating in single combat a Greek cavalier that had killed many of the favourites of the Seljuk Sultan.[667] According to others, who give nearly the same story, the name of Osman’s father is ‘the madman Delis, a shepherd’.[668] For his success in killing the Greek, the Sultan rewards him with the castle of Ottomanzich, which is often confused with Sugut, and is claimed to be the origin of Osman’s name.[669] By another story, which is asserted to be the invention of Mohammed II, who thus wanted to legitimatize in the eyes of the world his claim to the throne of the Caesars, Osman is the descendant of a certain Isaac Comnenus, a member of the imperial Byzantine family, who fled to the court of the Seljuks of Konia, and became a Moslem.[670]
In this, as in the discussion of other misconceptions which follow, we are not at all justified in throwing out categorically the testimony of the early western writers every time that they conflict with the eastern authorities, or in ignoring them entirely, as Hammer, Zinkeisen, and Jorga have done. We must remember that Chalcocondylas and all the Ottoman historians are very late, that they cite no sources upon which to base their assertions or inferences, and that they write with the intention to please, and under the necessity of pleasing, the Ottoman court, at a time when its rulers had become so powerful that they could not brook the recording of an humble origin for their royal house. The extravagant descriptions of Seadeddin, for example, when he speaks of Osman’s court, and his expressions such as ‘laying his petition humbly at the feet of his royal master’, &c., seem much out of place in a narrative about primitive and exceedingly plain and simple people. The western writers claim to have sources for information which are as early and as good as those of Ali and Seadeddin. Some of them certainly had.[671] We cannot claim for these writers that their stories be accepted as fact. But we can claim that they be accepted as an honest reflection of late fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century opinion concerning the founder of the Ottoman royal house—opinion derived from stories which were current in Constantinople at that time, and which, for lack of definite history, were circulated among the Osmanlis themselves up to a very much later period.[672]
The later western historians have taken, without critical examination, the Ottoman accounts of the origin of their royal family, as they have of the relationship with the Seljuks of Konia, practically at their face value. But it is not hard to prove a good case against the Ottoman historians.
The story of Soleiman Shah, prince of Mahan and leader of 50,000 families, living and ruling in the neighbourhood of Erzerum between 1224 and 1232, is very easy to disprove. The name of Mahan is often given to two cities, Dinewer and Nehawend.[673] It is rather the designation of a plain in which these two cities lay. In 1229, Sultan Djelaleddin, after his defeat by the Mongols at Mughan, passed the winter in the plain of Mahan. A certain Izzeddin was lord of the fortress there. He had been rebellious some years before, but was ‘now serving Djelaleddin devoutly’.[674] In the history of Djelaleddin, I find absolutely no mention of a Soleiman Shah in connexion with Mahan or any other place in that region. With 50,000 families, Soleiman Shah would have been a factor in Armenia between 1224 and 1232. For that is precisely the time when Djelaleddin, Sultan of Kharesm, his logical suzerain or his enemy, was struggling with the Seljuks of Konia in that very region! In 1229, Djelaleddin was at Erzindjian, and ravaged the whole country.[675] At the same time, a cousin of Alaeddin I, a very powerful ruler, Rokneddin, was lord of Erzerum, and was strong enough to be at enmity at the same time with Djelaleddin’s invading army and with Alaeddin of Konia.[676] Other Arabic historians, and the Seljuk historian of this period, confirm the history of Mohammed-en-Nesawi in its leading points, but they, no more than the historian of Djelaleddin, make any mention whatever of a Soleiman Shah, or of an Ertogrul.[677] Nor is Soleiman Shah and his family mentioned in any of the Arabic genealogies prior to the seventeenth century, although these exist in great numbers.[678] There is only one Ottoman genealogy prior to the tables of Hadji Khalfa.[679]
The best authority on the western Turks, the late Léon Cahun, conservator of the Mazarine Library in Paris, declares that the Turkish tribes of the time of the purported Soleiman Shah and Ertogrul had no family ties. They knew no rank other than that of a man higher up in the army. In inheritance, the younger son got the land, and the older sons the movable possessions of the father. There were no family names; there are none to this day. The Turks who came into Asia Minor were without name or family. They wandered far and sold their services to get established family ties.[680]
There is one more testimony concerning the humble origin of the Ottoman royal house. The different historians of the relations between Timur and Bayezid I all speak of the taunt flung by Timur at Bayezid concerning the Ottoman ruler’s lack of royal ancestors.[681] Bayezid never made any response to this taunt, and confined his boasting, which was by no means of a modest sort, to his own and his father’s achievements, and to his power as a European ruler.
We cannot establish the ancestry of Osman. It is altogether probable that he had none of note, but was what Americans would call ‘a self-made man’.