He noted that Osman’s successor, Sultan Orhan, who led the Ottomans from about 1323 to 1362, “was always on the move, never staying in the same place for more than a few days.”[41] This peripatetic lifestyle would have protected him and his followers from plague. Unlike people who lived in permanent villages and towns, nomads didn’t store large amounts of grain or accumulate big piles of food waste, both of which attracted rats. The nomadic Turkish would have suffered fewer plague casualties than their settled Turkish neighbors, the Byzantines and the Slavs in the Balkans.
