vitality and numerical strength to be absorbed into his nascent state, and applied himself unremittingly to winning over and identifying with himself the Greek feudal seigneurs in his territory or about its frontiers.  Some of these, like Michael, lord of Harmankaya, readily enough stood in with the vigorous Turk and became Moslems.  Others, as the new state gained momentum, found themselves obliged to accept it or be crushed.  There are to this day Greek communities in the Brusa district jealously guarding privileges which date from compacts made with their seigneurs by Osman and his son Orkhan.

It was not till the Seljuk kingdom was finally extinguished, in or about 1300 A.D. that Osman assumed at Yenishehr the style and title of a sultan.  Acknowledged from Afium Kara Hissar, in northern Phrygia, to the Bithynian coast of the Marmora, beside whose waters his standards had already been displayed, he lived on to see Brusa fall to his son Orkhan, in 1326, and become the new capital.  Though Nicaea still held out, Osman died virtual lord of the Asiatic Greeks; and marrying his son to a Christian girl, the famous Nilufer, after whom the river of Brusa is still named, he laid on Christian foundations the strength of his dynasty and his state.  The first regiment of professional Ottoman soldiery was recruited by him and embodied later by Orkhan, his son, from Greek and other Christian-born youths, who, forced to apostatize, were educated as Imperial slaves in imitation of the Mamelukes, constituted more than a century earlier in Egypt, and now masters where they had been bondmen.  It is not indeed for nothing that Osman’s latest successor, and all who hold by him, distinguish themselves from other peoples by his name.  They are Osmanlis (or by a European use of the more correct form Othman, ’Ottomans’), because they derived their being as a nation and derive their national strength, not so much from central Asia as from the blend of Turk and Greek which Osman promoted among his people.  This Greek strain has often been reinforced since his day and mingled with other Caucasian strains.

It was left to Orkhan to round off this Turco-Grecian realm in Byzantine Asia by the capture first of Ismid (Nicomedia) and then of Isnik (Nicaea); and with this last acquisition the nucleus of a self-sufficient sovereign state was complete.  After the peaceful absorption of the emirate of Karasi, which added west central Asia Minor almost as far south as the Hermus, the Osmanli ruled in 1338 a dominion of greater area than that of the Greek emperor, whose capital and coasts now looked across to Ottoman shores all the way from the Bosphorus to the Hellespont.

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Expansion of the Osmanli Kingdom