Once in Anatolia, these new arrivals sought out for themselves and their animals the undulating plains of the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts, where they entered a fractured Byzantine entity. In thirteenth-century Anatolia, they became one of dozens of small family principalities—Muslim and Christian, Turkish and Greek—existing within and sometimes fighting against a waning Byzantine Empire. Their loosely-bound tribal group was led by a man named Osman, who died in the mid-1320s. He would later come to be seen as the first Ottoman (the word being an anglicized derivation of Osman). Every
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