The most important members of the second category, however, were the Seljuks.  Like the earlier Thu-Kiu, they were pushed out of Turkestan late in the tenth century to found a power in Persia.  Here, in Khorasan, the mass of the horde settled and remained:  and it was only a comparatively small section which went on westward as military adventurers to fall upon Bagdad, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor.  This first conquest was little better than a raid, so brief was the resultant tenure; but a century later two dispossessed nephews of Melek Shah of Persia set out on a military adventure which had more lasting consequences.  Penetrating with, a small following into Asia Minor, they seized Konia, and instituted there a kingdom nominally feudatory to the Grand Seljuk of Persia, but in reality independent and destined to last about two centuries.  Though numerically weak, their forces, recruited from the professional soldier class which had bolstered up the Abbasid Empire and formed the Seljukian kingdoms of Persia and Syria, were superior to any Byzantine troops that could be arrayed in southern or central Asia Minor.  They constituted indeed the only compact body of fighting men seen in these regions for some generations.  It found reinforcement from the scattered Turki groups introduced already, as we have seen, into the country; and even from native Christians, who, descended from the Iconoclasts of two centuries before, found the rule of Moslem image-haters more congenial, as it was certainly more effective, than that of Byzantine emperors.  The creed of the Seljuks was Islam of an Iranian type.  Of Incarnationist colour, it repudiated the dour illiberal spirit of the early Arabian apostles which latter-day Sunnite orthodoxy has revived.  Accordingly its professors, backed by an effective force and offering security and privilege, quickly won over the aborigines—­Lycaonians, Phrygians, Cappadocians, and Cilicians—­and welded them into a nation, leaving only a few detached communities here and there to cherish allegiance to Byzantine Christianity.  In the event, the population of quite two-thirds of the Anatolian peninsula had already identified itself with a ruling Turki caste before, early in the thirteenth century, fresh Turks appeared on the scene—­those Turks who were to found the Ottoman Empire.

They entered Asia Minor much as the earlier Turcomans had entered it—­a small body of nomadic adventurers, thrown off by the larger body of Turks settled in Persia to seek new pastures west of the Euphrates.  There are divers legends about the first appearance and establishment of these particular Turks:  but all agree that they were of inconsiderable number—­ not above four hundred families at most.  Drifting in by way of Armenia, they pressed gradually westward from Erzerum in hope of finding some unoccupied country which would prove both element and fertile.  Byzantine influence was then at a very low ebb.  With Constantinople itself in Latin hands, the Greek writ ran only along