We see, then, the tremendous importance of these dreams of Osman, of his meeting with Edebali, and of his marriage with Malkhatun. We cannot regard these events in any other light than as recording, in a truly Oriental way, his conversion to Islam. The interpretation of the dream of the Holy Book strikes one immediately. Except in Seadeddin, the religious significance of the moon and tree dream is overshadowed by the romance of Osman and Malkhatun. Let us give to sheik Edebali his proper place in history as the great missionary of Islam, who found for his faith in its hour of dire need a race of swordbearers worthy of the task of reconstituting the Khalifate and of spreading once more the name of Mohammed in three continents.
It was the conversion of Osman and his tribe which gave birth to the Osmanli people, because it welded into one race the various elements living in the north-western corner of Asia Minor. The new faith gave them a raison d’être. This conversion, and not the disappearance of the Seljuks of Konia,[30] is the explanation of the activity of Osman after 1290, as in sharp contrast with the preceding fifty years[31] of easy, slothful existence at Sugut.
Ertogrul and Osman, village chieftain at Sugut, had lived the life of a simple, pastoral folk, with no ambition beyond the horizon of their little village. No record exists of any battle fought, of any conquest made. Turks had already made their appearance in raids against the coast cities of Asia Minor, upon the islands of the Aegaean Sea, and even in the Balkan peninsula. But they were not the Turks of Osman. Until the students of the later Byzantine Empire, and of the Italian commercial cities in their relations with the Levant, make a clear distinction between Turk and Osmanli, there will always be confusion upon this point. Ertogrul had about four hundred fighting men.[32] There is no reason to believe that Osman had more. His relations with his neighbours were those of perfect amity.[33] There is no question of believer and unbeliever.
Suddenly we find Osman attacking his neighbours and capturing their castles. During the decade from 1290 to 1300 he extends his boundaries until he comes into contact with the Byzantines. His four hundred warriors grow to four thousand. We begin to hear of a people called, not Turks, but Osmanlis, after a leader whose own name first appears at the same time as that of his people.[34] They are foes of Greeks and Tartars alike. They are definitely allied to Islam. They possess a missionary spirit and a desire to proselytize such as one always finds in new converts. Their unity among themselves, and their distinctively different character from that of the other Turks of Asia Minor, becomes, during the first sixty years of the fourteenth century, so marked that Europe is forced to recognize them as a nation. Being more in the presence of Europe than the other groups of Asia Minor, the Europeans begin to call them simply Turks, and to take them as representing all the Turks of Anatolia.
But they had never called themselves Turks until they got the habit of doing so through the influence of European education upon their higher classes, and because of the awakening since 1789 of the sentiment of nationality among the subject Christian races. Mouradjea d’Ohsson, who understood the Osmanlis better than any other European writer of his day, wrote in 1785: ‘The Osmanlis employ the term “Turk” in referring to a coarse and brutal man. According to the Osmanlis, the word Turk belongs only to the peoples of the Turkestan and to those vagabond hordes who lead a stagnant life in the deserts of the Khorassan. All the peoples submitted to the Empire are designated under the name “Osmanlis”, and they do not understand why they are called Turks by Europeans. As they attach to this word the idea of the most marked insult, no foreigner in the Empire ever allows himself to use it in speaking to them.’[35]
V
Nor were the Osmanlis, until the reign of Bayezid, one hundred years later, the strongest military and political factor in Asia Minor. The Turkish emirates of Sarukhan, of Kermian, and especially of Karaman, could match the Osmanlis in extent of territory and ability to defend it.[36] We shall see later how the Osmanlis conquered their Anatolian neighbours by a prestige won in Europe and by soldiers gathered in Europe. One of the principal tasks of this book is to correct the fundamental misconception of the foundation of the Ottoman Empire, which has persisted to this day.[37] It seems to be a pretty generally accepted idea that the Osmanlis were a Turkish Moslem race, who invaded Asia Minor, and, having established themselves there, pushed on into Europe and overthrew the Byzantine Empire. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Osmanlis were masters of the whole Balkan peninsula before they had subjugated Asia Minor as far as Konia!
Osman and his people have no history until they come in contact with the Byzantines. The Ottoman chroniclers, and the Byzantine and European historians who have followed them, give at some length the early conquests of Osman. But the accounts are fantastical, obscure, and frequently contradictory. It is the story of a village chieftain, who succeeded in imposing his authority upon his neighbours over an increasingly wider area, until a small state was formed. But it is not the same story as that of the other emirs who built up independent states in the old Seljuk provinces. For Osman founded his principality in territory contiguous to Constantinople, and by attacking
