Oghuz Turks

History would remember most of them as the Anatolian Beyliks, small principalities scattered across the peninsula, each carving out its own territory in the political vacuum left behind by the Mongols and the fading Seljuks.

One of these groups was the Kayi clan, part of the larger Oghuz Turkic people.

Their leader, a man named Ertugrul, had been granted a small stretch of land near the town of Sogut in the northwestern corner of Anatolia, close to the Byzantine frontier.

It was not particularly rich land.