Orhan

The second Ottoman ruler, Orhan Ghazi, took over a small frontier principality in north-western Anatolia in the 1320s and, over almost four decades, turned it into the strongest Turkish state in the region. He took the great Byzantine cities of Bithynia, absorbed a neighbouring Turkish emirate, married into the Byzantine imperial family and, at the end of his reign, saw his troops gain their first lasting foothold in Europe.

Orhan was born in Söğüt, the son of Osman I and Malhun Hatun; his birth date is unknown, though he was said to be about eighty when he died. Osman died in 1323 or 1324 and Orhan succeeded him. According to Ottoman tradition he offered to share power with his brother Alaeddin, who declined, saying their father had chosen a single heir, and accepted only the income of one village near Bursa. Later Ottoman writers credit Alaeddin with early laws and with creating a paid standing infantry, though how far such reforms date from this reign is uncertain.

Even before his accession Orhan had seized Mudanya, in 1321, cutting Bursa off from the sea. Bursa itself fell when its Byzantine commander was persuaded to defect. In 1329 the Byzantine emperor Andronikos III marched to relieve besieged Nicaea, but Orhan's troops routed his army at Pelekanon, and the emperor never again met the Ottomans in open battle. Nicaea surrendered in 1331 after a three-year siege, Nicomedia fell in 1337 and Scutari, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople, in 1338. By then almost all of north-western Anatolia was his.

In 1345 Orhan turned on Karesi, a fellow Turkish principality to the south-west whose two princes were fighting over the succession. Presenting himself as a peacemaker, he annexed its lands around Pergamum and Balıkesir, which carried his frontier to the Asian shore of the Dardanelles. A long period of relative calm followed, which he used to build mosques, schools and public buildings and to strengthen his government. The scholar Ibn Battuta called him the greatest and richest of the Turkmen kings.

Orhan profited from the quarrels that tore the Byzantine Empire apart. During the civil war of 1341 to 1347 the regent John VI Kantakouzenos sought Ottoman help; in 1346 he recognised Orhan as the most powerful Turkish ruler and gave him his daughter Theodora in marriage at Selymbria; Ottoman troops fought for him in Thrace and looted it. In the next civil war, from 1352, Kantakouzenos again relied on Ottoman soldiers and let them hold the fortress of Tzympe on the European side of the Dardanelles. When an earthquake wrecked Gallipoli soon afterwards, Orhan's eldest son, Süleyman Pasha, occupied the abandoned town and settled Turks there, refusing Byzantine offers of money to leave. It became the Ottoman bridgehead for the conquest of the Balkans.

In old age Orhan lived quietly in Bursa and left much of the government to his son Murad. In 1356 his son Halil was kidnapped by a Genoese captain and taken to Phocaea; the Byzantine emperor John V ransomed him for 100,000 hyperpyra. In 1357 Süleyman Pasha, the expected heir, died after falling from his horse, a loss that reportedly hit his father hard. Orhan died in Bursa in March 1362 and was buried there; Murad I succeeded him. Ottoman tradition also places the founding of the Janissaries, the infantry corps recruited from Christian boys that Mahmud II abolished in 1826, in his reign, on the advice of the statesman Kara Khalil Çandarlı.

Our 1300 map shows the region just before Orhan's conquests, with the Byzantine Empire still holding Bithynia; our 1400 map shows the Ottoman Empire that grew from them, which covered much of today's Turkey.