Fire on the Frontier: The Life of Ertugrul Gazi - Warrior, Father, and the Forgotten Founder of the Ottoman Empire (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798184745275)

He left almost nothing behind. Two small silver coins, struck by his son.

That is the entire record written about Ertugrul Gazi while anyone who knew him was still alive. Nine words of metal. Everything else came later, from court historians serving his descendants, who needed him to have been larger than he was.

This is the story of who he actually was.

A displaced herdsman in his thirties, leading a hundred and ten households west across two thousand miles while the Mongols dismantled the world behind him. A man who split his own family at a river over a decision he could not defend, and was never certain he had been right. Who was given a poor district nobody wanted, on a frontier two exhausted empires had quietly agreed to let rot. Who never took a city. Who never won a battle anyone bothered to record.

What he did instead was hold a few hundred frightened people together for fifty years. And in one hard spring, against the advice of every sensible man around him, he spent the labour they could not spare on a small mud-and-timber room to pray in. Archaeologists have measured it. It held about forty men.

Six hundred years later, his descendants ruled from Vienna to Basra.

Fire on the Frontier is narrative history written the way a story is told rather than the way a lecture is given, and it is honest about what cannot be known. The name of his father is contested and this book says so. The wife the traditions call Halime has no evidence behind her and this book says that too. Where the record is silent, the scenes are imagined, and you are told each time.

• Understand why the smallest and poorest of a dozen Turkish principalities is the one that lasted six centuries
• See what the founding of an empire looked like from inside a felt tent, in the year it was still just a bad idea
• Learn what the sources actually support, and what two hundred years of court flattery added
• Recognize the particular loneliness of doing correct, unwitnessed work with no evidence it will ever amount to anything

This is a book for anyone who is somewhere in the middle of something difficult, with nobody watching, and no proof yet that any of it will hold.

He never knew what he had started. That was never the point.

Open the first page. He is standing on a hill above a poor valley, and he has just been given it.