On the dissolution of the Carizmian power by the Moguls, some of the Turkman chiefs engaged in the service of Aladdin, the sultan of Iconium; and among these were the obscure fathers of the Ottoman line. They had formerly pitched their tents near the southern banks of the Oxus. At the head of a Carizmian force, Soliman Shah was drowned in the passage of the Euphrates. His son Orthogrul became a soldier of Aladdin. He was the father of Othman. The Seljukian dynasty was no more; and the decline of the Mogul Khans soon freed him from the control of a superior.

He was situate on the verge of the Greek empire, which he first invaded, A.D. 1299. The conquest of Prusa by his son Orchan, A.D. 1326, may be dated as the true aera of the Ottoman power. The Seljukian coin was changed for the name and impression of the new dynasty. Orchan subdued all Bithynia to the shores of the Bosphorus and Hellespont; and A.D. 1341, crossed for the first time into Europe, where they established themselves in the province of Thrace, A.D. 1353. They soon subdued the whole province from the Hellespont to Mount Haemus, and the verge of Constantinople. Adrianople was now their capital; and at this fatal hour, the Greeks were surrounded, both in Asia and Europe, by the arms of the same hostile monarchy. But Amurath I postponed for a while this easy conquest; and turned his arms against the Sclavonians between the Danube and the Adriatic.

His son Bajazet I, subdued his brother emirs from the Euphrates to the Danube, and after the conquest of Iconium, the ancient kingdom of the Seljukians was revived in the Ottoman dynasty. He now accepted the patent of sultan from the caliphs who served in Egypt under the yoke of the Mamelukes: a last and frivolous homage yielded by force to opinion, by the Turkish conquerors to the Abbassides, and the successors of the Arabian prophet. Bajazet’s ambition was inflamed by the obligation of deserving the august title; and he turned his arms against Hungary, the perpetual theatre of Turkish victories and defeats. In the battle of Nicopolis, he defeated a confederate army of 100,000 catholic idol worshippers, who had proudly boasted that if the sky should fall, they could uphold it on their lances. In the pride of victory, Bajazet threatened to subdue Germany and Italy; and that he would feed his horse with the bushel of oats on the altar of St. Peter at Rome.

The Roman world was now contracted to a corner of Thrace, between the Propontis and the Black Sea, about fifty miles in length and thirty in breadth. At length the ambition of the victorious sultan pointed to the conquest of Constantinople, which he claimed as his own. A refusal to surrender caused it to be more closely pressed by war and famine; and the savage would have devoured his prey, if, in the fatal moment, he had not been overthrown by another savage stronger than himself, A.D. 1402; an event that delayed the fall of Constantinople about fifty years.