BECOMING OTTOMAN

The Ottoman empire, among the greatest the world has seen, was founded by the eponymous Osman, a minor Turkish chieftain from northwestern Anatolia. His main rival was the declining and enfeebled Byzantine empire, which had once controlled all of Anatolia, though by the late 13th century encroaching Turks had driven it to the westward edges of the peninsula.

Still, at the turn of the 14th century the Ottomans themselves remained a minor power, one of a number of Turkish petty states in western Asia Minor. Osman enters recorded history—recorded, that is, by contemporary Byzantine historian George Pachymeres—around 1301 when he led a party of 100 nomads on a night raid against a Byzantine force north of the city of Nicaea, which he’d been harassing. At a place called Telemaia, Osman and his band literally caught the enemy sleeping, riding in among them and spearing them as they lay on the ground. Thus rudely awakened, the Byzantines rallied and pursued their attackers, who fell back on nearby hills. There the Turkish horsemen halted and drove back their pursuers with volleys of arrows. In the resulting melee the Byzantine commander Mouzalon would have been captured were it not for a daring rescue by one of his bravest men.

of the Ottoman empire began in 1204, nearly a century before Osman’s fight at Telemaia, when Latin Christian (Catholic) soldiers