TURKS: (Ottoman): A. D. 1240-1326. Origin and rise of the modern Turkish power. On the final defeat and death, in Kurdistan, of the last Khuarezmian or Carizmian prince, who was pursued relentlessly by the Mongols of Jingis Khan and his successors, there was dissolved an army which included various Turkish hordes. The fragments of this Khuarezmian force were scattered and played several important parts in the history of the troubled time. "The bolder and more powerful chiefs invaded Syria, and violated the holy sepulchre of Jerusalem; the more humble engaged in the service of Aladin, Sultan of Iconium, and among these were the obscure fathers of the Ottoman line. They had formerly pitched their tents near the southern bank of the Oxus, in the plains of Mahan and Nesa; and it is somewhat remarkable that the same spot should have produced the first authors of the Parthian and Turkish empires. At the head or in rear of a Carizmian army, Soliman Shah was drowned in the passage of the Euphrates. His son Orthogrul became the soldier and subject of Aladin, and established at Surgut, on the banks of the Sangar, a camp of four hundred families or tents, whom he governed fifty-two years both in peace and war. He was the father of Thaman, or Athman, whose Turkish name has been melted into the appellation of the Caliph Othman; and if we describe that pastoral chief as a shepherd and a robber, we must separate from those characters all idea of ignominy and baseness. Othman possessed, and perhaps surpassed, the ordinary virtues of a soldier, and the circumstances of time and place were propitious to his independence and success. The Seljukian dynasty was no more, and the distance and decline of the Mogul Khans soon enfranchised him from the control of a superior. He was situate on the verge of the Greek empire. The Koran sanctified his 'gazi,' or holy war, against the infidels; and their political errors unlocked the passes of Mount Olympus, and invited him to descend into the plains of Bithynia. … It was on the 27th of July, in the year 1299 of the Christian era, that Othman first invaded the territory of Nicomedia; and the singular accuracy of the date seems to disclose some foresight of the rapid and destructive growth of the monster. The annals of the twenty-seven years of his reign would exhibit a repetition of the same inroads; and his hereditary troops were multiplied in each campaign by the accession of captives and volunteers. {3134} Instead of retreating to the hills, he maintained the most useful and defensible posts, fortified the towns and castles which he had first pillaged; and renounced the pastoral life for the baths and palaces of his infant capitals. But it was not till Othman was oppressed by age and infirmities that he received the welcome news of the conquest of Prusa, which had