Sheikh Edebali

He found part of that legitimacy through marriage.

Osman married the daughter of a respected local religious figure, a sheikh named Edebali, whose spiritual authority gave Osman's ambitions a kind of moral weight in the eyes of the Muslim frontier communities around him.

Ottoman legend would later frame this with a famous dream.

Osman supposedly saw a great tree growing from his chest, its roots spreading across three continents, its branches providing shade for the whole world.

Sheikh Edebali interpreted this as a prophecy of imperial destiny.

Whether Osman actually had this dream is impossible to know, but the story itself mattered because it gave his project a narrative and people, then as now, followed narratives.

Through the 1280s and 1290s, Osman gradually expanded his territory.