CONCLUSION
Orkhan’s emirate, then, was but one of more than thirty independent states which existed in Asia Minor during the decade from 1330 to 1340. During his lifetime, and the lifetime of his father Osman, the other better-known emirates had been slowly forming by the absorption of small independent villages and cities. Although several of the emirates that have been given above were ephemeral, and some of them duplicated practically the same territory at different periods in the fourteenth century, others, such as Aïdin, Kermian, Karamania, Sarukhan, and Tekke, were far more powerful in Asia Minor than Orkhan or than Murad. That Bayezid had not crushed the life out of the larger emirates is proved by the ease with which they were revived by Timur, and by their survival during the first half of the fifteenth century.
Karamania, for one, remained powerful and flourishing long after the political life of the Balkan states had become extinct. Karamania demanded one hundred years of strenuous effort on the part of the conquerors of the Byzantine Empire before it could be subjugated. The Osmanlis crossed the Balkans more than a century before they crossed the Taurus.
This exposé was written in order to show:
1. That Osman fell heir to no part of the Seljuk dominions;
2. That the Seljuks had many more heirs than the traditional ten;
3. That Osman and Orkhan carved their state out of the remnants of the Byzantine possessions along the upper end of the Sea of Marmora and in the Valley of the Sangarius—a very small portion indeed of Asia Minor;
4. That Murad, the wonderful conqueror of the Balkan peninsula, was only one of several rulers in Asia Minor, and not the most powerful of these, and that there were large portions of Asia Minor with which neither he nor his successor Bayezid came into contact at all;
5. That neither Bayezid, with his tremendous prestige in Europe, nor his brilliant successors of the fifteenth century, gained undisputed possession of Asia Minor. The Osmanlis were not masters of Asia Minor until long after their inheritance of the Byzantine Empire was regarded in Europe as a fait accompli.