The frontier tent at Söğüt

Driven west by the Mongol pressure from Central Asia in the 1220s, Ertuğrul brought his Kayı clan into Anatolia. The Seljuk sultan granted him a small fief at Söğüt on the Byzantine frontier. On that fief his son Osman would build an empire that lasted 623 years.

Ertuğrul Ghazi was born about 1191 CE, the son of Süleyman Şah, chief of the Kayı clan of the Oghuz Turks. The Kayı were among the most senior of the twenty-four Oghuz tribes, said to descend from Kayı Han himself, one of the six sons of Oghuz Khan the mythical progenitor of the whole Oghuz confederation.

The Kayı had lived for centuries as pastoralists in Central Asia, moving with the seasons across the steppes of what is now Turkmenistan and northern Iran. In the early thirteenth century they were displaced west by the Mongol expansion under Genghis Khan and his sons. The Mongol invasion of Khwarezm in 1219-1221 destroyed the last major Persian-Turkic state in Central Asia. Refugee tribes flowed west into Anatolia, hundreds of thousands of people over decades, seeking territory, security, or service in the Muslim states that still held territory west of the Mongol advance.

Süleyman Şah brought his people west in the 1220s. He is said to have drowned crossing the Euphrates near modern Halfeti, in Turkey, in about 1227 CE. Ertuğrul assumed the leadership of the tribe at his father's death. He was about 36.

He continued west across Anatolia. He entered the territory of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, the last major independent Muslim state in Anatolia, ruled from Konya by the Seljuk sultan Alauddin Kaykubad I. Kaykubad was one of the great sultans of the Seljuk line, a builder of caravanserais and mosques and the patron of the Persian mystic Rumi's family (Rumi's father Baha ad-Din Walad settled in Konya in the 1220s under Kaykubad's protection). Kaykubad was also under Mongol pressure from the east.

The commander reported the incident to Kaykubad. Kaykubad summoned Ertuğrul. He offered him a fief. The fief was a small tract of land in the western marches of the sultanate, at the town of Söğüt in the sanjak of Bilecik, on the Byzantine frontier. The condition was that Ertuğrul defend the frontier and conduct ghazw, Muslim frontier raiding, against the Christian Byzantine empire to the west.

Ertuğrul accepted. He brought his tribe to Söğüt. He established his summer camp in the plateau above the town and his winter camp in the valley below. He held Söğüt for the next fifty years.

His life at Söğüt is thinly documented in contemporary sources. The Ottoman chronicles that describe him were written 150 to 200 years after his death, by court historians of Mehmed II and later sultans who had a strong political interest in glorifying the founding chief of their dynasty. Modern historians treat their accounts with caution. What is reasonably certain: Ertuğrul held Söğüt through the collapse of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum after its defeat by the Mongols at Kösedağ in 1243, through the Mongol vassalage of the Seljuk sultans that followed, and through the political chaos of the last decades of the sultanate as it fell apart in the 1280s and 1290s. He conducted small raids against Byzantine outposts on the frontier. He raised his family. He held his tribe together.

He died at Söğüt in about 1281 CE, aged about 90. He was buried in Söğüt. His tomb is still there, and is a national monument of the Turkish Republic today.

His son Osman inherited the small fief. Osman was in his late twenties or early thirties at his father's death. He was, by every account, more politically ambitious than his father. Over the next twenty years he transformed the frontier ghazi principality of Söğüt into an independent state. In 1299 CE, the date Ottoman tradition takes as the founding of the empire, Osman formally repudiated Seljuk suzerainty and declared himself sovereign of his own emirate. He then began the systematic conquest of Byzantine territory in northwestern Anatolia. By his death in 1326 CE, Osman had taken Bursa and had the political and territorial base of what became the Ottoman Empire.

The empire that Osman founded, that his father Ertuğrul had prepared without knowing it, was the longest-lasting Muslim empire in history. It ruled continuously from 1299 CE to 1922 CE, a span of 623 years. At its peak it included southeastern Europe, the Levant, Egypt, Arabia, Iraq, the North African coast, and the Balkans. It took Constantinople in 1453 under Ertuğrul's great-great-great-great-grandson Mehmed II. It took Cairo in 1517 under Selim I. It besieged Vienna twice, in 1529 and 1683. It fought the last surviving crusader kingdom (Cyprus) in 1570 and the last independent Muslim state of the medieval Islamic world (Granada) had already fallen to Christian Iberia in 1492 while the Ottomans consolidated their eastern conquests.

Every Ottoman sultan called himself ibn Osman, son of Osman. Osman called himself ibn Ertuğrul, son of Ertuğrul. The Ottoman house was Al-i Osman, the house of Osman, but its tribal origin was Kayı and its human origin was a frontier chief in a tent at Söğüt in the late thirteenth century.

What the story teaches

Ertuğrul is remembered because he demonstrates what the classical Muslim scholars called himmah tabqa, enduring resolve at a scale one lifetime cannot see. Ertuğrul held a small fief for fifty years. He built no visible institution. He founded no city. He fought no famous battle. He raised his son, held his tribe together, and died in his tent at 90. From the outside his life was small. From the inside, from Osman's inside, and from Mehmed II's, and from Suleiman's, and from every Ottoman sultan for six hundred and twenty-three years, his life was the seed of the largest and longest-lasting Muslim empire in history. The classical Muslim historians take a specific lesson from him: the greatness of some founders is invisible in their own lifetimes, and the true measure of their contribution is what their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons build on the fief they held. Ertuğrul at Söğüt in 1281 did not know what Mehmed II at the walls of Constantinople in 1453 would do. But he had held Söğüt. And the rest followed.