the north Anatolian coast, ruled from two separate centres, Isnik (Nicaea) and Trebizond:  and the Seljuk kingdom was run in reality much more vigorous.  Though apparently without a rival, it was subsisting by consent, on the prestige of its past, rather than on actual power.  The moment of its dissolution was approaching, and the Anatolian peninsula, two-thirds Islamized, but ill-organised and very loosely knit, was becoming once more a fair field for any adventurer able to command a small compact force.

The newly come Turks were invited finally to settle on the extreme north-western fringe of the Seljuk territory—­in a region so near Nicaea that their sword would be a better title to it than any which the feudal authority of Konia could confer.  In fact it was a debatable land, an angle pushed up between the lake plain of Nicaea on the one hand and the plain of Brusa on the other, and divided from each by not lofty heights, Yenishehr, its chief town, which became the Osmanli chief Ertogrul’s residence, lies, as the crow flies, a good deal less than fifty miles from the Sea of Marmora, and not a hundred miles from Constantinople itself.  Here Ertogrul was to be a Warden of the Marches, to hold his territory for the Seljuk and extend it for himself at the expense of Nicaea if he could.  If he won through, so much the better for Sultan Alaeddin; if he failed, vile damnum!

Hardly were his tribesmen settled, however, among the Bithynians and Greeks of Yenishehr, before the Seljuk collapse became a fact.  The Tartar storm, ridden by Jenghis Khan, which had overwhelmed Central Asia, spent its last force on the kingdom of Konia, and, withdrawing, left the Seljuks bankrupt of force and prestige and Anatolia without an overlord.  The feudatories were free everywhere to make or mar themselves, and they spent the last half of the thirteenth century in fighting for whatever might be saved from the Seljuk wreck before it foundered for ever about 1300 A.D.  In the south, the centre, and the east of the peninsula, where Islam had long rooted itself as the popular social system, various Turki emirates established themselves on a purely Moslem basis—­certain of these, like the Danishmand emirate of Cappadocia, being restorations of tribal jurisdictions which had existed before the imposition of Seljuk overlordship.

In the extreme north-west, however, where the mass of society was still Christian and held itself Greek, no Turkish, potentate could either revive a pre-Seljukian status or simply carry on a Seljukian system in miniature.  If he was to preserve independence at all, he must rely on a society which was not yet Moslem and form a coalition with the ‘Greeks’, into whom the recent recovery of Constantinople from the Latins had put fresh heart.  Osman, who had succeeded Ertogrul in 1288, recognized where his only possible chance of continued dominion and future aggrandizement lay.  He turned to the Greeks, as an element of