Rethinking the Ottoman Empire’s Origins

Everything you learned about the birth of the Ottoman Empire is basically a massive guessing game.

There are actually zero documents from the founding days, so the first history books were written

a hundred years later, mixing facts with legends like magic dreams.

One historian, Gibbons, even claimed the founders weren't originally Muslim,

while others argue it was purely about holy war. Then the legend Halil İnalcık dug

into Byzantine archives and realized the famous 1299 start date is wrong. It was actually

1302. It just proves history isn't always facts, it’s whoever tells the best story.