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Updated: June 29, 2025
My father was a merchant in prosperous circumstances, and a man of no mean learning in Arabic and Persian literature. I soon showed a strong taste for books, and every opportunity was given me for pursuing my inclinations in this respect. At the early age of twelve I was kidnapped by a party of slave-dealers, and carried off into Roum Turkey you call it.
The three younger dynasties were those of Kerman, of Syria, and of Roum: the first of these commanded an extensive, though obscure, dominion on the shores of the Indian Ocean: the second expelled the Arabian princes of Aleppo and Damascus; and the third, our peculiar care, invaded the Roman provinces of Asia Minor.
Now, the extent of the duration of his travel was four days and an equal number of nights; and it was on the fifth morn that he entered the gates of a city by the sea, even at that hour when the inhabitants were rising from sleep: fair was the sea beyond it, and the harbour was crowded with vessels, ships stored with merchandise silks, dates, diamonds, Damascus steel, huge bales piled on the decks for the land of Roum and other lands.
What Constantinople means for the Osmanlis is implied in that name Roum by which the western dominions of the Turks have been known ever since the Seljuks won Asia Minor. Apart from the prestige of their own early conquests, the Osmanlis inherited, and in a measure retain in the Near East, the traditional prestige of the greatest empire which ever held it.
Malek Shah invaded Syria, Palestine, Jerusalem, and carried his arms as far as Egypt, while a member of the Turkish family of Seljuk wrested Asia Minor from the Greeks, and established the kingdom of Iconium, which was called Roum, extending from Mount Taurus to the Bosphorus.
His kingdom of Roum extended from the Hellespont to the confines of Syria, and barred the pilgrimage of Jerusalem, his name was Kilidge-Arslan, or Soliman, of the race of Seljuk, and son of the first conqueror; and in the defence of a land which the Turks considered as their own, he deserved the praise of his enemies, by whom alone he is known to posterity.
In India the head of the house of Othman was still known to Moslems as Padishah or Sultan er Roum, the Roman Emperor, the most powerful of Mussulman princes, but not in any special manner the head of their religion, certainly not their sovereign.
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