ecoming once more a fair field for any adventurer able
to command a small compact force.

The newly come Turks were invited finally to settle on the extreme
north-western fringe of the Seljuk territory--in a region so near Nicaea
that their sword would be a better title to it than any which the feudal
authority of Konia could confer. In fact it was a debatable land, an angle
pushed up between the lake plain of Nicaea on the one hand and the plain
of Brusa on the other, and divided from each by not lofty heights,
Yenishehr, its chief town, which became the Osmanli chief Ertogrul's
residence, lies, as the crow flies, a good deal less than fifty miles from
the Sea of Marmora, and not a hundred miles from Constantinople itself.
Here Ertogrul was to be a Warden of the Marches, to hold his territory for
the Seljuk and extend it for himself at the expense of Nicaea if he could.
If he won through, so much the better for Sultan Alaeddin; if he failed,
_vile damnum!_

Hardly were his tribesmen settled, however, among the Bithynians and
Greeks of Yenishehr, before the Seljuk collapse became a fact. The Tartar
storm, ridden by Jenghis Khan, which had overwhelmed Central Asia, spent
its last force on the kingdom of Konia, and, withdrawing, left the Seljuks
bankrupt of force and prestige and Anatolia without an overlord. The
feudatories were free everywhere to make or mar themselves, and they spent
the last half of the thirteenth century in fighting for whatever might be
saved from the Seljuk wreck before it foundered for ever about 1300 A.D.
In the south, the centre, and the east of the peninsula, where Islam had
long rooted itself as the popular social system, various Turki emirates
established themselves on a purely Moslem basis--certain of these, like
the Danishmand emirate of Cappadocia, being restorations of tribal
jurisdictions which had existed before the imposition of Seljuk
overlordship.

In the extreme north-west, however, where the mass of society was still
Christian and held itself Greek, no Turkish, potentate could either revive
a pre-Seljukian status or simply carry on a Seljukian system in miniature.
If he was to preserve independence at all, he must rely on a society which
was not yet Moslem and form a coalition with the 'Greeks', into whom the
recent recovery of Constantinople from the Latins had put fresh heart.
Osman, who had succeeded Ertogrul in 1288, recognized where his only
possible chance of continued domi