The tractability of the Turks, as of the Tartars and Mongols, in the matter of religion was noted by every traveller, and was so well known in western Europe that strenuous efforts were made by the popes at various times from Djenghiz Khan to Gazan Khan to bring these Asiatic hordes into the Christian fold. A united Christendom, even a united Rome, might have seen its missionary work crowned with success. Of the village and castle chieftains with whom Osman at the beginning of his career lived on friendly terms, almost every one was a Christian. His lot was cast with them. He was cut off from the decaying Seljuk dominion of Konia. He had practically no intercourse with the other Turkish emirs of Asia Minor.[29] His only serious foes were the Mongols, pagans like himself, who had, at the very year of his birth, given what seemed a death-blow to Islam in destroying the Khalifate at Bagdad in 1258, and who were, when Osman began his active career, plotting with the Franks of the Holy Land to aid them against the Egyptian sultanate--the last strong bulwark of Islam. We see, then, the tremendous importance of these dreams of Osman, of his meeting with Edebali, and of his marriage with Malkhatun. We cannot regard these events in any other light than as recording, in a truly Oriental way, his conversion to Islam. The interpretation of the dream of the Holy Book strikes one immediately. Except in Seadeddin, the religious significance of the moon and tree dream is overshadowed by the romance of Osman and Malkhatun. Let us give to sheik Edebali his proper place in history as the great missionary of Islam, who found for his faith in its hour of dire need a race of swordbearers worthy of the task of reconstituting the Khalifate and of spreading once more the name of Mohammed in three continents. It was the conversion of Osman and his tribe which gave birth to the Osmanli people, because it welded into one race the various elements living in the north-western corner of Asia Minor. The new faith gave them a _raison d’être_. This conversion, and not the disappearance of the Seljuks of Konia,[30] is the explanation of the activity of Osman after 1290, as in sharp contrast with the preceding fifty years[31] of easy, slothful existence at Sugut.