Download PDF | Islam, Literature And Society In Mongol Anatolia By Andrew A. C. S. Peacock
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Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia From a Christian, Greek- and Armenian-speaking land to a predominantly Muslim and Turkish speaking one, the Islamisation of medieval Anatolia would lay the groundwork for the emergence of the Ottoman Empire as a world power and ultimately the modern Republic of Turkey. Bringing together previously unpublished sources in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, Peacock offers a new understanding of the crucial but neglected period in Anatolian history, that of Mongol domination, between circa 1240 and 1380. This represents a decisive phase in the process of Islamisation, with the popularisation of Sufism and the development of new forms of literature to spread Islam. This book integrates the study of Anatolia with that of the broader Islamic world, shedding new light on this crucial turning point in the history of the Middle East. A. C. S. Peacock is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Great Seljuk Empire (2015), and co-editor of Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate World (2015), and The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013).
Acknowledgements
The research leading to this book has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 208476, ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500’. I thank the European Research Council for its financial support, which enabled the extensive research in libraries in Turkey and elsewhere on which it is based. In addition, I am grateful to the Royal Society of Edinburgh for providing a grant to cover the costs of publication of colour images. I would also like to record my thanks to the Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı for allowing access to the various collections under its authority, and generously permitting reproduction of many of the manuscripts they contain.
I am especially grateful to the staff of the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul for their assistance over many years. Other libraries such as the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek and the Bibliothèque nationale de France have also been generous in granting access and providing images. Small portions of Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 were previously published in a different form as ‘Sufis and the Seljuk Court: Politics and Patronage in the Works of Jalal al-Din Rumi and Sultan Walad’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), pp. 206–26 and ‘Islamisation in Anatolia and the Golden Horde: Some Notes on Travelling Scholars and Texts’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 143 (2018): 151–64 respectively. I thank the publishers for permission to reuse these passages. Numerous colleagues have contributed, wittingly or unwittingly, to this book, although none should be held responsible for the mistakes it doubtless contains. At St Andrews, Timothy Greenwood, Angus Stewart, Ilse Sturkenboom and Dimitris Kastristis have generously tolerated numerous questions in their areas of expertise.
In Istanbul, I am especially grateful to Sara Nur Yıldız and Zeynep Oktay for discussion, assistance with obtaining copies of manuscripts and answering queries on Old Anatolian Turkish; Zeynep Oktay also kindly checked the translations from Old Anatolian Turkish, while Sara Nur Yıldız generously read and commented on a draft of this book. I am also indebted to numerous other colleagues for assistance on individual questions at various points over the long period this book has been in preparation: Evrim Binbaş, Jonathan Brack, Michael Brett, Bruno De Nicola, Devin DeWeese, Cailah Jackson, Robert Hillenbrand, Christian Lange, Timothy May, Charles Melville, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Scott Redford and Rustam Shukurov. I am also indebted to the Press’ two anonymous reviewers for useful comments and corrections. I apologise to any others whose names I have inadvertently omitted and of course I absolve them all for responsibility for the errors that inevitably remain. As ever, I am grateful to my family for their support and encouragement, and especially to my wife, Liz. This book is for her.
A Note on the Transliteration and Translation
This book draws on sources in Arabic, Persian and Old Anatolian Turkish. All have incompatible systems of transliterating the same word; for reasons of simplicity, for terms common to all three languages I have therefore adopted an Arabising transliteration throughout. Thus I spell consistently futuwwa, not fütüvvet or fotovvat, mathnawi not mesnevi and qa_ sīda not kaside, irrespective of the language of the source under discussion. Diacritics are only used in quotations. Regrettably, standards for transliterating from Old Anatolian Turkish vary considerably. When citing from published texts, the transliteration of the original editor is respected and no attempt has been made to impose uniformity. For reasons of space, quotations from texts in the original have only been provided when the text is especially obscure or the original choice of vocabulary particularly important. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own.
Introduction
In around the year 732/1332, the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited Anatolia, or Rum, as it was known to Muslims after its Romano-Byzantine heritage. It was, Ibn Battuta said, ‘the finest region of the world, where God has gathered diverse fair points; its people are the most handsome in appearance, the cleanest in clothes, their food is the most delicious and they are the most solicitous of God’s people’.
The Maghrebi was particularly impressed by the Islamic piety he found there, despite the substantial Christian population he also noted: All the people of this land follow the lawschool of the imam Abu Hanifa, may God be pleased with him, and uphold the sunna. There is no Qadari, Shi‘i (rāfi _ d ī), Mu‘tazili, Khariji or innovator (mubtadi‘ ) among them, and that is a virtue with which God has singled them out; however, they do consume hashish without considering anything wrong with it.1 This impression of Anatolian Muslims’ unwavering devotion to Sunnism is reinforced by an anecdote Ibn Battuta recounts concerning his visit to Sinop on the Black Sea coast.
When the locals saw him pray with hands downturned, not realising this was also a custom of the Sunni Maliki law school that predominated in Ibn Battuta’s homeland, they accused him of Shiism, whose adherents some of them had witnessed praying in the same fashion in Iraq and the Hijaz. Ibn Battuta was only saved from the accusation when the local sultan tested him by sending him a rabbit, forbidden to Shiites, which the Maghrebi traveller devoured, satisfying the doubters of his orthodoxy.2 Allusions to this commitment of rulers in Anatolia to upholding Sunni piety recur frequently in his account of his travels, which, owing to the region’s highly politically fragmented environment in this period, took Ibn Battuta into the presence of numerous different sultans, amirs, and governors. These are regularly depicted as enjoying a close relationship with the various religious officials who frequented their courts, such as faqīhs (specialists in Islamic jurisprudence), kha_ tībs (preachers) and qurrā’ (Qur’an reciters).3 Ibn Battuta was a learned qadi, and his account of his travels was doubtless influenced by his own pious agenda of seeking out the blessings of holy men and spiritual benefits, in common with most travellers from the pre-modern Islamic world who have left written records.4 Nonetheless, even if influenced by this pious perspective, his account stands in striking contrast to the consensus of modern scholarship, which has often seen medieval Anatolia as a barely Islamised frontier region, a ‘Wild West’, 5 characterised, in the words of one scholar, by ‘the absence of a state that was interested in rigorously defining and strictly enforcing an orthodoxy’. 6 Islam in medieval Anatolia is often described as ‘syncretic’ or ‘heterodox’, and even the Sunni piety that Ibn Battuta identified is often argued to represent a considerably broader tent than it became at a later date, incorporating elements redolent of Shiism or indeed ‘heterodoxy’. 7 Certainly, Anatolia was distinguished from other parts of the Middle East by its late incorporation into the Muslim world, which was effected only in the wake of the invasions of the Turks in the eleventh century, after which a number of Muslim Turkish states emerged in the peninsula, most prominently the Seljuqs of Rum (r. 463/1071–708/1308). Yet despite the advent of Muslim rulers, it is likely that even in Ibn Battuta’s time Christians made up a much larger proportion of the population of Anatolia than most other parts of the Middle East, notwithstanding the survival of substantial Christian communities in Egypt and Syria. Although we have no reliable statistical information, such are the hints given by contemporary sources. Travelling through Anatolia in 1253, shortly after the region had come under the control of the Mongols who had recently invaded much of the Middle East, the friar William of Rubruck, an emissary to the Great Khan Möngke, calculated that only one in ten of the population was Muslim.8 Indeed, even at the end of the fourteenth century, there were some Christians who abandoned Byzantine territory to take refuge in Muslim-ruled Anatolia.9 Nonetheless, there is much evidence that by the time Ibn Battuta visited in the fourteenth century, Christians were increasingly converting to Islam or otherwise fleeing Muslim rule.10 While recent scholarship has affirmed that the Orthodox Church in Muslim Anatolia remained vital, albeit in difficult circumstances and perforce in collaboration with the new Turkish rulers, this does not change the fact that a wealth of evidence attests the decline in numbers of its adherents.11 Conversion is often explained by the activities of Sufi holy men, who, operating outside the framework of formal religion, are said to have been able to appeal both to Anatolia’s Turkish nomadic population and to its Christians by providing forms of syncretism between Islam and their previous beliefs while claiming to offer direct communication with the divine, in contrast to the legalistic religiosity of the educated ‘ulama’. 12 Ibn Battuta’s reference to hashish may allude to such Sufis, some of whom regularly used the drug in their rituals.13 To what then were Christians converting? To an almost unimpeachable ‘orthodox’ Sunnism, as described by Ibn Battuta, or to the ‘heterodox’ and ‘syncretic’ Islam propounded by much modern scholarship? As we shall discuss, recent research has underlined that all of these categories are problematic.
The task of this book is to attain a more sophisticated understanding of the characteristics of Islam in Anatolia during the crucial period of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, when not only were increasing numbers of Christians embracing Islam, but Islamic society and culture in the peninsula were themselves undergoing profound changes. The invasions of the pagan Mongols in the early to midthirteenth century precipitated political, social and religious transformation across the Middle East and Central Asia. Lands that had long been Muslim for the first time came under the control of a non-Muslim empire, the centre of which was located thousands of miles to the east at the imperial capital of Qaraqorum in Mongolia, and in which Muslims initially lost the privileged status to which they had been accustomed (Map 1). These developments are generally regarded as having strengthened the hand of non-Muslims and Shiites, the former in the short and the latter in the long term.14 The Mongols’ capture of Baghdad in 656/1258 and killing of the Abbasid Caliph is thought to have created a void of political legitimacy in the Islamic world. In the absence of the divinely ordained institution of the Caliphate as the ultimate, if theoretical, source of political authority, Sunni Muslims had to find new ways of structuring society and politics. This may account for the increasing importance of Sufism, which offered a hierarchy of authority that could, in part, fill the void left by the disappearance of the Caliphal order, and Sufis came to play an increasingly important political role.15 These dislocations, while especially intense within the Ilkhanid lands, were by no means restricted to them, and a comparable search for new forms of political legitimacy and societal order can be observed in the Ilkhans’ great rivals, the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria.16 In around 1260, the Mongol empire ceased to be a unitary state controlled by a single ruler, the Great Khan, from Qaraqorum, and instead was divided into four principal successor states, the Yüan dynasty in China and Mongolia, the Chaghatayids in Central Asia, the Golden Horde in the South Russian steppe and the Ilkhanate of Iran.17 It was this latter state, founded by Hülegü, grandson of Chinggis Khan, and taking its name from the title īlkhān assumed by its rulers, that dominated Anatolia for most of the period (Map 2). To assert their legitimacy, the rulers of all these Mongol successor states stressed their descent from Chinggis Khan, the great conqueror who was regarded by Mongols (and some non-Mongols) as possessing more or less divine status. A distinctive political culture developed in the Ilkhanate. The Ilkhans came to view themselves as inheritors not just of the legacy of Chinggis but also that of ancient Iran,18 while after converting to Islam in 694/1295, the Ilkhan Ghazan started to employ simultaneously a vocabulary of Islamic kingship, describing himself as pādshāh-i Islām, ‘king of Islam’. 19 This model of political legitimacy that drew on steppe, Iranian and, from the end of the thirteenth century, Islamic elements accrued prestige to the Ilkhans, which enabled them to exert a broader cultural and political influence. Anatolia was certainly affected by the broader developments in Middle Eastern society and politics precipitated by Mongol domination, which was established in the peninsula after the Seljuqs’ defeat at the Battle of Kösedağ near Sivas in 641/ 1243. However, it also experienced some distinct consequences. Mongol hegemony opened the way for a new political dispensation in Anatolia, even if the Seljuqs nominally retained the position of sultan until the early fourteenth century, although without being able to exercise effective power. The Mongols asserted suzerainty over all the Seljuq lands (as they did, in theory, over the entire world). In practice, this claim was contested by the numerous Turkmen lords, such as those encountered by Ibn Battuta, who first emerged as major political forces in the Mongol period, and who, with the decline of the Ilkhanate in the 1330s, became ever more powerful. The most successful of these Turkmen lords were the Ottomans, who expanded from a small base in north-western Anatolia to establish a great empire that absorbed its Turkmen rivals and both Christian and Muslim neighbours, lasting, in one form or another, until the First World War. These political changes were accompanied by equally dramatic cultural ones. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, Turkish emerged as a literary medium, supplementing and eventually superseding Persian as the main literary and textual vehicle of Anatolian Muslims. This facilitated the composition and circulation of basic manuals of the faith as well as a pious literature that addressed the concerns of a recently converted or converting population, in contrast to the situation at the height of Seljuq rule in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when almost all literary works seem to have been destined for a limited courtly or elite audience. From the mid-thirteenth century the religious, social and literary landscape was transformed by the spread of Sufism, which penetrated society from artisans’ guilds to the ruling elites, and introduced novel ways of conceptualising not just man’s relationship to God but also temporal power and authority, which became increasingly intertwined with Sufis’ spiritual claims. Konya, the old Seljuq capital, was fast becoming a major scholarly centre to which men migrated from other parts of the Islamic world to study Sufi thought, as well as to seek professional advancement. It was under Mongol rule that figures such as the major Sufi writers Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 672/1273), his son Sultan Walad (d. 712/1312) and the leading interpreter of Ibn ‘Arabi, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (d. 672/1273), were active, as well as some of the earliest Turkish poets in Anatolia, such as Gülşehri (d. after 718/1318) and Aşık Paşa (d. 732/1332). Mongol domination thus facilitated the integration of Anatolia into the broader Muslim world, through the activities of migrant scholars, Sufis and litterateurs, all of whose presence becomes increasingly marked from the second half of the thirteenth century. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate how Mongol domination thus played an integral part in the process of Islamisation in Anatolia, but one which has not yet received due attention from scholarship. By Islamisation I mean not simply conversion to Islam, but the processes by which Islam permeated politics, society and culture more generally.20 In most other regions of the Middle East, this process had taken place at a much earlier date, primarily the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, and is thus often attested only by later Islamic sources. In Anatolia, however, we have a large body of contemporary texts in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. To date, this literature has been little studied and remains mainly unpublished, as will be discussed at more length in due course, but it can serve as a valuable first-hand source for understanding these religious and cultural transformations, forming a unique window into the process of Islamisation as it happened. Beyond the intrinsic interest of deepening our understanding of the evolution of Muslim society in Anatolia, this book thus also aims to enhance our understanding more generally both of processes of Islamisation and the consequences of Mongol hegemony in the Middle East.21
I hope also to address some of the issues highlighted by Ibn Battuta’s account, shedding light on the relationship between political power and religion, and assessing the effect of the political convulsions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the social and religious structures of the Muslim community in Anatolia. I concentrate on the crucial period of cultural transformation and Mongol political and cultural dominance from c. 641/1243 to 783/1381, the former date marking the Mongol victory over the Seljuqs at the Battle of Kösedaǧ, which established their dominance over Anatolia, and the latter marking the demise of the last Mongol successor state in the peninsula, the Eretnids (c. 735/1335–783/1381). However, these dates offer only a rough framework: the pace of cultural and religious change, while certainly connected to broader political developments, is necessarily slower, so we will have cause on occasion both to look back and forward beyond these dates. This book will give particular attention to Central Anatolia.
Its towns such as Konya, Kayseri and Sivas had been the cultural centre of Muslim Anatolia since the coming of the Turks and remained the heartland of the Seljuq sultans, the Ilkhanid governors of Anatolia and the Eretnids. It is also by far the best attested region in the historical sources, most of which were produced there, a fact reflected in the coverage of this book too. Beyond, in the peripheries and coastal areas, the courts of the Turkmen chiefs produced no chronicles in our period, and our understanding of these polities is often limited; nonetheless, some played an important role in the patronage of literary texts and thus the broader cultural transformations of the period. Of course, this is not to say that literary texts are the sole possible source for interpreting the transformations of the Mongol period. Art history, epigraphy and material culture might all serve the historian, but this book deliberately limits itself largely to the textual sources as these are perhaps the least exploited, and, in tracing the changes in intellectual and literary history that are the book’s focus, the most relevant. Nonetheless, occasionally I will refer to epigraphic and architectural evidence where this seems relevant to my argument, but limitations of space have constrained me from exploiting such sources more fully.
The significance of the book’s argument that Mongol role played a crucial role in the Islamisation of Anatolia is severalfold. First, it draws attention to the importance of this era in the history of Anatolia, which has received very little scholarly attention, and brings a new understanding to the consequences of the Mongol conquests in a specific region. Secondly, it sheds light on the development and spread of Islam in this region against the broader political and intellectual background, based on contemporary Muslim sources. Thirdly, it obliges us to revise the scholarly consensus, discussed further later, that it was the high Ottoman period of the sixteenth century that saw the initiation of a process described as ‘Sunnitisation’ whereby, backed by the might of the state, a distinctively Sunni religiosity was increasingly propagated. Rather, we can see that many elements of this Sunnitisation must be traced back to the consequences of Mongol rule.
HISTORIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES ON ANATOLIA IN THE PERIOD OF MONGOL DOMINATION Until recently, scholarship both inside and outside Turkey has tended to view Anatolian history as a neat sequence of Turkish dynasties leading from the Seljuqs (r. 463/1071–708/1308) to the Ottomans (r. 699/1299–1923) and thus ultimately to the Turkish Republic.22 Lately, however, aspects of medieval Anatolia have attracted increasingly scholarly attention in their own right rather than as merely a precursor to the Ottomans, and this research has underlined the political and cultural complexity of the region.23 Nonetheless, it is hard to escape entirely from the influence of the earlier approach and the underlying assumptions of its basic vocabulary. Even the word Anatolia, commonly used in modern scholarship as an equivalent for the classical Islamic term Rum, was first popularised by Turkish nationalist scholars in the early twentieth century, and especially after the establishment of the Republic in 1923, as part of a state-building effort that equated Anatolia with modern Turkey. Yet in reality, many of the south-easternmost parts of modern Turkey, such as Antakya, Urfa, Diyarbakır and Mardin, had a distinct history from the westerly and central regions, having been incorporated into the Islamic world at the time of the Umayyad conquests. Some of these areas were (especially in Ottoman times) considered part of the lands of Rum; but others would traditionally be categorised as part of other regions such as the Jazira or al-Sham.24 No less nebulous than Anatolia is the Arabic, Persian and Turkish term Rum, and its adjective Rumi. Derived from Rhomaioi, the Greek term for Byzantine or Roman, Rum and Rumi could refer to the Byzantine Empire, to inhabitants of the lands of Asia Minor who were either Muslim or Christian, or at times specifically to Christians, and at times specifically to Muslims. The multiplicity of usages underlines the fluidity of identity in the period, the way in which it was possible for individuals to slip between ethnic and religious barriers.25 In our period, Rum could thus apply equally to the Muslim-ruled territories of central, southern and eastern Anatolia, and to those areas that were still under Christian control. The Byzantine empire, although much diminished after the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade (1204), continued to control substantial territories in western Anatolia, although these were increasingly being encroached on by the Muslims from the late thirteenth century.26 On the eastern Black Sea coast the Greek state of Trebizond (1204–1461) survived as a Mongol tributary, and the shores of the eastern Mediterranean were controlled by another Mongol ally, the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375). The population of all these areas might be considered Rumi for some purposes. In this book, Rum and Anatolia are used interchangeably to refer to the parts of the peninsula that either came under Muslim control after the Turkish conquest or remained under Christian rule until the final Turkish conquest of the last Greek outpost of Trebizond in 1461. Broadly speaking, the southeasternmost regions of modern Turkey that were incorporated into the dār alislām in the seventh century are excluded because of their separate history and the quite different progress of Islamisation in these areas. Even when limiting ourselves to the regions under consideration here which are defined as Rum/Anatolia we must be careful to avoid falling into the trap of conceptualising them as the direct ‘ancestor’ of modern Turkey. The neat teleogy of Seljuq, Ottoman and Republican rule and an antithesis between Muslim and Christian Anatolia disguises a distinctly more complex situation. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, generally considered the height of the ‘Seljuq’ period, different parts of Anatolia were ruled by a variety of fractious Turkish dynasties, such as the Mengücekids (Erzincan and Divriği in Eastern Anatolia), the Saltukids (Erzurum) and the Danishmendids (Kayseri and Malatya, central and south-eastern Anatolia) in addition to the Seljuqs. The latter, moreover, themselves splintered with the emergence of a rival Seljuq line in Erzurum that replaced the Saltukids. Both ethnic and religious fault lines were rather more blurred than older scholarship might suggest. The Danishmendids struck coins in Greek, representing figures such as Jesus Christ and St George,27 while in the Seljuq case the sultans regularly intermarried with Christian (largely Byzantine and Georgian) princesses, who did not necessarily convert to Islam. Their offspring, the future sultans, were often brought up speaking Greek and were sometimes baptised (although it is not clear the ceremony would have had anything more than an apotropaic meaning). Churches were found even in Seljuq palaces.28 Moreover, a substantial Turkish population was also found in lands under Byzantine control,29 while Islamic culture exercised a strong influence on literature and socio-political institutions in Christian societies (above all Armenian and Georgian, to a much lesser extent in Greek).30 This inadequacy of periodisation by dynastic names to capture the complexity of the period is also suggested by the fact that the Seljuqs were themselves tributary to the Mongols from 634/1236, while from 653/1255 to c. 735/1335 Anatolia was a province of the Ilkhanate. The Christian polities of Cilicia and Trebizond were also bound as tributaries to the Ilkhanate, with which Byzantium also enjoyed cordial relations that were cemented through imperial marriage alliances.31 The fact of the dominant role of the Ilkhanate in Anatolia in this period is swept under the carpet by much scholarship, especially, though not exclusively, in Turkey. Rather than the ‘Mongol’ or ‘Ilkhanid’ period, late thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Anatolia is generally known in scholarship as the beylik period, after the term for the small principalities ruled over by Turkmen (and occasionally Mongol) chiefs, although as we shall see the notion of a beylik is distinctly problematic.32 With the benefit of hindsight, the most important of these beyliks was that of the descendants of the Turkmen chief Osman. Thus, the overwhelming bulk of scholarship concentrates on the emergence of the Ottoman state in the north-west of the peninsula, which has been the subject of scholarly research for a good century. Some scholars, such as Paul Wittek, writing in 1938, whose ideas remain influential even today, have seen the emergence of the Ottomans as propelled by their ‘ghazi ethos’, in which the commitment to holy war served as a means of acquiring legitimacy for an upstart nomad dynasty that possessed no antecedents.33 Others have seen the early Ottoman state as something akin to a joint Christian/Muslim enterprise, with unconverted Christians playing a formative role. In this view, the Ottoman empire was itself in many ways a continuation of Byzantium by other means, witnessed by the eventual adoption of Constantinople as the imperial capital after its conquest in 1453.34 The conquest of parts of the Balkans with their Christian populations, starting from the early fourteenth century, most probably gave the early Ottoman state a character quite distinct from the beyliks of Anatolia that existed on or on the peripheries of lands subject to Muslim rule for over two centuries. Yet the nature of the early Ottoman state remains opaque, in no small part owing to the lack of sources for the period before c. 1400. Contemporary chronicles from the Ottomans and other beyliks do not survive, nor is there much indication that other chronicles that have not come down to us were written, although there are traces of an earlier oral Ottoman historiographical tradition, which is partly preserved in histories that reached their current form at the end of the fifteenth century.35 Nor are significant archival records extant from this period, and there is very little evidence of any literary activity in the early Ottoman beylik, which represented something of a cultural backwater compared to Central Anatolia. As a result, research has focused on a very limited source base: the extensive debates on Wittek’s famous ghazi thesis have revolved around a single inscription, a brief passage from a poem by the Turkish writer Ahmedi (d. 816/1413) and supplementary material from Ottoman chronicles of the fifteenth century. Scholarly interest in the early Ottoman state has rarely extended to the rest of Muslim-ruled Anatolia in the period, a handful of studies seeking to understand the Mongol influence on Ottoman institutions notwithstanding.36 Individual beyliks have often received monograph treatment in Turkish (very rarely in any Western language), outlining their political history and principal monuments, but these are seldom integrated into a broader study of Anatolia, meaning each beylik is seen in isolation from the others.37 In more popular works, the Mongols are routinely ignored. Despite the fact that some of the most iconic medieval monuments of Anatolia were constructed by Ilkhanid patrons, such as the Çifte Minareli Medrese at Sivas, in Turkish scholarship the Ilkhanid connection tends to be played down and such monuments are subsumed under the catch-all terms Seljuq or beylik, even if in reality they have little or no connection with either.38 Meanwhile, historians of the Mongols have generally given little attention to Anatolia, despite a recent boom in studies of the Mongol empire, and the Ilkhanate in particular.39 As a result, with a few notable exceptions, the period of Mongol domination in Anatolia as a whole has been neglected in scholarship.40
Given the focus of existing scholarship, it may seem perverse that Mongolcontrolled Central Anatolia is in fact by far the best attested region of the peninsula in contemporary sources, much better than any beylik, including the Ottomans. All our extant chronicles from before the fifteenth century come from Central Anatolia and are in some way connected to Mongol rule. All too are in Persian. In chronological order, they are: Ibn Bibi’s al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya, a chronicle of the Seljuq dynasty in Anatolia written for the Ilkhanid bureaucrat ‘Ala’ al-Din Juwayni in or after 681/1282; a chronicle of Mongol rule in Anatolia, the Musamarat al-Akhbar, written by the bureaucrat Aqsara’i for the Ilkhanid governor Timurtash in 723/1323; a brief anonymous history of the Seljuqs, compiled in Konya by various hands between the end of the thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century, one of the compilers of which was probably a member of the retinue of the Ilkhan Geikhatu; and the biography of the ruler of Sivas and successor to the Eretnid principality, Burhan al-Din Ahmad, the Bazm u Razm, by ‘Aziz b. Ardashir Astarabadi (d. 800/1398), which also gives much information about the later Eretnids. Mention should also be made of an encyclopaedic work produced by the qadi of the Central Anatolian town of Niğde in 733/1333, alWalad al-Shafiq, which contains historical information. This historiographical tradition is well known to scholars, although only recently have efforts been made to treat these works as more than mines of historical data, dates and facts, and to understand the underlying political and legitimatory aims of their authors.41 The coverage provided by these chronicles is thus uneven, and the period between the end of Aqsara’i’s Musamarat al-Akhbar in 723/1323 and the collapse of the Eretnid state in 783/1381 is especially poorly documented. Their focus is almost exclusively on political history, meaning that the insights they offer into broader processes of social change are limited. However, two Arabic sources by outsiders provide valuable portraits of Anatolia in the mid-fourteenth century: the relevant sections in the travel account of Ibn Battuta (d. 770/1368 or 779/1377) previously mentioned and the work of an Egyptian chancery official, al-‘Umari (d. 749/1349), the Masalik al-Absar, a vast encyclopaedia that includes a substantial description of contemporary Anatolia based on reports of travellers.42 These Arabic sources are especially important for the impression they give of the broader organisation of society beyond the immediate political and military concerns of the elite that form the focus of the Persian chronicles. Despite the still substantial Christian population of Anatolia in our period, there seems to have been little textual production in Greek within the Muslimruled territories, perhaps because Greek literature was closely connected to court patronage.43 Armenian and Syriac, on the other hand, continued to be widely used as vehicles of literature, and indeed one of the most important historical sources not just for Anatolia but for the region more broadly in the period is the chronicle of the Syriac patriarch Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286), a native of Melitene/ Malatya, which, together with its continuation, is a valuable first-hand source for the Mongol invasions and their aftermath.44 Texts were also produced in Armenian, and both original works and the colophons of copies of manuscripts made in the period can serve as valuable historical sources.45 Yet they are less useful for understanding the internal dynamics of Muslim society, which form the subject of this book; the same is true of the rich Greek literary tradition that continued to be composed by Constantinople-based authors. Christian views of Muslims have been studied by previous scholars, and their work will not be duplicated here.46
ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY IN MEDIEVAL ANATOLIA While several previous studies have attempted to address the vexed question of Christian conversion to Islam in this period, and the broader Islamisation of Anatolia, these have largely been undertaken on the basis of the Christian sources by scholars of Byzantium. The seminal work on the process of Islamisation remains the great if problematic study by Speros Vryonis, first published in 1971, The Decline of Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization. Vryonis’s work represents a highly ambitious attempt to understand the entire period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, yet Vryonis relied predominantly on Christian sources and the relatively few Islamic ones available to him in translations into modern Turkish or Western languages. The book does what its title proclaims: the process of Islamisation is seen through the prism of the end of Greek civilisation in Anatolia, and destruction, violence and forced conversion feature prominently in its account of the transformations of the period. As a result, while providing a wealth of information, it presents a perspective determined by this lamentation for a lost Greek Christian Anatolia. Much less attention has been devoted to the profound changes in Muslim society and culture during the same period, and in 2009 the leading Turkish scholar of Anatolian Sufism, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, remarked that almost no new research has been carried out on the history of Islam in Anatolia since the famous article by the pioneering Turkish nationalist scholar Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, ‘Islam in Anatolia after the Turkish conquest’, first published in 1922.47 While this is something of an exaggeration, Ocak himself having provided some valuable studies of aspects of Sufism in the period, the broad picture remains correct, for the field is still dominated by many of Köprülü’s ideas. Alongside the aforementioned 1922 article, Köprülü’s Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, which came out in 1918, shaped perceptions of the development of Islam in the region throughout the twentieth century. In both these works, Köprülü argued that the study of Islam in Anatolia must concentrate on the authentically Turkish elements that he believed could be detected among the Turkmen (i.e. the nomadic Turks), who ‘constitute the most important object of study in the religious history of Anatolia’. Köprülü saw the Turkmen babas (Sufi leaders) as ‘Islamized versions of the old Turkish kam/ozan [shaman]’ who ‘directed the religious life of the active and warlike Turkmen’ and were ‘preoccupied with holy war’. 48 Köprülü contrasts these heroic and militant Turkmen babas who ‘spread Islam in the lands of unbelief’ with the ‘Arab and Persian Sufis, who spent quiet and contemplative lives secluded in lodges’. In places, Köprülü seems strongly to disapprove of this ‘Arab and Persian’ Sufism, which he viewed as tantamount to Shiism.49 The idea of Turkish Sufis playing a crucial role in the formation of a Turkish identity expressed in the Turkish language, an identity that was translated from the Turks’ place of origin in Central Asia to Anatolia, was developed at greater length in his Early Mystics, which also emphasised the role of this literature in the spread of Islam. At the same time, Köprülü argued that Turkish Sufi literature, inspired by the eleventh- or twelfth-century Central Asian poet-saint Ahmad Yasavi to whom he attributed a crucial role in the original conversion of the Turks, ‘is so characteristically Turkish that nothing like it is found among the Arabs and Persians’. 50 These Central Asian and shamanistic elements, he argued, underlie Alevism/Bektashism, the form of Sufism infused with Shiite elements that Köprülü saw as the main form of a ‘popular’ and ‘Turkish’ Islam in Anatolia.51 Köprülü’s emphasis on a distinction between a ‘popular’ religiosity and a Persianate one of the towns was adopted by much subsequent scholarship, including the works of Ahmet Yaşar Ocak,52 and Irène Mélikoff,53 albeit without the nationalist undertones, and it remains prominent in some contemporary scholarship, especially that of Ahmet Karamustafa, who has investigated what he calls ‘vernacular Islam’ in medieval Anatolia.54 Köprülü’s description of the militant Turkmen babas also brings to mind Paul Wittek’s formulation a few years later of the ghazi ethos of the early Ottoman state, which was similarly based on ideas of ethnically determined militarism.55 Vryonis concurred that the militant proselytization of Sufis played a crucial role in the process of Islamisation.56 Likewise, Köprülü’s argument that the incorporation of pre-Islamic modes of religiosity played an essential part in the Turkmen’s own Islamisation was also influential in the widespread conceptualisation of Islam in Anatolia as highly syncretic, and was reinforced by the research of F. W. Hasluck that appeared in the same period, emphasising the shared shrines and popular religious beliefs of Muslims and Christians in medieval Anatolia.57 Syncretism could thus account for both the pagan Turks’ embrace of a militant Islam based on holy war, and at the same time the emergence of a society characterised by intercommunal harmony. Cemal Kafadar attempted to square this circle in his study of debates around the emergence of the Ottoman state, Between Two Worlds, arguing that The people of the marches did not see a contradiction between striving to expand their faith and engaging in conciliatory (not necessarily insincere) gestures towards members of the other faith ... Very probably they were aware of the wonders that syncretism could work.58 Many of Köprülü’s ideas have been challenged of late.59 Ahmet Karamustafa and Ayfer Karakaya-Stump have criticised the idea of a Central Asian origin of Anatolian Sufism, 60 while Devin DeWeese has reassessed Ahmad Yasavi’s own role in the Islamisation of the Turks, demolishing one of Köprülü’s major assumptions.61 The idea of a dichotomy between urban and rural, popular and elite religiosity has been argued to be simplistic by some scholars, and it should in fairness be noted that Köprülü did himself underline that one of the main heroes of Early Mystics, the (probably) fourteenth-century Turkish poet Yunus Emre, was also influenced by the Persianate Sufi culture around him, in particular Jalal al-Din Rumi.62 Syncretism, too, has been challenged as an explanatory device by a number of scholars from different perspectives. Reuven Amitai has argued on the basis of studies of other parts of the Mongol empire that there was in fact little similarity between the Sufi saint and the shaman (the latter itself a problematic category),63 and Tijana Krstić, who has studied the process of Islamisation in fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Anatolia and the Balkans, has argued that ideas of syncretism or heterodoxy are misleading. In fact, Krstić sees shared religious spaces as places of religious negotiation and dispute, not necessarily conciliation, and argues that historians need to take account of the ‘politics’ of religious synthesis and that many medieval Turkish texts demonstrate ‘ideological investment in a firm upholding of religious boundaries’. 64 Nonetheless, syncretism remains a dominant idea in studies of medieval Anatolia, and underlies the highly influential analysis propounded by Kafadar, which it is worth quoting in full, standing in sharp contrast as it does to Ibn Battuta’s perception of the ‘orthodoxy’ of Anatolia: The religious picture of Anatolia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries appears to be much more complex than the neat categorizations of a simple Sunni/Shi‘i dichotomy would allow. In this context even if one were able to identify some particular item of faith as heterodox, this would not necessarily imply “Shi‘i” as it is usually assumed; questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, even if they are meaningful, should not be formulated along the lines of a Sunni/Shi‘i sectarianism ... Maybe the religious history of Anatolian and Balkan Muslims living in the frontier areas of the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries should be conceptualized in part in terms of a ‘metadoxy,’ a state of being beyond doxies, a combination of being doxy-naive and not being doxy-minded, as well as the absence of a state that was interested in rigorously defining and strictly enforcing an orthodoxy.65 In recent years, some scholars have become increasingly uncomfortable in framing the debate in such terms. The whole notion of ‘orthodoxy’ is problematic in Islam, given the lack of an authority to define or enforce it, and the lack of a single lexical equivalent in Arabic or other languages used by pre-modern Muslims. It has even been argued that Islam only prescribes practice, not belief.66 In its place, in studies of Anatolia the term ‘Sunnitisation’ or even ‘confessionalisation’ is sometimes preferred, although these processes are commonly argued only to set in with an increasing willingness on the part of the Ottoman empire to define and prescribe religious beliefs in the sixteenth century, a phenomenon which is argued to parallel the Reformation in Europe.67 Nonetheless, if orthodoxy may be in the eye of the beholder, Ibn Battuta’s response to the religious environment in medieval Anatolia suggests that at least in the view of this contemporary there was a clear distinction between both right and wrong belief and practice, and such concerns were shared by Anatolian rulers and people. A recent discussion has suggested that ‘the Sunni enthusiasts encountered by Ibn Battuta were acting more out of an uninformed zeal than out of sound knowledge of Sunni Islam’. 68 While, as noted above, Ibn Battuta’s perceptions were doubtless in some way influenced by his pious agenda and religious background, such a statement, for the moment, remains unproven, for we lack sufficient research on the history of Islam in Anatolia to even start to hypothesise about the characteristics of the faith in the peninsula. Such studies as do exist are often determined by an emphasis on the Ottomans and Turkish sources, and a narrow focus on Anatolia that often fails to take account of the broader Middle Eastern and Islamic environment in which the peninsula was located. Even beyond the strictly political field, studies often take as their starting point the emergence of the Ottoman state in c. 1300 and remain resolutely focused on the Ottoman context, such as a recent (and valuable) examination of the rise of the ulama.69 Yet religious, cultural and political change did not necessarily occur in synchrony, and taking c. 1300 as a starting point can obscure the nature of developments outside the political arena. Furthermore, despite their undoubted importance, the relatively few studies that have sought to address the religious situation in Anatolia in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries – predominantly the works of Ocak, Mélikoff, Şevket Küçükhüseyin and Rıza Yıldırım – tend to rely on a small corpus of sources, usually in Turkish, mainly later hagiographies of earlier Sufis and popular romances such as the Battalname, written down in its current form in the fifteenth century.70 The utility of such sources for our period is questionable. For instance, according to tradition, Hacı Bektaş, the founder of the Bektashi order, and a crucial figure in the development of Alevism, lived in the period, dying, according to the conventional date, in 1271.71 However, we actually possess no references to him of the period beyond passing allusions in works of the hagiographer Aflaki (d. 761/1360) and his contemporary Elvan Çelebi, which do at least affirm his historicity. The reports of his activities in the fifteenth-century Vilayetname, the main hagiography, reflect the preoccupations of a later age and offer a mythologised presentation of the saint, which cannot be balanced against any contemporary evidence. Such cases could be multiplied, for there is a tendency to overemphasise this Turkish language material of later date at the expense of contemporary Arabic and Persian materials, aside from the published chronicles and Aflaki’s well-known hagiography of Rumi and his descendants, the Manaqib al-‘Arifin. This is understandable, as much more Turkish material has been published, albeit largely for its philological interest, while the bulk of the contemporary Arabic and Persian material remains in manuscript, scattered across different libraries and inadequately documented in their catalogues and other reference works. Yet relying on the distorting lens of later texts may detract from our understanding of the period. In addition, owing to the excessive interest in detecting ‘heterodoxy’, scholarship has concentrated on rather marginal groups such as radically antinomian Sufis who rejected the need to adhere to the external forms of sharia.72 Both the importance and the ‘heterodoxy’ of such groups has sometimes been exaggerated.73 Another problematic facet of existing scholarship is the tendency to conceptualise Islam in Anatolia in our period in terms that emphasise its distinctiveness from that of the surrounding region, as is suggested by the quote from Kafadar given above. In reality some of the blurred boundaries he identifies are to be found more generally in Islam in this period. For instance, the tendency of certain Sunnis to sympathise with Shiite practices and even beliefs (known as tashayyu‘ _ hasan) is a feature of Islam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that can be observed elsewhere in Iran, Central Asia and the Levant. Figures key to Shiism such as the imams ‘Ali b. Abi Talib and Ja‘far al-Sadiq played a role in all circles of Muslim believers as gates to the ‘unseen world’(‘ālam al-ghayb), the supernatural world belief in which was almost universal.74 Whether or not this deserves to be labelled tashayyu‘ of any kind seems doubtful; but there is certainly firm evidence of the enduring attachment to these figures that some modern scholarship associates with Shiism long after the so-called Ottoman ‘Sunnitisation’ had set in during the sixteenth century.75 At the same time, as we shall discuss in Chapter 4, there seems to be evidence of a distinct Shiite presence in medieval Anatolia that was, to contemporary Sunnis, a theologically deviant path quite separate from such popular manifestations of Alid piety that could be accommodated within Sunnism. The growing role of Sufism was also far from being a specifically Anatolian phenomenon; as Nile Green has observed, Sufism was more or less Islam in the medieval period.76 Although certainly Sufism possesses a rich textual tradition, its essence is a believer’s search for personal contact with the divine mediated through the intercession of a holy man. As Azfar Moin has explained, it was through the sacred presences of holy men, ‘whether alive in physical form, active in enshrined graves, apparent in dreams, or resurrected in blood descendants and anointed ancestors’ that Islam was experienced by most believers.77 The major social, political and religious role played by Sufism in medieval Anatolia thus suggests the region’s integration into the broader Islamic world, where the same phenomenon was equally widespread. Even the radically antinomian Sufis who have attracted much comment were far from being an exclusively Anatolian phenomenon.
Where Anatolia may appear to differ from the neighbouring Muslim world in the paltry evidence for a class of ‘ulama’, the religious scholars who constituted the backbone of society and intellectual life in centres such as Damascus, Cairo and Tabriz.78 As Claude Cahen commented, the ‘ālim in Anatolia generally died unnoticed by his peers, whereas the lives of his counterparts in the centres of the Muslim world were lovingly documented in detailed biographies and obituaries either as independent works (_ tabaqāt) or inserted into chronicles.79 For Anatolia, there is no attempt to chronicle the lives of the ‘ulama’ before the biographical dictionary of Taşköprizade (d. 968/1561), al-Shaqa’iq al-Nu‘maniyya, produced at the height of the Ottoman imperial age, and which attempts to associate early scholars with the founders of the Ottoman imperial venture.80 Nonetheless, Taşköprizade’s coverage of the fourteenth century is very scanty, in part doubtless owing to the lack of earlier sources on which he could draw. Yet it is questionable whether the lack of this specific type of textual source can really lead us to assert the complete absence of a class of ‘ulama’. Tabaq ̣ āt seems to have emerged as a means of distinguishing between those scholars ‘who had the necessary qualifications to be authoritative, and those who did not. The motivation behind _ tabaqāt works was the empowerment of certain groups of scholars to the exclusion of others.’ 81 It has also been argued that these biographical dictionaries served as a sort of ‘social capital’ through which the intellectual elites of, for example, Damascus asserted their status.82 The absence, then, of biographical dictionaries of scholars from Anatolia may not reflect so much the complete lack of such scholars, as Cahen and others have believed, but rather the different social structures in which competition for rank, position and authority were articulated in different ways, for example through the conflicts between rival Sufi groups that are well attested in our sources, as will be discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. Certainly, provincial ‘ulama’ from Central Anatolia are attested through some of the literary works they have left us, such as the Persian encyclopaedia by Qadi Ahmad of Niğde, or the jurist Muhsin al-Qaysari who composed several Arabic works on inheritance law in early fourteenth-century Kayseri.83 However, rather than looking for the ‘ulama’, about whom the sources are so reticent, it makes more sense to focus on the texts themselves that have survived from our period, of which an enormous number in Arabic, Persian and Turkish have come down to us.84 These can help us understand the relationship of Islam in Anatolia to broader trends in the Islamic world as well as in its own right. Apart from the handful of chronicles discussed above, which represent a rare form of secular courtly literature, the surviving texts that can be securely dated to our period comprise a predominantly religious literature dealing with diverse topics such as eschatology, stories of saints, hadith, belief (‘aqā’id) and Sufi texts, quite apart from the well-known hagiographies such as Aflaki’s Manaqib. Most of these works are didactic in intent, but it would be erroneous to exclude such works from a definition of pre-modern literature, which I use here to mean all texts composed without an immediate documentary or administrative purpose (such as tax documents or royal decrees). Much of this remains unpublished in manuscript form, with a handful of notable exceptions such as the works of Jalal al-Din Rumi and his son Sultan Walad, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, or Yunus Emre.85 Even studies of these figures, who are of major importance in the history of Islamic literature and thought, tend to lack adequate historical contextualisation in the light of texts produced by their contemporaries, and thus our understanding of the broader religious and literary environment of the region remains limited. In this book, therefore, I make use of selections from this vast and barely known corpus of lesser-known texts that can be reasonably securely dated to our period and which itself constitutes a vital source for the religious and intellectual history of Anatolia. As Norman Calder has argued, the corpus of religious texts dealing with themes such as qi _ sa _ s al-anbiyā’, hadith, Qur’an, tafsir and kalām is itself the pre-eminent repository of what it means to be ‘orthodox’. 86 Without necessarily subscribing completely to Calder’s definition of the Sunni literary corpus that defines orthodoxy, which I believe underestimates the importance of Sufism at least for our place and period and perhaps gives undue prominence to kalām, or indeed to the notion of ‘orthodoxy’ itself in an Islamic context, it is clear that without examining what people were actually reading and writing, rather than later depictions in hagiographies, any attempt to assess the nature of Islam in Anatolia is flawed. Such literature of course presents problems of interpretation, but also opportunities. Treatises on topics such as sainthood or jihad present an ideal, not a reality, but their contents can give an insight into the changing roles and representations of Sufis. From the fourteenth century, for instance, motifs of conversion become widespread in Sufi literature, as we can observe in the vita of Rumi by Aflaki.87 To what extent this actually reflects an active role by these saints in promoting conversion to Islam is another question, for Rumi’s own works do not indicate this was a particular concern of his; but they certainly do reflect an atmosphere in which conversion to Islam was become increasingly widespread, and a role in conversion narratives served as a symbolic proof of the validity of a saint’s claims. Similarly, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, the eschatological literature, discussing what the believer needs to do to enter paradise, shows a distinct evolution over time, the bar being set increasingly high and thus reflecting greater expectations of the knowledge of Islam on the part of the average Muslim. This religious literature thus both contributed to and reflects the process of Islamisation, as well as the broader religious environment. Sufism will play a substantial part in this discussion, as Sufi texts represent some of the most widely circulated forms of literature in medieval Anatolia, and Sufis play an active role in all parts of social and political life, as we shall see. Despite Sufis’ prominence here, this is not a book about the theories of Sufism per se but rather the ways in which politics, religion, society and textual production were interlinked, and how developments in one area could affect the others. The book comprises two parts. Part One, ‘Religion, Politics and Society’, examines the ways in politics and religion were intertwined in medieval Anatolia. Chapter 1, after laying out the political and intellectual background to the formation of Islamic culture and society in Anatolia up to the fourteenth century, focuses on the ways in which both Mongols and Turkmen chiefs faced a crisis of political legitimacy with the fall of the Seljuqs, and argues that one major response was the adoption of a newly aggressive religious stance, centred around a rhetoric of unbelief, which was absent in earlier times. The following two chapters discuss the ways in which political elites sought to shore up their authority by patronising both elite and popular Sufism. Chapter 2 explores how Sufism and political power were closely linked by examining the relationship with rulers of prominent Sufis such as Jalal al-Din Rumi, his son Sultan Walad and the descendants of Baba İlyas, the thirteenth-century rebel who some sources claim sought the sultanate for himself. The chapter shows how Sufism could both support and challenge political elites. Chapter 3 studies one of the most influential forms of religious expression that rise to prominence in Mongol Anatolia, Sufi brotherhoods known as futuwwa. The chapter argues that these brotherhoods were nurtured by political elites, including the Mongols, for whom their leaders acted as de facto local governors. At the same time the growing political and economic importance of futuwwa won it further adherents, and seems to have sparked both imitations among Anatolia’s Christian communities and to have acted as an incentive to convert. The rise of Sufism as a social force is reflected in the production of a large number of Sufi texts, which, from the Mongol period, become increasingly written in Turkish, the new vernacular literary language of Anatolia that emerged at this time. Part Two examines the new literary production of Mongol Anatolia and the ways in which it reflects the religious and political changes of the period. Chapter 4 considers the emergence of Turkish as a literary language over the late thirteenth to fourteenth centuries in its political and social context; this process allowed the emergence of a vernacular literature that inculcated the basics of Islam and in particular stimulated a cultural environment that was hostile to unbelief and promoted a culture of jihad, as is argued in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 considers the impact of the rising interest in apocalypticism among Muslims in Mongol Anatolia, arguing that this should not, as has generally been done, be viewed as an expression of a popular Shiite religiosity, but rather as an expression of an elite Sunnism. Apocalypticism, which highlighted the requirement for true sharia law to be imposed as one of the signs of the approaching end, further promoted a Sunni religiosity that was hostile to non-Muslims. In short, I hope to show how Mongol domination unleashed a complex sequence of reactions in various areas of society – language, literature and religion – that contributed towards Anatolia becoming a distinctly less welcoming place for its Christian population, precipitating a much deeper degree of Islamisation of the peninsula than had been the case under Seljuq rule.
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