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.