Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Seljuk's Successors. ig these states were eventually swallowed up in the empire of the House of Othman, but this did not happen till many years after its founder's death. The prince of Karaman was the strongest of the ten, and many long wars were fought with him before his lands were annexed to the Turkish dominions. In the early days of which we are writing, the Kara- nanian state was too powerful for the Ottoman to ittempt an advance in this direction ; and the chief extension of their territory in the beginning of the fourteenth century was towards Europe, where the feeble representatives of the once mighty Emperors of the East offered an easy prey to the hardy warriors of Sultanoni. From his stronghold at Yenishehr, Othman sent out expeditions against the nearest Greek towns, and captured many fortresses before the armies of the emperor moved out against him. When at length he met the Byzantine army at Baphoeum, he put it to utter rout and ravaged the whole of Bithynia, so that the Greeks dared not venture outside the walls of Nicaea.1 Encouraged by such successes Othman pushed his forces nearer the sea, and emulated the example of the princes of Aydin and Saru-Khan, whose fleets had ravaged the Greek islands and thus inaugurated the terrible scourge of the Corsair. Gradually he hemmed in the second city of the empire, Nicaea ; slowly he brought up his armies against Brusa, and erected two forts over against the city, whence for ten years he pressed the siege. " The method employed by the Ottomans to gain possession of the large, populous, and wellfortified cities, inhabited by the wealthy but unwarlike Greeks, was not unlike that employed by the Dorians in the early ages of Greece. Indeed it is almost the only way by which the courage and perseverance of a small force ...