nion and future aggrandizement lay. He
turned to the Greeks, as an element of 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