Osman biography

First sultan of the Ottoman Empire

"Osman Gazi" redirects here. For other uses, see Osman Gazi (disambiguation).

Osman I or Osman Ghazi (Ottoman Turkish: عثمان غازى, romanized: ʿOsmān Ġāzī; Turkish: I.

Osman or Osman Gazi; died 1323/4)^[1][3][a] was the eponymous founder of the Ottoman Empire (first known as a beylik or emirate). While initially a small Turkoman^[5] principality during Osman's lifetime, his beylik transformed into a vast empire in the centuries after his death.^[6] It existed until 1922 shortly after the end of World War I, when the sultanate was abolished.

Owing to the scarcity of historical sources dating from his lifetime, very little factual information about Osman has survived. Not a single written source survives from Osman's reign,^[7] and the Ottomans did not record the history of Osman's life until the fifteenth century, more than a hundred years after his death.^[