Ertugrul

c. 1191 - 1281 CE

Chief of the Kayı clan of the Oghuz Turks, granted a small frontier fief in Söğüt in western Anatolia by the Seljuk Sultan for defending the Byzantine frontier. His son Osman would build on that fief the Ottoman Empire, which would last 623 years.

Life

Ertuğrul Ghazi was a chief of the Kayı clan of the Oghuz Turks, driven west by the Mongol pressure from Central Asia in the early thirteenth century. He led his tribe into Anatolia and settled at Söğüt, a small town on the Byzantine frontier in the sanjak of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum.

The Seljuk Sultan Alauddin Kaykubad I granted Ertuğrul a fief at Söğüt in the late 1220s or 1230s, on the condition that he defend the Byzantine frontier and fight the ghazi wars against the Christian empire to the west. Ertuğrul held Söğüt for the next fifty years. He raided Byzantine outposts, defended the frontier, held together his tribe through the collapse of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum after the Mongol victory at Kösedağ in 1243, and eventually died in Söğüt in about 1281.

His son Osman inherited the small fief. From that fief, a frontier ghazi principality of a few thousand tribesmen on the western edge of the Muslim world, Osman built what became the Ottoman Empire. The empire outlasted every other Muslim state in history. It ruled from 1299 to 1922 CE, a span of 623 years, and at its peak included southeastern Europe, the Levant, Egypt, Arabia, Iraq, and the North African coast.

The Ottoman house called itself Osmanli after Osman, and Osman never forgot he was ibn Ertugrul, son of Ertuğrul. Every Ottoman sultan for six centuries traced his line back to the frontier chief of Söğüt. The tomb of Ertuğrul in Söğüt is a national monument of the Turkish Republic today.

Stories

Each story below is drawn from the classical Islamic historical sources.