The Ottomans expand in Asia Minor and to Thrace: the years 1000 to 1362

After the year 1000, tribes of Turks were moving through Transoxiana and into Persia, helping to fragment the Islamic empire and Germans had the Roman empire. The Turks conquered much of Persia and then much of Mesopotamia, including Baghdad in 1055, and from the declining Fatimids the Turks took control of Syria and Palestine. And just as the the Germans had adopted Christianity, the Turks adopted Islam.

The Turks were a people who spoke an Uralo-Altaic language and were descended from herders who roamed the plains of Central Asia -- horsemen organized by clans and tribes. The Ottoman Turks originated with the Turkish sultan Osman (Uthman), an Oghuz Turk and a Ghazi leader who had inherited power in 1280 in an area in the northwest of Asia Minor -- territory that had been a part of Constantinople's diminishing empire and had been taken over by the Oghuz Turks. The Ghazi brotherhood was based on loyalty and action rather than ethnicity. They were fleeing from Mongol expansion and into Asia Minor, and they put themselves in the service of Osman's son and successor, Orkhan.

In 1326, Orkhan conquered the city of Bursa, about fifty miles south of Constantinople. Orkhan sent his Ghazi warriors further to the northwest, in Thrace, to engage in a traditional activity that enhanced a power's economic well being -- plunder. And he sent warriors along the coast of the Black Sea for the same reason. He allied himself with one of the Christian contenders for the throne in Constantinople, John Cantacuzemus, and married his daughter, Theodora.

Under Orkhan, an elite army was created, called the Janissaries. These were men who had been brought up as Muslims, selected for their potential as warriors, given military training. They included the children of Christian slaves taken by the Ghazi warriors. The Janissaries were devoted to asceticism, celibacy, to behavior that matched Islamic values, the ways of brave men and camaraderie with each other. They were proud warriors, an effective fighting force with esprit de corps and were eager for glory.

In 1331 Orkhan expanded northward in Asia Minor, to Nicaea. In 1337 he expanded a little farther, to Nicomedia (Izmit). And in 1338 he expanded to the narrow waterway -- the Bosporus -- that separated Asia Minor and Constantinople. In 1345 Orkhan annexed the Karasi area in the far west of Asia Minor. And in 1354 the Ottomans established themselves at Gelibolu (Gallipoli), on the European side of the waterway called the Dardanelles.

Gelibolu became a base for further expansion in Europe. Joining the Ottomans there were Turkish migrants from Asia Minor. These were landless peasants and nomads seeking a new life, and the Ottomans continued to view their society as one of immigrants. The Ottomans were becoming rulers of a state with a culture of its own.

The conquest of Gelibolu by the Turks alarmed people in Western Europe, but conflict within Europe, including the war between Venice and Genoa, delayed intervention. Then in 1362, Orkhan's son and successor, Murad I (whose mother was a Greek princess) expanded in Thrace and took possession of the city of Edirne (Adrianople) 110 miles west of Constantinople -- the first European city to fall to the Turks.

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