Osman I

Osman inherited or carved out a small beylik in Bithynia, one of many Turkoman statelets that appeared across Anatolia in the late thirteenth century. His domain sat along the Byzantine frontier, well positioned for raiding weakened Christian lands. What he actually did in life is nearly impossible to reconstruct - not a single document from his reign exists, and Ottoman chroniclers only began shaping his legend in the 1400s, more than a hundred years gone. Later tradition claimed his family descended from the noble Kayı branch of the Oghuz Turks, though most historians now read that as invented pedigree. He died in 1323 or 1324, leaving a principality that would, across the centuries, become the Ottoman Empire - a state that endured until 1922.