In this, as in the discussion of other misconceptions which follow, we are not at all justified in throwing out categorically the testimony of the early western writers every time that they conflict with the eastern authorities, or in ignoring them entirely, as Hammer, Zinkeisen, and Jorga have done. We must remember that Chalcocondylas and all the Ottoman historians are _very late_, that they cite no sources upon which to base their assertions or inferences, and that they write with the intention to please, and under the necessity of pleasing, the Ottoman court, at a time when its rulers had become so powerful that they could not brook the recording of an humble origin for their royal house. The extravagant descriptions of Seadeddin, for example, when he speaks of Osman’s court, and his expressions such as ‘laying his petition humbly at the feet of his royal master’, &c., seem much out of place in a narrative about primitive and exceedingly plain and simple people. The western writers claim to have sources for information which are as early and as good as those of Ali and Seadeddin. Some of them certainly had.[671] We cannot claim for these writers that their stories be accepted as fact. But we can claim that they be accepted as an honest reflection of late fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century opinion concerning the founder of the Ottoman royal house--opinion derived from stories which were current in Constantinople at that time, and which, for lack of definite history, were circulated among the Osmanlis themselves up to a very much later period.[672] The later western historians have taken, without critical examination, the Ottoman accounts of the origin of their royal family, as they have of the relationship with the Seljuks of Konia, practically at their face value. But it is not hard to prove a good case against the Ottoman historians.