He devoted himself to the service of the Seljuk Sultans of Persia, and enjoyed the confidence of Malec Shah, and his son and grandson, Mohammed and Massoud, by the last of whom he was raised to the dignity of vizir.

The stoutest opponent of the Osmanlis in Asia was the Anatolian Sultanate of KaramanMoslem, Turkish, and the legitimate heir of those Seljuk Turkish Sultans who had given Osman's father his first footing in the land.

Alp Arslan, the Seljuk Sultan, defeats and captures the Eastern Emperor, Romanus Diogenes.

Then bishops, princes, and people alike understood the danger which overshadowed Europe from the Mohammedan powers; and by soundly directed, though fanatical instinct, all Christendom rushed eastward, till the chivalry of the Seljuk Turks was crippled on the fields of Palestine.

First they came as slaves, then as mercenaries, until at last, in the eleventh century, the clan of Seljuk grasped with a strong hand the political dominion of Islam.

They challenged the Romaic Empire's progress in Armenia, and in A.D. 1071five years after the Norman founded at Hastings the strong government which has been the making of Englandthe Seljuk Turk shattered at the battle of Melasgerd that heritage of strong government which had promised so much to Greece.

The only monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses built by the Seljuk sultans themselves after the consolidation of their rule, and they are the best witnesses of the vigorous barbarism by which Romaic culture was effaced.

The Seljuk sultanate in Anatolia, shaken by the crusades, had gone the way of all oriental empires to make room for one of its fractions, which showed a most un-oriental faculty of organic growth.

The most important members of the second category, however, were the Seljuks.

Penetrating with, a small following into Asia Minor, they seized Konia, and instituted there a kingdom nominally feudatory to the Grand Seljuk of Persia, but in reality independent and destined to last about two centuries.

The creed of the Seljuks was Islam of an Iranian type.

With Constantinople itself in Latin hands, the Greek writ ran only along the north Anatolian coast, ruled from two separate centres, Isnik (Nicaea) and Trebizond: and the Seljuk kingdom was run in reality much more vigorous.

The newly come Turks were invited finally to settle on the extreme north-western fringe of the Seljuk territoryin a region so near Nicaea that their sword would be a better title to it than any which the feudal authority of Konia could confer.

Here Ertogrul was to be a Warden of the Marches, to hold his territory for the Seljuk and extend it for himself at the expense of Nicaea if he could.

Hardly were his tribesmen settled, however, among the Bithynians and Greeks of Yenishehr, before the Seljuk collapse became a fact.

The Tartar storm, ridden by Jenghis Khan, which had overwhelmed Central Asia, spent its last force on the kingdom of Konia, and, withdrawing, left the Seljuks bankrupt of force and prestige and Anatolia without an overlord.

It was not till the Seljuk kingdom was finally extinguished, in or about 1300 A.D. that Osman assumed at Yenishehr the style and title of a sultan.

For the present, it could hardly break back into Asia Minor, occupied as this was by Moslem principalities sanctioned by the same tradition as itself, namely, the prestige of the Seljuks.

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.

What Constantinople means for the Osmanlis is implied in that name Roum by which the western dominions of the Turks have been known ever since the Seljuks won Asia Minor.

coalition with the Seljuks.

"You mean," I said, "on the ground that the island of Funicula was brought under the Dodopeloponnesian sceptre on September 11th, 1405, by Blagoslav the Splay-fingered, from whom it was wrested on February 3rd, 1406, by the Seljuks?" "Precisely," he said.

In fact," I added as the waiter poured out the champagne, "it seems to me that in addition to the Island of Funicula there properly belongs, in the realm of your Greater Anti-Vivisectoria, the adjacent promontory, geyser and natural bridge of Pneumobronchia, from which the last Seljuk ruler, Didyffius the Forty-fifth, leaped in front of a machete wielded by his eldest son, who therefore became Didymus the Forty-sixth.

The Seljuk and the Ottoman Turks were Pagans, but adopted the religion of Tartars and Persians whom they subjugated, because it was superior and was blended with a superior civilization; exactly as the German conquerors of the Western Empire of Rome adopted some form of Christianity.

ALP-ARSLAN (Brave Lion), a sultan of the Seljuk dynasty in Persia, added Armenia and Georgia to his dominions (1030-1072).