Set at the turbulent founding period of the Ottoman state under Osman Gazi, when the small Anatolian principality is asserting itself against both the declining Seljuk Sultanate and Byzantine territories, Altın Kılıç follows Tarık Çelik, 27, a Black man raised by the Çelik family — one of the founding clans of the nascent Ottoman beylik — as a warrior, commander, and loyal member of Osman Bey's inner circle. Tarık is entirely Turkish, his identity forged in the same fires as every Çelik before him — the horse, the sword, the faith, the yurt, the brotherhood of the frontier. His name is Tarık, meaning one who knocks at the door, who arrives like a star — and he has spent his life arriving at the front of every battle he has fought. When Tarık is assigned to protect a diplomatic mission traveling through the Byzantine frontier, he meets Asena — a Turkish woman from a scholarly family in Bursa who is accompanying her father, a scholar and physician, on the mission. Asena is witty, educated beyond her era, and entirely unimpressed by military valor as a personality. Their marriage — arranged as part of a broader alliance between the Çelik warrior clan and the scholarly Esen family — is initially a collision of two people who have exactly the same strength and none of the same vocabulary. The series follows their marriage across its first years, including Tarık's campaigns, Asena's transformation from reluctant bride to the most important strategic advisor her husband has, and the larger political drama of a principality becoming an empire.
