lim I and Mohammed IV.

By the opening of the fifteenth century, when, all unlooked for, a most
terrible Tartar storm was about to break upon western Asia, the Osmanli
realm had grown considerably, not only in Europe by conquest, but also in
Asia by the peaceful effect of marriages and heritages. Indeed it now
comprised scarcely less of the Anatolian peninsula than the last Seljuks
had held, that is to say, the whole of the north as far as the Halys river
beyond Angora, the central plateau to beyond Konia, and all the western
coast-lands. The only emirs not tributary were those of Karamania,
Cappadocia, and Pontus, that is of the southern and eastern fringes; and
one detached fragment of Greek power survived in the last-named country,
the kingdom of Trebizond. As for Europe, it had become the main scene of
Osmanli operations, and now contained the administrative capital,
Adrianople, though Brusu kept a sentimental primacy. Sultan Murad, who
some years after his succession in 1359 had definitely transferred the
centre of political gravity to Thrace, was nevertheless carried to the
Bithynian capital for burial, Bulgaria, Serbia, and districts of both
Bosnia and Macedonia were now integral parts of an empire which had come
to number at least as many Christian as Moslem subjects, and to depend as
much on the first as on the last. Not only had the professional Osmanli
soldiery, the Janissaries, continued to be recruited from the children of
native Christian races, but contingents of adult native warriors, who
still professed Christianity, had been invited or had offered themselves
to fight Osmanli battles--even those waged against men of the True Faith
in Asia. A considerable body of Christian Serbs had stood up in Murad's
line at the battle of Konia in 1381, before the treachery of another body
of the same race gave him the victory eight years later at Kosovo. So
little did the Osmanli state model itself on the earlier caliphial empires
and so naturally did it lean towards the Roman or Byzantine imperial type.

And just because it had come to be in Europe and of Europe, it was able to
survive the terrible disaster of Angora in 1402. Though the Osmanli army
was annihilated by Timur, and an Osmanli sultan, for the first and last
time in history, remained in the hands of the foe, the administrative
machinery of the Osmanli state was not paralysed. A new ruler was
proclaimed at Adrianople, and the European part of the realm held