There was nothing in the achievements of Ertoghrul and his camp to portend the greatness which his children were to reach. A remarkable contrast to the rise of most Asiatic empires, which, like those of Genghis and Timour, often grew to their colossal and terrific power in the life of one generation, the Ottomans advanced steadily, but at first almost imperceptibly. The Ottoman legends relate the dream of Ertoghrul, who had sought hospitality in the house of a holy dervish; and after he had stood all night long, reading the Koran, fell asleep, and in the dreams of morning, the time when dreams are divine, received the promise, that as he had honoured the Eternal Word that night by his devout watching, his children should be had to honour throughout all generations. But all that had been granted to Ertoghrul, at the end of a life of nearly a century, was but a wasted and narrow border tract, with its ruined villages and lonely hills; and Othman, his greater and more restless son, though he turned the thoughts of his tribe towards wider conquests, and though from him a nation and its name, new in history, had its beginning, yet had barely, at the end of his threescore years and ten, made himself master of half a small and feebly defended province.

The accounts of Othman's life pass insensibly from legends to history. They begin with the patriarchal simplicity and romantic adventures of a chieftain of the desert: they end with the first rude outlines of the founder of a dynasty, and the territorial prince. But even the legendary part of his historythe stories of his marriage, his friendships, and the marriage of his son-exhibit, as it were in rudiment and figure, some of the most characteristic features of what was afterwards the policy of his race. Othman wooed and won a foreign wife to be the mother of his children. Besides his Tartar brethren and comrades, the Alps,' whose names are joined with his in the story of his wars, he sought beyond the camp the friendship of two sorts of men. The counsellors whom he venerated, whose sanction he sought for in all his plans, whose abodes he visited with reverent humility, and for whom lands and houses were largely and solemnly set apart in all his conquests, were the Scheikhs and dervishes, the learned and holy men of Islam. For his most daring and zealous captain, he had won over from his race and his faith, a Christian apostate. And as he had himself married out of his own race, so the legends tell us, how he

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1 The names of Othman, Bajazet, Amurath, Mahomet, are so naturalized in cur language, that incorrect, and needlessly incorrect as they are, it is hardly worth while, at least in a paper like the present, and speaking of certain wellknown historical persons, to replace them with Osman, Bayazid, Murad, Mohammed, or Mahmoud. It is too late to change, in general use, the familiar Ottomans for the more accurate Osmans or Osmanli; just as it would be to introduce the native forms of the names of Lyons, Leghorn, Naples, Florence.

laid in wait for and carried off into captivity a Christian damsel, to be the wife of his young son. We see already a foreshadowing of the domestic and administrative usages of the Ottoman house -its mixture of foreign blood, its slave marriages, its array of viziers and generals, torn away or allured from the choicest youth of surrounding Christendom; and a fierce military spirit, and institutions adapted only for war, intimately allying themselves with a religious element, and owning their only control in its ministers.

Othman had long to wait, and much to endure, before he could win the wife whom he had chosen, Malchatoun, the daughter of Edebali, a holy man, who had wandered from his birth-place in Cilicia among many cities of Islam, and had at last chosen for the resting-place of his old age, a village in Bithynia. Othman's love was passionate and strong. He visited with assiduous and humble reverence the threshold of the venerable Scheikh. But difficulties and dangers met and sorely tried him. Edebali refused to give his only daughter. Othman had a rival in the Greek chief of Dorylæum, who assembled his friends, and laid wait for Othman's life. Othman, indeed, slew his treacherous enemy, and gained, in the affray, his trustiest friend, Michael 'of the pointed beard,' one of the companions of the Greek captain; who, after having been vanquished and disarmed by Othman, was so struck with admiration of his conqueror, that he devoted himself to his service, and at last forsook for his sake creed and country, and became the ever ready assailant of his own people; the first of that long line of Christian renegades, who have been in every age the fiercest and the most terrible servants of the Ottoman power. But Malchatoun had yet to be won; and it required a dream sent from heaven, to overcome the scruples or fears of Edebali. Othman, in spite of the old man's discouraging words, waited, resigned and patient, under his roof, still reverently listening to.his wisdom, still hoping in his own perseverance and fortune. One night he had a dream, such as is accustomed to be related of the founders of Oriental empires. He saw the full moon rise from the bosom of Edebali, and descend into his own; and from thence he saw a stately tree arise, which grew taller and more spreading, till it overshadowed the world. Beneath it arose four of the great mountains of the earth, Caucasus and Atlas, Taurus and Hæmus. From its roots issued four mighty rivers, the Danube, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile. Beautiful gardens and stately palaces were spread under its branches, with minarets, from whence the call to prayer blended with songs of nightingales, and the prattle of many coloured parrots. At length a strong wind bent the branches, the leaves lengthened out into the form of pointed sabres, which

turned to the chief cities of the world, and at last to Constantinople. Constantinople, between two continents and two seas, seemed like a diamond set between two sapphires and two emeralds-the jewel of a royal ring. Othman was about to put it on his finger when he awoke. A century and a half were to elapse before the promise of the dream was fulfilled. But it won Othman his wife, the predestined mother of a line of mighty kings, the last and the longest of the royal races of Islam.

For his son also, Orchan, he sought a wife of fairer beauty and higher blood, than could be found in the black tents of his wandering brethren. The early legends tell of alliances as well as feuds between the camp of the Turkomans and the Greeks of the towns. Ertoghrul and Othman had formed an alliance with the captain of the castle of Belecoma—an alliance marked by a curious mixture of confidence and mistrust. When the Turkomans drove their flocks to the hills in summer, they left the more cumbrous portion of their possessions in charge of the captain of Belecoma; but the compact was that the Turkoman treasures were to be brought into the Greek town, by none but the women and children of the tribe. For many years the agreement was faithfully kept. The Turkomans missed nothing at the hands of the Greek captain; and Othman, when he came down to the plains in winter, brought presents of cheese and honey, of horse trappings and carpets of goats' hair-the labours of the summer months on Olympus,-for his Christian ally. But, at last, say the Turkish chroniclers, the Greek grew jealous of Othman's power, and leagued against him. Othman was invited to the marriage feast of the captain of Belecoma, where the Greeks were prepared to seize him. Michael of the pointed beard,' whom the Greeks had in vain endeavoured to gain over to the conspiracy, warned Othman of his danger. Then he resolved on swift and signal revenge. He said he would be present at the nuptials. But as summer was at hand, and he was going up into the hills, he requested the bridegroom, the captain of Belecoma, to take charge as usual of the treasures of the tribe for the summer months, and to admit the women who bore them into the town. The gates were opened without suspicion; but this time, under the long veils and mantles came forty stout warriors, Othman and thirty-nine companions. The captain with his retinue was absent, preparing for his wedding on the following day, with the beautiful daughter of the chief of a neighbouring Greek town. Othman seized Belecoma, and then went off to waylay its master and the bridal procession, as they passed through a gorge in the hills on their road homeward. The surprise was successful. The bridegroom was slain; and his Greek bride, the 'Lotus-flower' of

Brusa, was swept off by the Turkoman robbers to their lair, to become the spouse of their leader's son, Orkhan.

But as the power of Othman grew, notices precise and circumstantial, with dates and names, appear by the side of these tales of desert life and border adventure. The year is recorded, and the place, in which Othman was raised from the head of a wandering camp, into a recognised Emir, or vassal of the Seljouk empire; and again, the date, when, after the Seljouk empire had fallen to pieces, Othman could call himself an independent prince, and began his struggle for conquest and preeminence with the other Turkish chiefs, most of them more powerful than himself, who had shared among themselves the heritage of Alp-Arslan in Asia Minor.' In 1289 Othman had seized a Greek town at the edge of that plain of Dorylæum, where he had long kept guard for the Seljouk frontier. The sultan of the expiring dynasty of Iconium rewarded the exploit of the rising border chief with the dignity of an Emir or Prince; and the Black Castle' (Karadja Hissar) on the Thymbres, deserves remembrance in history, as the place where the ancestors of Mahomet the Conqueror, and Soliman the Magnificent, ceased to be private men, and exchanged their rude preeminence for an acknowledged place among the lords of their people. The flag, the kettledrum, and the horsetail, the insignia of his new rank, were solemnly delivered to Othman, by the messenger of his feudal superior, the Iconian Sultan. Othman received them amid the clanging salute of barbaric music, with his arms reverently crossed on his bosom. And long afterwards, in remembrance of the investiture of the Emir of Karadja Hissar, his proud successors stood in the same attitude, when the trumpets and cymbals of the host sounded forth at the hour of prayer, till Mahomet the Conqueror thought it time to abolish the memento of his forefather's dependence, and rise to greatness, with the observation, that forms of reverence which have lasted 200 years, have lasted too long.'

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At Karadja Hissar, the seat of his new government, Othman established a weekly market, according to a custom still characteristic of the Turkomans,' with its overseers, and a tribunal,

1 The Ten States, mostly named after their first chiefs, were, on the Ægean, Karasi, in Mysia, Saruchan, in the Valley of the Hermus, Aidin, at Smyrna on the Mæander, Mentesche, in Caria, Tekkeh, in Lycia: the Midland States, Kermian and Hamid, in Phrygia and Pisidia: on the North Coast, Kastemuni, at Sinope and in Paphlagonia: in the South-east, the most powerful of all, inheriting the Seljouk capital, Iconium, and holding the approaches from Persia and Syria, the Karamans: lastly, the Ottomans, in Bithynia.

2 Burnes' Travels, ii. p. 225.; iii. p. 7. Probably a fairly correct idea may be formed of the life of Othman's tribe, balancing between a camp and a fixed village of their religious temper, their forays, their relations with their neighbours, from Burnes' account of the Turkomans of Shurukhs, on the border between

which became famous through the neighbourhood for its justice and impartiality. He turned the church into a mosque; and to the mosque he appointed the ministers of public prayer and preaching, and the judicial expounder of the religious and civil law. But he did not do this before he had first consulted the Elders of his camp and the holy Sheikh Edebali, by whose words he was guided, and till, by their advice, he had sought and obtained the sanction of his liege lord. But the Seljouk power was fast hastening to its ruin. For ten years only after the Sultan of Iconium had invested Othman with the rank of a vassal Emir, was the name of the last Alaeddin named, as his sovereign and liege lord, in the public prayer of Othman's town. In the last year but one of the thirteenth century, Alaeddin's name was changed in the prayer which was said in the Mosque of Karadja Hissar, for that of Othman. And from this era, the opening of the fourteenth century, so famous in the religion and the poetry of the West, no other name but that of their own princes has been heard in the Friday worship within the Ottoman dominions. The Mahometan historians remark that the opening of each of the centuries of their era, which at that epoch nearly corresponded with the division of those of our own, had been marked, up to the time of Othman, by the appearance of some renowned and mighty prince. The Prophet himself--the founder of the Ommiades -the great Caliph Al-Mamun-the first of the Fatimites in Egypt-the last of the great Abbasides-and lastly, the devastator of the world, Genghis Khan, stand like colossal figures, in the portal, each of his century.' At the threshold of the eighth, stands a name, after the Prophet, the mightiest of all, that of the founder of the Ottomans.

2

Yet a traveller could easily traverse in a day the dominions. over which Othman first exercised independent sway. He was now, however, a sovereign prince, and he distributed the towns and hamlets of his principality among his companions and counthe Turkoman Khan of Orgunje, the strongest of these robber-chiefs, and the polished, but unwarlike empire of Persia. The tribe claimed kindred with the Osmanli of Constantinople. Around an old fort, were grouped the permanent huts of the Jews and traders, and the movable houses of the Turkomans. Their customs in courtship and marriage, in which the lover carries off his bride on horseback, accord with what the legend relates of Othman, but would startle his descendants. Burnes, vol. iii. ch. xii.- -XV.

1A Mahometan ruler is known as an independent sovereign by two tokens:1, when he coins money in his own name; 2, when the solemn Friday prayer is said in his name.

2 It need perhaps hardly be observed, that the Mahometan years consist of lunar months; so that the years of their centuries gain on the years of ours. The beginning of the 8th century from the Hegira thus nearly coincided with the beginning of the 14th century of our era. The remark is more characteristic than

accurate.