Orhan
Orhan was Osman's son, the second ruler of the Ottomans and the first to have a capital, a coinage, a standing army and a foothold in Europe: in thirty-six years he took Bursa, Nicaea and Nicomedia from the Byzantines, married a Byzantine emperor's daughter, was paid by that emperor to fight his civil war, and in 1354 kept Gallipoli after an earthquake had thrown down its walls, which is the date from which the Turks were in Europe to stay. He had been leading his father's raids for years when Osman died, and the siege of Bursa, which had gone on since 1317, ended with its surrender in April 1326 in the same season. He buried Osman there and made it the capital, and it was Bursa's silk and its position on the road from Constantinople to the east that paid for what followed. The emperor Andronikos III came out in person in 1329 to relieve Nicaea and was beaten at Pelekanon, the last time a Byzantine army fought the Ottomans in the field in Asia; Nicaea surrendered in 1331 and Nicomedia in 1337, and the whole of Bithynia was his. The reforms the tradition credits to him and his brother Alaeddin are the beginnings of the state: the first Ottoman silver coin in 1327 in his name, a paid infantry of yaya and cavalry of musellem in place of the tribal levy, the first medrese at Iznik, the first vizier, and the white cap that marked his soldiers. The janissaries came later than the legend says. In 1346 he married Theodora, the daughter of John Kantakouzenos, who was fighting for the Byzantine throne, and for the next eight years Ottoman troops crossed to Thrace as the emperor's allies, learning the country. In 1352 his son Suleyman took a fort at Tzympe on the Dardanelles, and when the earthquake of March 1354 emptied Gallipoli Suleyman moved in and Orhan refused every offer to give it back. He took Ankara from the Ahi brotherhood in 1354 as well. Suleyman died in a fall from his horse in 1357 and Orhan, past eighty, died in 1362, leaving the beylik to Murad, who would make it an empire.
- Lived: 1281 CE – 1362 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: sultan, monarch
