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Towards the end of the thirteenth century a small Turkish tribe made its first appearance in the Seljouk Empire. Othman, who gave his name to this new band of immigrants, and his son, Orkhan, laid the foundation of the institutions and power of the Othoman Empire.
The policy to which they owed their growth was absorption, and the people whom they first began to absorb were Greeks and other Christians, and it was to a Christian girl, Nilufer, that Osman married his son Orkhan. They took Christian youths from the families of Greek dwellers, forced them to apostatise, gave them military training, and married them to Turkish girls.
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.
After fifteen invasions without any permanent conquest, in 1354 Orkhan and his son Suleiman perceived an opportunity by which they prepared themselves to profit civil war was raging in the Byzantine empire, where John Palæologus was striving to deprive the emperor Cantacuzenus of his throne.
Orkhan then asked a delay for reflection, and subsequently promised that he would request his son to return the towns that he occupied, if Cantacuzenus, on his side, would engage to pay him a sum of forty thousand ducats. At the same time he invited him to an interview to meet Suleiman on the Gulf of Nicomedia.
Orkhan, to perpetuate the exploits of his son, caused a tomb to be built to his memory on the shore of the Hellespont, the only one which, during more than a century, was erected in memory of an Ottoman prince on Greek soil.
Then, in 1453, after a memorable siege, Constantinople was captured by the Muhammadans, and made the capital of the empire. Orkhan was the first to exact as tribute the strongest and healthiest male children of all Christian peoples whom he conquered. These youths, reared as Muhammadans and trained under strict military discipline, became that efficient body of troops called the Janizaries.
The service that John had rendered did not prevent Orkhan from sending to Abydos a body of troops to rescue the son of Cantacuzenus, Mathias, then at war with the Bulgarians.
The great city of Brusa, whose groves to-day enshrine the stately beauty of their mosques and sultans' tombs, capitulated to Orkhan, the son of the first Sultan, in 1326; and Nicaea, the cradle of the Greek church and temporary capital of the Greek Empire, surrendered in 1330.
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