A recent reconsideration of the widely-accepted view that the raison d’être of the Ottoman emirate was the pursuit of ‘holy war’ has concluded that it was, rather, a ‘predatory confederacy’ comprising Muslim and Christian warriors alike, whose goal was ‘booty, plunder and slaves, no matter the rhetoric used by its rulers’.28 In this confederacy, the hypothesis continues, Turcoman fighters were in the minority: the rapid pace of conquest required willing and indiscriminate acceptance of large numbers of Christians into the Ottoman fold to meet the shortage of manpower available to create and administer the fledgling state.29 The religion of the early Ottoman Muslims was not exclusive: oral traditions which sang the deeds of the heroes of the marches recorded not only that co-operation between Muslim fighters and Byzantine Christians was frequent, but that intermarriage was not uncommon.30 That the Christian population of the north-west Anatolian marches continued to practise their religion freely is attested to in the letters of Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica, who travelled through the area in 1354 as captive of the Ottomans. 31 Eminent Byzantines, moreover, found employment at the Ottoman court, both in Orhan’s time and into the early sixteenth century.32
The death of Emperor Andronicus III in 1341 plunged Byzantium into civil war. Emir Umur Bey of Aydın and the Emir of Saruhan had earlier helped him with their navies to ward off Latin attacks on Byzantine possessions in the Aegean and Umur Bey now took the side of Andronicus’ successor and regent for his young son, his trusted adviser John VI Cantacuzenus. Umur Bey’s growing military and naval power and alliance with John enabled him to raid into the Balkans. This prompted a western crusade which in 1344 burnt his outlet to the sea, the fortress and port of İzmir (Smyrna). 45 The Ottomans also formed an alliance with the new emperor when Orhan married John’s daughter Theodora in a splendid ceremony in 1346.46 These events in Thrace precipitated the abdication of Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus in favour of his son Matthew, who ruled briefly before being succeeded by Andronicus III’s son John V Palaeologus.
When Orhan’s youngest son Halil, still only a child, was captured by Genoese pirates in 1357, the new emperor became involved in delicate negotiations to engineer his ransom and release, thus bringing the Byzantines some respite: the next two years saw little advance on the Ottoman frontier. John Palaeologus, aspiring to unite Byzantine and Ottoman territories, married his daughter Irene to Halil – in the hope that Halil would succeed his father as, under the Ottoman system where each son theoretically had an equal chance of succeeding, he might have done. But the plan came to nothing, for it was Halil’s older brother Murad who took their father’s place.