Osman I

Osman I was a Turkish frontier chieftain in north-western Anatolia whose small principality, founded around 1300, grew into the Ottoman Empire, which takes its name from him. Almost nothing about him was written down in his own lifetime, and the stories later told by Ottoman chroniclers mix memory with legend, so he is one of the most important and least documented founders in history. What is reasonably certain is that he led raids and conquests against the Byzantine Empire in Bithynia, defeated a Byzantine army in 1302, and left his son Orhan a state strong enough to take Bursa.

No document survives from Osman's reign, apart perhaps from a single coin of uncertain authenticity. The Byzantine historian George Pachymeres, writing in the early fourteenth century, mentions him briefly as Atman or Atouman. The Ottoman chronicles that tell his story, such as that of Aşıkpaşazade, were written in the fifteenth century, more than a hundred years after his death, when the dynasty had become a great power and wanted a heroic, pious and legitimate origin. The historian Colin Imber has called the period a "black hole". Modern accounts of Osman therefore distinguish carefully between the few facts confirmed by outside sources and the later traditions.

According to Ottoman tradition, Osman's family belonged to the Kayı branch of the Oghuz Turks, had fled westwards from the Mongols, and was granted lands around Söğüt, in north-western Anatolia, by the Seljuk sultan of Rum. His father was Ertuğrul, who is said to have died around 1280. Many historians regard the Kayı genealogy and the link with the Seljuks as later inventions designed to give the dynasty a noble pedigree; the Ottoman origins may have been humbler, among the Turkmen nomads of the frontier.

Osman was probably born around the middle of the thirteenth century; later Ottoman writers give dates such as 1254–55 and 1258, none of them reliable. His name may originally have been the Turkish Atman or Ataman, later replaced by the prestigious Arabic Muslim name Uthman, or Osman in Turkish. Ottoman tradition says he married the daughter of a respected Sufi sheikh, Edebali, and tells of a dream in which a moon rose from the sheikh's breast and sank into Osman's, and a great tree grew from his navel to shade the world, a sign that God had granted sovereignty to his line. The story served as the dynasty's founding myth.

In the late thirteenth century Anatolia was fragmented. The Seljuk sultanate of Rum, an offshoot of the Seljuk Empire, had become a vassal of the Mongol Ilkhanate, and its authority was dissolving into a patchwork of independent Turkish principalities, or beyliks. Osman's was one of the smallest, but its position was favourable. It lay on the frontier with the Byzantine province of Bithynia, close to the rich towns of Nicaea (İznik), Nicomedia (İzmit) and Bursa, and far from the stronger Turkish states of the interior. The Byzantine emperors, distracted by wars in the Balkans and short of money, had neglected the defences of their Asian lands.

Osman built his power by raiding Byzantine territory and drawing in followers: Turkish warriors, nomads, dervishes and, notably, local Byzantine Christians. Tradition remembers Köse Mihal, a Greek lord who became his ally and later converted to Islam, and whose descendants became a leading Ottoman family. Some neighbouring fortresses were taken by force, others came over by agreement or marriage. Bilecik, Yarhisar and İnegöl are said to have fallen around 1299, and Yenişehir became an early centre of his rule.

The first securely dated event of Osman's career is the battle of Bapheus, near Nicomedia, in the summer of 1302, probably on 27 July. Osman's cavalry defeated a small Byzantine force under Giorgios Mouzalon sent to relieve Nicomedia, which Ottoman raiders were cutting off from its harvest. The victory was minor in size, but its effects were large: the Byzantines lost control of the Bithynian countryside, many Christian inhabitants fled to Europe, and Osman's reputation drew new warriors to him. Over the following years his forces spread north towards the Black Sea along the Sakarya river and west towards the Sea of Marmara, isolating the Byzantine cities, which held out behind their walls.

The greatest of these, Bursa, was blockaded for years from forts built around it. In old age Osman suffered from gout and left the campaign to his son Orhan. Bursa surrendered in 1326 and became the first real Ottoman capital.

Osman's date of death is uncertain. Ottoman tradition places it just after, or just before, the fall of Bursa in 1326, but an endowment deed of 1324 shows Orhan already ruling, so most historians put Osman's death in 1323 or 1324. He was buried at Söğüt and later moved, according to his wishes, to a tomb in Bursa; the present building there dates from the nineteenth century, after an earthquake destroyed the original.

Osman never called himself sultan; he was a bey, or lord. Yet his descendants, the House of Osman, ruled without a break for over six hundred years. Under Orhan and Murad I the Ottomans crossed into Europe, Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453 in the fall of Constantinople, and under Suleiman the Magnificent the empire reached from Hungary to Iraq. Its rulers were girded on accession with a sword said to be Osman's, and the dynasty ended only with the abolition of the sultanate in 1922, before the founding of the Republic of Turkey.

Why Osman's principality, rather than any of its rivals, succeeded has long been debated. In the 1930s the historian Paul Wittek argued that the early Ottomans were driven by the ideal of holy war, ghaza, against Christians. Later scholars, including Rudi Paul Lindner, Heath Lowry and Cemal Kafadar, have questioned or refined this view, pointing to the inclusion of Christians in Osman's following, to tribal and nomadic loyalties, and to the advantages of his location. Most now see the early Ottoman state as a flexible frontier society in which religious zeal, plunder, opportunism and cooperation with local Christians all played a part. Modern Turkey honours Osman as the founder of a great Turkish state, and he has become a popular figure in Turkish television drama.