Page One  Page Two  Page Three  Ottoman Society   The Ottomans:
From Frontier Warriors To Empire Builders Author: Robert Guisepi
Date: 1992  For centuries before the rise of the Ottoman dynasty
in the 13th and 14th centuries, Turkic-speaking peoples from
central Asia had played key roles in Islamic civilization as
soldiers and administrators, often in the service of the Abbasid
caliphs. In fact, the collapse of the Seljuk Turkic kingdom of
Rum in eastern Anatolia in Asia Minor, following the invasion by
the Mongols in  1243 described in Chapter 20, opened the way for
the Ottomans' rise to power. The Mongols raided but did not
directly rule Anatolia, which fell into a chaotic period of
warfare between petty, would-be successor states to the Seljuk
sultans. Turkic peoples, both those fleeing the Mongols and
those in search of easy booty, flooded into the region in the
last decades of the 13th century. One of these peoples, called
the Ottomans after an early leader named Osman, came to dominate
the rest, and wit