The myth of the Byzantine origins of the Osmanlis: an essay in interpretation

Abstract

The story that gave the Osmanlis a distant Comnenian origin emerges in sixteenth-century Italian and Greek histories, inspired by the twelfth-century accounts of the renegade prince John Komnenos, as related by Niketas Choniates Its invention and propagation might have served the legitimacy of Ottoman rule, in which case, it was addressed to gulams and converts rather than to the Christian subjects of the sultans. It can also be interpreted as fitting the ideals and the imaginations of highly positioned converts in the Ottoman service, who previously belonged to the Byzantine and Balkan aristocracies.