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ARCHITECTURE AND MATERIAL POLITICS IN THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY OTTOMAN EMPIRE
In this book, Patricia Blessing explores the emergence of Ottoman architecture in the fifteenth century and its connection with broader geographical contexts. Analyzing how transregional exchange shaped building practices, she examines how workers from Anatolia, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Iran and Central Asia participated in key construction projects. She also demonstrates how drawn, scalable models on paper served as templates for architectural decorations and supplemented collaborations that involved the mobility of workers. Blessing reveals how the creation of centralized workshops led to the emergence of a clearly defined imperial Ottoman style by 1500, when the flexibility and experimentation of the preceding century was leveled. Her book radically transforms our understanding of Ottoman architecture by exposing the diverse and fluid nature of its formative period. It also provides the reader with an understanding of the design, planning, and construction processes of a major empire of the Islamic world. Patricia Blessing is an assistant professor of art history at Princeton University. A scholar of Islamic architecture in the eastern Mediterranean, Iberian Peninsula, and Iran, she is the author of Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest.
INTRODUCTION
MATERIAL POLITICS OF ARCHITECTURE IN A FLUID EMPIRE
The buildings designed and built by the architect sinan (d. 1588) in the imperial capital Istanbul, with their stripped-down aesthetic of impressive volumes and monumental domes, have become the epitome of Ottoman architecture. Active from the 1530s until the 1580s, Sinan designed monuments at both the large scale required by the sultans and the smaller one accorded to viziers, admirals, and princesses, as seen in the mosques built for Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent in 1550–77 and for one of his grand viziers, Rüstem Pasha, in 1563. Sinan’s work and the work of the office of imperial architects (hassa mimarları) define our understanding of architecture in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century onward, and they were integral parts of the functioning of a centralized empire that tightly regulated its administration and its aesthetic outlook.1 But while these developments are well known, less understood is what happened in the first half of the fifteenth century, when what we now think of as classical Ottoman architecture began to coalesce. The transformation of Byzantine Constantinople into the Ottoman capital over the course of the second half of the fifteenth century under the patronage of Mehmed II has been examined in detail due to its crucial importance and the scale of the project, yet it has largely been analyzed in isolation from the broader context of architecture across the empire.2 Moreover, equally important is the earlier part of the fifteenth century, when a visual identity was being actively shaped in a cultural and political context that was fluid and malleable enough to draw from an extremely varied array of sources and influences. In this book, I analyze the fifteenth century on its own terms rather than looking backward from the vantage point of the unified imperial architecture of the mid-sixteenth century. As we shall see, Ottoman art and architecture of the fifteenth century stand at multiple crossroads: between Renaissance Italy and Timurid Central Asia, between Anatolia and the Balkans, and between Byzantine and Islamic architectural styles. In this fluctuating world, patrons, artists, and architects explored diverse modes of representation that eventually converged into a distinctly Ottoman aesthetic during the reign of Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512). The question is not one of origin – Eastern or Western, local or foreign – but one of how seemingly disparate elements of architecture were combined. Over time, an imperial Ottoman style came to be consolidated in connection to the larger epistemological project of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when knowledge was methodically organized and cataloged. The study here includes Ottoman monuments built both before and after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, to allow us to consider long-term developments that shed light on the wide range of architectural practice within the nascent empire. Such an approach also connects the dots back to studies that focus on Ottoman architecture built in the fourteenth century, and to the question of Ottoman emergence.3 Chronologically, therefore, this book extends from the early fifteenth to the early sixteenth century, with forays into late fourteenth-century Ottoman and beylik (the Muslim-ruled principalities of Anatolia) architecture. The choices made by the actors involved in these projects as they commissioned, designed, and built monuments form the core of the concept that I define as material politics. This concept includes, on the one hand, the politics of patronage – who commissions what, when, and where – that reflect the shifting power structures in the fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, it also addresses the material preferences that are made on and for building sites – that is, the politics of stylistic choices, which come into play in the use of design models adapted from paper, and the hiring of workers with a wide variety of backgrounds, who then contributed to the formation of Ottoman identity through architecture. Crucially, identity formation within the Ottoman Empire was closely intertwined with the multilingual and multireligious environment of the Balkans and Anatolia. The actors who were part of the fifteenth-century Ottoman landscape embodied the concept of Ru¯m¯-ness coined by Cemal Kafadar. ı Seemingly disparate elements blended with ease in Ru¯m¯-ness and Ottoman Turkish emerged as its ı literary expression, but without ethnic identity being fixed, in contrast to what twentieth-century nationalist historiographies state. The Ru¯m¯ identity was most fundamentally based on close ties to the ı geography of the Lands of Ru¯m.4 In the Ottoman imaginary until the mid-eighteenth century, Ru¯m extended beyond the confines of the defunct eastern Roman Empire, from which the term derived, to include both the Ottoman Balkans (Ru¯m-ili, Rumelia) and Anatolia up to but not south of the Taurus Mountains.5 Definitions associating Anatolia with the territory of the Republic of Turkey and with Turkish ethnic identity emerged in the early twentieth century, in close parallel to the establishment of a nation-state in 1923. In history writing, M. Fuad Köprülü (1890–1966) was a central figure in the 1930s and 1940s for his work on the emergence of the Ottoman enterprise and on medieval Anatolia as a place where Turkish Islamic culture, including its literary and religious expressions, developed.6 Köprülü pushed back against Western notions that presented the Ottoman Empire as a simple copy of the Byzantine Empire, which made no cultural contribution.7 From the 1930s onward, cultural unity under the umbrella of Anadoluculuk (Anatolianism) was claimed as part of the Turkish nation-state’s identity, with significant impact on the study of art history and archaeology, as Scott Redford explains.8 Importantly, Anatolianism did not emphasize Islam as a unifying feature, but rather claimed that Anatolia had been a coherent political and cultural space since the Hittite period in the second millennium BCE. Beginning in the 1950s, historians of medieval Anatolia such as Osman Turan (1914–78) and İ brahim Kafesoğlu (1914–84) shifted to an approach that emphasized the emergence of a specifically Turkish and Muslim culture in Anatolia with the rule of the Saljuqs (Türk-İ slam sentezi), starting in the late eleventh century.9 Further, the notion of a Saljuq–beylik–Ottoman sequence was adopted for the study of the region, as Oya Pancaroğlu notes, erasing complex historical and cultural dynamics.10 The Turkish Islamic culture proposed by Turan and others for the medieval period was correlated with the territories of the Turkish nation-state, especially Anatolia. National-territorial narratives of this sort emerged not only in Turkey but also in other nation-states – such as Armenia, Georgia, and Iran – that held territories in a wider region that was marked by close economic and cultural ties in the Middle Ages (and beyond).11 New scholarship over the past three decades has proposed to disentangle medieval and early modern Anatolia from nationalist historiographies; the concept of the Lands of Ru¯m is crucial in this body of work.12 Within the context of architectural histories of the Lands of Ru¯m, attention to Ru¯m¯ identity is ı a way to escape the historiographical ballast of, on the one hand, nationalist designations of Ottoman, beylik, and Saljuq architecture as exclusively Turkish and, on the other hand, the blanket term “Islamic” with its attendant problems.13 In this book, in line with my earlier work on the architecture of central and eastern Anatolia under Mongol rule, I view the region as one of cross-cultural interaction, multiethnic and multilingual populations, and complex political dynamics involving a wide range of actors.14 Within this framework, architecture is strongly influenced not only by regional dynamics but also by transregional networks extending from the Mediterranean to Central Asia. While these aspects of cultural formation can be traced in writing where literati and scholars in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere in the Islamic world are concerned, they are also relevant for the makers (such as stonemasons, tile makers, calligraphers, and architects) who created buildings. Many of these makers remain anonymous, but their buildings give them voice. The “maker’s share,” a term that Svetlana Alpers established while studying the eighteenth-century Italian painter Tiepolo, is central to an understanding of works of art that moves beyond the roles of patron and viewer.15 As Ethan Lasser explains in a study of nineteenth-century American decorative arts, the notion of the maker’s share allows conceptual access to process.16 Such an approach provides crucial insights into the emergence and consolidation of the Ottoman artistic milieu over the course of the fifteenth century, when written sources are much more attentive to scholar-bureaucrats and military and religious elites than to makers. The role of the architect – and indeed the very meaning of that term – and the roles of other building professionals are central points of discussion throughout this book, which covers a time period that saw changes to the ways in which construction sites were organized and run, from the design process to the completion of the building. These processes too constitute material politics. Within the larger exploration of how the process of creating a monument functioned in the fifteenthcentury Ottoman Empire, this book animates a number of central questions. How were architects trained? How did theory and practice intersect? What was the role of workshops? Who were the architects participating in the construction of Ottoman imperial commissions? How were building sites organized? Such questions are not exclusive to the study of Ottoman architecture: in fourteenthand fifteenth-century Europe, the roles and education of architects, engineers, and designers similarly shifted.17 In the Persianate world beginning in the fifteenth century, architects became increasingly visible in inscriptions on buildings that they created. Sussan Babaie notes that practices of architecture and the social standing of architects varied widely across the Islamic world, arguing that this fact has not been sufficiently taken into account in scholarship.18 Thus the question of how architecture is conceived of and created has a global dimension in the fifteenth century that is not simply a matter of influence across regions.19 By attending to the details of artistic production, then, we can gain an understanding of how architecture was shaped by those who worked on construction sites, from the planning and commissioning of a monument to its completion. Loose and shifting associations of makers connected the practice of architecture to networks of ulema, Sufis, scholar-bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and poets, reaching beyond the text-based connections that have been traced in studies of such figures’ writings.
PASTS, PRESENTS, FUTURES: ARCHITECTURE AND SOURCES
With the foregoing in mind, I examine uses of past, present, and future in Ottoman architecture, frameworks that are closely tied to the ways in which the Ottomans wrote about and fashioned their own place in history. Since many of the first major Ottoman histories that have been preserved in full were written during the late fifteenth century, our perceptions of the earlier period are strongly influenced by those later historians’ views. Titles of rulership, architectural patronage, and support for the arts and scholarship all tie into questions of Ottoman self-representation, as does history writing intended for the purpose of shaping a dynastic framework.21 As Kafadar notes, however, the narratives that emerged during the reigns of Mehmed II and especially Bayezid II are by no means homogenous, and their authors’ identities affect the ways in which they depict events and figures of the late thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, just as their affiliations determine how they judge their own present.22 As these authors write about the past, they construct it according to the present’s canon and establish narratives that make the present appear predestined. In the early fifteenth century, crisis shook the Ottoman principality. Moving into Anatolia, Timur defeated Ottoman sultan Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402) at the Battle of Ankara in 1402. The sultan never returned from captivity and his sons became embroiled in a civil war as large swaths of territory in Anatolia were lost to the local rulers who had held them before the initial Ottoman expansion in that region.23 The Ottomans’ ways of writing their own history changed profoundly during and after the ensuing interregnum (1402–13). As Dimitri Kastritsis and Baki Tezcan have shown, the trauma of the Timurid conquest led to new narratives that asserted Ottoman legitimacy based on a claim that the Ru¯m Saljuq sultan (a constructed fictive version rather than a precise historical reality) had given authority to Osman.24 Thus pre-Mongol Anatolia is strongly evoked in a period when the Timurids – Genghisid through Timur’s marriage and subsequent claims – represented a threat equal to the one the Mongols had posed to the Ru¯m Saljuqs in the mid-thirteenth century.25 Few histories written at this time have survived, but the ones that do exist provide unique views on this period in which the Ottoman principality was reshaped.26 The long-lived ʿAşıkpaşaza¯de (1393–1502?), raised in the Wafa¯ʾ¯ı za¯viye of Elvan Çelebi in Mecidözü near Çorum, wrote a major history that includes eyewitness accounts beginning with the reign of Mehmed I.27 Mehmed I (r. 1413–21) emerged after the decade of interregnum and warfare as the new if contested ruler and set about rebuilding the realm. This effort went hand in hand with architectural patronage, particularly in the city of Bursa, closely associated with dynastic memory.28 Buildings erected there between the 1410s and 1430s were essentially malleable monuments: the Byzantine architecture of the city, earlier and contemporary Islamic architectures of Anatolia, and contemporary monuments in Iran and Central Asia were all drawn upon in what was built in this Ottoman dynastic center. During the reign of Murad II (r. 1421–44, 1446–51), this engagement continued as architectural patronage expanded across the realm and cultural interests extended into the Mediterranean, while Edirne, the Ottomans’ frontier capital, was a crucial site of patronage.29 In sources written during Mehmed II’s reign (r. 1444–46, 1451–81), authors particularly praised the sultan for his role as conqueror of Constantinople and the corresponding rise in importance of the Ottomans and their empire, headed by a universal ruler.30 Under Mehmed II, direct contact with artistic centers of the European Renaissance, as well as engagement with the Byzantine heritage and building fabric of the new capital Istanbul and the internal tradition of Ottoman architecture created since the early fourteenth century, led to numerous innovations.31 During the reign of Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), with which this book concludes, central workshops were established for most art forms produced for the Ottoman court. Simultaneously, new design practices brought architecture closely into the frame of an Ottoman project of knowledge gathering aimed at consolidating imperial ideology. These two practices led to the emergence of an Ottoman style that is easily recognizable in its plan schemes and volumes. This Ottoman imperial style offered a synthesis of the Ottoman architectures of the preceding century and firmly established the foundation of a new Ottoman future to be realized in the sixteenth century. Such specific engagements with past(s), present(s), and future, I argue, were a hallmark of the material politics of Ottoman architecture. Such reflections are also relevant for the writing of history in that period. Murat Cem Mengüç argues that, rather than viewing history writing during Bayezid II’s reign as a centralized, state-sponsored project, we should see the emergence of a range of histories as an expression of “emerging historical self-consciousness” among those who endeavored to write such texts and those who might read them.32 According to Mengüç, historians acted on their own initiative; he notes that only Ruhi (d. 1522) states that he wrote at the sultan’s behest.33 This corresponds to Kafadar’s observation that varying perspectives appear across different histories, so that, for instance, ʿAşıkpaşaza¯de’s Sufi affiliation is clear throughout his work, including when he severely criticizes Mehmed II for taking away the lands of gazi families and Sufi communities, both instrumental actors in the rise of the Ottoman Empire throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.34 Neşri (d. ca. 1520), on the other hand, works within the premises of his position as a member of the ulema.35 Diverse as these histories may be, in them and in the major biographical dictionary by Ahmed b. Mustafa Taşköprüza¯de (d. 1561), Shaqa¯ʾiq al-nuʿma¯niyah f¯ı ʿula¯ma¯ʾ al-dawlah al-ʿuthma¯n¯yah ı , which includes scholars whom the sixteenth-century compiler deemed important for the Ottoman context, narratives are shaped that conform to late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman worldviews.36 Since Taşköprüza¯de himself was a mudarris and kadi trained in the Ottoman madrasa system, his choices are influenced by that specific background and his work is therefore also selective in that it includes and excludes individuals according to their place within the Ottoman system. The work’s title, specifically evoking scholars tied to the Ottoman state (dawlah), is programmatic in that sense, tying into the centralized madrasa system that emerged with the construction of the Semaniye madrasas connected to Mehmed II’s mosque complex in Istanbul.37 History writing and self-fashioning through sixteenth-century lenses, then, gloss over some of the complex social and material dynamics of architecture in the fifteenth century. Architectural history can offer certain correctives if we examine sources that record earlier views or stages of development. In his study of the Ottomans’ emergence, Cemal Kafadar has demonstrated how effective sources such as hagiographies and epics can be in providing perspectives that were omitted in later history writing.38 Architecture can offer similar insights. For example, inscriptions on monuments provide information about founders, dates, functions, and sometimes individuals involved in the construction. Many fifteenth-century buildings that today function as Friday mosques (Arabic ja¯miʿ, Turkish cami) or smaller prayer spaces (Arabic masjid, Turkish mescid) were originally built as multifunctional structures that served the activities of dervish groups along with travelers, scholars, and other guests. Although such buildings lost their original functions as part of a larger transformation of imperial structures circa 1500, their foundation inscriptions retain the terms originally used. This allows us to recognize the overwhelming presence of such buildings, otherwise invisible in the current day due to later changes and modern naming.39 These inscriptions are thus testimonies to those dervishes who, gathering converts to Islam in much larger numbers than many ulema, were crucial to the Ottomans’ success, especially in formerly Christian-ruled lands.40 In one particular case, that of the Alibey Camii in Manisa, a sixteenth-century inscription tells the story of the building’s transformation into a Friday mosque.41 Founded in 831 AH / 1427–28 CE by ʿAli Beğ b. Timurtaş, the building was not used for the Friday prayer. In 975 AH / 1567–68 CE, the founder’s descendant, Haydar Çelebi, turned the building into a Friday mosque. Finally, in 978 AH / 1570–71 CE, Cafer Çelebi had the roof restored and added a minbar and minaret – elements visibly marking the building as a Friday mosque – as well as commissioning a new decorative program. While nothing survives of the Alibey Camii’s fifteenth-century substance or sixteenth-century decorative program, the story of the monument’s transformation can be read in the five lines of text that make up its inscription and in the building’s minaret. While I fully discuss the use of specific terms in foundation inscriptions when addressing specific examples, it is important to note here that waqf¯ya ı s, the endowment deeds connected to foundations, also provide information about buildings’ functions, staff, and related financial arrangements. A substantial number of fifteenth-century Ottoman waqf¯ya ı s survive, in several cases jointly with the buildings for which they were established. Thus these documents offer glimpses of fifteenth-century worlds – albeit within the clearly delineated framework of endowments (waqfs) in Islamic law – that are not always available in other sources. This is, for instance, true for the lists of staff positions, where one or two posts often entail being responsible for the maintenance of a building’s structure or of specific elements such as water features. Such mentions, along with the occasional appearance in inscriptions of the names of individuals who designed buildings or parts of their decoration (such as stonework or tiles) and furnishings (such as doors and minbars), provide insights into the building crafts of the fifteenthcentury Ottoman Empire. While Ottoman histories generally refer to the arts only in passing or as they relate to patronage, such inscriptions and mentions in waqf¯ya ı s allow for insights into the composition of the workforce at building sites, the kinds of roles available during and after construction, and at times the planning process. Together with close attention to architectural elements, then, such sources are helpful in making methodological inroads into a more comprehensive understanding of Ottoman architecture in the fifteenth century. This brings us to the question of architecture itself and of the monuments covered in this book. The large number of extant monuments makes it crucial to select specific examples for in-depth treatment.42 An interest in understanding interior spaces along with façades has led me to privilege examples in which original interior decorative programs are still extant or ones that, while restored, retain substantial parts of their original character.43 The buildings discussed in this book are located in cities across Anatolia and the Balkans, in provincial centers as well as in the three imperial cities of Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul. However, the survival of fifteenth-century monuments varies across different regions that were part of the Ottoman Empire, and this affects how we can study architecture – low survival rates of buildings can particularly be a factor in former Ottoman lands in southeastern Europe.
SHIFTING ARCHITECTURES, CHANGING ACTORS
The formation of Ottoman architecture drew from two main strands at its outset in the fourteenth century. The Byzantine architecture present in the northwestern Anatolian lands the Ottomans conquered early on, along with monuments in Greece and the Balkans, was a crucial point of departure for Ottoman architecture. The transformation of churches into mosques in cities such as Thessaloniki was a crucial step in these conquests. The same construction techniques that could be observed in these Byzantine monuments continued to be used as the Ottomans had new buildings erected. Some of the makers of these pre-Ottoman architectures, remaining in the region under Ottoman rule, acted as building professionals, supplying knowledge of skills and locally available materials, and played a central role in establishing the technical and stylistic bases for the first Ottoman monuments.45 Further, by the late fourteenth century, political and artistic connections beyond the Ottoman lands were reflected in architecture, with Mamluk and Italian elements appearing, for instance, in Murad I’s and Bayezid I’s foundations in Bursa.46 In the early fifteenth century, new aspects of architecture emerged. While earlier elements were still used, the Ottomans became increasingly aware of and interested in the Timurid cultural (rather than political) sphere, which extended from Samarqand to Tabriz. The prestige of Timurid court culture was such that the Ottomans moved to deploy its arts for their purposes. At the same time, a historical narrative was being constructed that erased the Mongol past that the Ottomans shared with the Timurids. Tile decoration in particular emerged as a central element of early fifteenth-century buildings in Bursa and Edirne, along with wall paintings. Gülru Necipoğlu has suggested viewing this set of references as a regional variant of the so-called international Timurid style – that is, the wide adaptation, within the eastern Islamic world throughout the fifteenth century, of stylistic choices that represented the Timurids’ cultural clout.
Throughout the fourteenth century and well into the fifteenth, the Ottoman Empire also operated within the post-Mongol context of Anatolia. When Bayezid I expanded his territories into Anatolia in the 1390s, reaching as far east as Malatya, the Ottomans came into close contact with the various political entities active there, from the beyliks of western Anatolia to Qadi Burhaneddin Ahmad (d. 1398), who reigned independently in the region between Sivas and Kayseri.48 While these conquered Anatolian lands were lost following the Ottomans’ defeat by Timur in 1402, Murad II and Mehmed II would again expand eastward, absorbing the beyliks of western Anatolia in the 1420s and the Karamanids and the Byzantine empire of Trebizond by 1470. 49 As I argue in my earlier work, the profound changes in patronage caused by the Mongol takeover of the Saljuq realm led to increasingly regionalized architectural styles beginning in the 1250s and continuing into the early fourteenth century.50 Thus neither the imperial architecture of the Mongols in Iran nor the modes of Saljuq royal patronage of the early thirteenth century dominated monuments built by a wide range of Muslim patrons in central and eastern Anatolia between the mid-thirteenth century and the mid-fourteenth century, in large part parallel to the emergence of the Ottomans. Farther east in Anatolia, the Ottomans’ rivalry with the Aqqoyunlu first came to a head in 1461, when Mehmed II’s conquest of Trebizond led Uzun Hasan (r. 1453–78) to withdraw from the region.51 After the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Otlukbeli (or Başkent) in 1473, the Aqqoyunlu ruler was forced to make peace.52 Some territories in southeastern Anatolia and beyond the Taurus Mountains remained contested until the early sixteenth century.53 The references available in Anatolia for Ottoman builders were a mirror of this hybrid frontier region and their incorporation into Ottoman visual culture deserves careful analysis. This is not to say that Ottoman architecture should be construed as inherently Eastern and Islamic – a view that has been espoused in nationalist narratives to emphasize the Turkish Islamic aspects of Ottoman culture.54 Rather, elements that can be traced back to Islamic architecture built by a range of patrons in Anatolia are one small part of the puzzle that is Ottoman architecture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Throughout the fifteenth century, elements adapted from a wide range of styles were combined with remarkable ease, with different types of decoration flexibly used across media, demonstrating the cultural fluidity that would be expressed in Ru¯m¯-ness by circa ı 1500. Regional powers within the Ottoman Empire remained in place until then and played a central part in architectural patronage. Families such as the Çandarlıs, the Mihailoğlus, and the Evrenosoğlus were major patrons of architecture and powerful political actors.55 Figures such as Hajji ʿIvaz Pasha, Bayezid Pasha, and Yörgüç Pasha established pockets of local power, as Chapters 2 and 3 will show, and commissioned monuments in cities where they held influence. Only with Mehmed II’s centralization policies were these regional powers dissolved and the powerful gazi families marginalized; land reforms affected them along with the Sufi communities who had been crucial in the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.56 Criticism of this treatment by Mehmed II rose to such a point that Bayezid II reversed some of these policies, returning extensive landholdings and waqfs.57 The Ottoman Empire and its artistic landscape in this period cannot be understood in isolation: they were intimately bound up in a closely connected, transregional cultural and political scene. Circulation of knowledge is a central element in this context. In his study of the intellectual biography of Timurid scholar Sharaf al-Din ʿAli Yazdi (d. 1454), Evrim Binbaş investigates an informal network that scholar ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Hanafi al-Bistami (d. 1454), who settled in Ottoman Bursa, described as extending across the Ottoman Empire and into Mamluk Egypt.58 Among the members of this network were figures such as Ş eyh Bedreddin (d. 1416), who later rebelled against Mehmed I, and Ş emseddin Muhammad b. Hamza al-Fenari al-Rumi, known as Molla Fenari (d. 1431 or 1434–35), who became the müftü of Bursa and was one of the most prominent Ottoman ulema of his time.59 As Binbaş argues, Bistami reveals connections that were completely omitted in later Ottoman biographical dictionaries.60 This later omission is unsurprising given the bloody suppression of Ş eyh Bedreddin’s uprising and the fact that its leader had been a classmate of both Molla Fenari and the poet Ahmedi in Cairo in the 1380s, associations that later Ottoman historians could have found improper.61 Taken together, these scholars’ endeavors are of encyclopedic proportion, addressing everything from astronomy to aesthetics.62 These kinds of networks operated in addition to more formal ones – for instance, those established among scholars teaching in madrasas and their students, who could then move on to positions elsewhere. The kind of mobility that we see among scholars and intellectuals was also available to those I refer to as makers – that is, a wide range of people employed on building sites and in the creation of ceramics, books, and other objects. But how do we document their roles, if we often do not even know their names, let alone their biographies? Due to the difficulties of reconstructing these looser, more diffuse networks, narratives that aim to explain the circulation of ideas and motifs within architectural contexts tend to assign an important role to traveling workshops. Yet such workshops, which tend to dominate scholarly narratives, often appear as abstract, nearly timeless entities that continue over decades, documented only in limited signed works and others attributed to them on stylistic grounds. While inscriptions containing the names of makers are generally designated as signatures, the term does need to be questioned. Thus Sheila Blair proposes a distinction between names included in formal building inscriptions – where they are part of carefully planned epigraphic programs – and informal signatures added in inconspicuous places on objects.63 In what follows, I largely observe this distinction while arguing that some architectural inscriptions might also fall into the informal category. Questions of the workshop members’ origin, the issue of possibly fictive labels conferring cultural prestige, and the idea that objects used in architecture could also move – again, either together with or independently of their makers – are rarely raised. In fact, as Jonathan Hay notes, the transfer of motifs does not necessarily require the movement even of objects; instead, a “mere two-dimensional notation, or even a memory, will do” in order to recreate a specific kind of decoration elsewhere.64 As an example of scholarly insistence on a workshop scheme, the Masters of Tabriz – tile workers who may or may not have actually come from that city – appear prominently in studies of fifteenth-century Ottoman tiles, and at times an argument has been made for the continuity of a single workshop over several generations from the 1420s to the 1470s. Builders from the Mamluk context seem to have arrived in late fourteenth-century western Anatolia. Thus there was clearly cross-pollination between the Ottoman Empire and other regions, but a central question to pursue is how much of it needs to be explained with the movement of people, and how much can be attributed to moving objects and works on paper. Art historian Michael Meinecke firmly stood on the side of moving workshops, an argument he pursued in focused studies of Mamluk architecture and of tiles in Anatolia from the Saljuq to the early Ottoman period, as well as in general study of patronage as a main motor for artists’ movements.65 In what follows, I argue that the movement of ideas, plans, drawings, and objects also played a central role. Paper, which had become increasingly available since the fourteenth century, is an important presence – though often an invisible one – behind designs, calligraphies, and templates for architectural decoration.66 Harder to trace is how building plans traveled, and the extent to which paper was relevant in those cases, at least before the late fifteenth century, when rare architectural drawings survive in the Ottoman context.67 Design practices that include carefully aligned, custom-designed inscription panels, for instance, suggest that paper templates were used in some way by the late fourteenth century. It was especially likely that such templates would be useful as a means of communication in a process that required measurements of buildings to be provided to calligraphers, who would then create appropriate, proportional inscription designs that could be sent in small size to building sites and ceramic workshops to be scaled up when necessary for monumental use. From these observations emerge three larger topics of discussion. First, the question of drawings in the process of architectural production needs to be examined in relationship to extant monuments and how they might have been planned, as well as in relationship to knowledge production. Second, the issue of how workshops were put together, how flexible they might have been, and how much we can read into their names is a central one. Third, the movement of objects – and this includes tiles, often silently assumed to be produced near the building site – appears as an important mode of transfer.68 Such a collaborative environment, where relationships between teachers, students, and members of a workshop were crucial, also relates to the kitabkha¯na setting – namely, workshops that produced books as well as designs for a wide range of objects. The notion of workshops, however, should not lead us to assume that the same members were always collaborating in a set formation: considering the changing nature of building sites in particular, we should imagine environments in which individuals could move around and changing sets of workers could collaborate on various projects.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE RENAISSANCE
The idea of the Renaissance, which scholars over the past three decades have reframed in global terms that extend beyond Italy, played a crucial role in the Ottoman context, particularly beginning in the second half of the fifteenth century.69 As Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton note, with the recognition of these connections “comes the inevitable recognition that cultural histories apparently utterly distinct, and traditionally kept entirely separate, are ripe to be rewritten as shared East/West undertakings.”70 Within the Ottoman context, Gülru Necipoğlu and Julian Raby have conducted extensive research to uncover these shared undertakings and to highlight the crucial contribution of Ottoman patrons and artists to a pan-Mediterranean Renaissance.71 In architectural history, such work allows for a study of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean that places the Ottoman Empire on equal footing with cultural and political centers of the Renaissance in Italy and generates an understanding of how ideas relating to building were received across this space in both directions – and such a study naturally poses many challenges.72 Working on Venice, Deborah Howard has examined the impact of Islamic art on the built environment of that city from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.73 Exhibitions such as Venice and the Islamic World have examined connections between Venice and the Islamic world beyond the Ottoman context, from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries.74 While objects, paintings, and drawings play a large role in these exchanges – being rife with imitation, copying, and catering to patrons’ specific taste – the place of architecture in this dynamic of transfer is at times harder to trace.75 And yet mutual influence is present in architecture: for instance, in the increasing symmetry of Ottoman mosque complexes starting with the mosque of Mehmed II in Istanbul (1463–70), which Necipoğlu argues was due to the influence of Italian models of urban planning.76 The presence of artists such as Gentile Bellini (1429–1507), who stayed at the Ottoman court in 1479, contributed to exchanges governed by trade and diplomatic missions.77 Mehmed II’s efforts to invite artists and architects from Venice and Florence, his interest in classical Greek and Latin culture and history, and the translations from Greek and Latin into Arabic and Ottoman Turkish created at his court were part of the sultan’s project of shaping Ottoman imperial identity – and his own claim to rule – as universal. Such invitations continued under Bayezid II, displaying persistent efforts to enhance artistic contacts with the cultural centers of Italy.78 Thus, Bayezid II’s unrealized project of building a bridge over the Golden Horn elicited correspondence in 1502 with Leonardo da Vinci, who got as far as making a sketch and writing a letter to the prospective patron, as well as with Michelangelo before 1506. 79 In addition to these direct attempts at artistic exchange, trade between Europe and the Mamluk and Ottoman realms played a central role; major port cities such as Alexandria and Istanbul and trading centers such as Cairo and Bursa were of particular interest in these exchanges. Increased trade became possible after the lifting of a papal ban on trade with non-Christian lands that had been in effect from 1320 to 1344, and Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus once more became major destinations for Venetian merchants.80 Trade networks established in previous centuries, such as the caravan routes in Anatolia marked by many caravanserais created under Saljuq rule in the early thirteenth century, persisted. These trade routes connecting Anatolia and Iran were expanded by the Ilkhanids in the early fourteenth century in order to facilitate access to Tabriz, while Genoese trading colonies existed in Pera and the Black Sea.81 Studies on trade demonstrate that cities such as Tabriz were major nodes in trade networks that extended from Genoa and Venice to China, with the Ottoman Empire as a crucial intermediary and point of passage in between.82 Glass, soap, textiles, and paper were coveted goods taken from the Islamic world to Venice and Genoa.83 Of these goods, textiles in particular long played an important role in trade connections between the Islamic world and Europe. In the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire took on a role in this trade as increasing volumes of silk, mainly from Iran, passed through Bursa.84 Onward trade to Europe consisted of both raw silk and finished textiles made in Bursa, although the raw material represented a larger part of the trade.85 The manufacturing of textiles in Bursa increased in the sixteenth century, and at the same time fabrics were also made in Istanbul, where production of brocades and velvets peaked between 1550 and 1600. 86 In the other direction, the Ottoman Empire became the biggest export market for Italian textile producers due to demand created by the Ottoman court.87 Producers of velvet in Italian centers – primarily Venice and Lucca – and in Bursa mutually influenced each other and similar motifs appeared on both sides of the Mediterranean as each market catered to the other while imitating imported products that appealed to local tastes.88 At times, distinguishing between Italian and Ottoman productions is difficult or nearly impossible without close attention to minute technical details of weaving.89 These connections are one manifestation of a mutual interest in similar types of objects that also extends to metalwork, ceramics, and glass, influencing production and consumption in multiple locations.
STYLES, INTERNATIONAL AND OTHERWISE
While style is a concept ingrained in and derived from the framework of Western art history as an academic discipline, internal practices of connoisseurship and art appreciation can clearly be traced in Islamic art, especially beginning in the late fourteenth century.91 In the Ottoman Empire, fifteenthcentury ekphrastic poems exalting buildings demonstrate practices of aesthetic appraisal, as I examine in Chapter 1. In the seventeenth century, Evliya Çelebi uses the term tarz to designate style in a building that he admires during a visit to Bursa, to be examined in Chapter 2. 92 Within the fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire, we observe an epistemological project that involves art and architecture in the same way as history writing, science, philosophy, and poetry. While manuscripts and correspondence between scholars, scientists, and administrators provide a crucial base of sources that, when meticulously studied, provide access to the thinking behind this knowledge project, we often have to find ways to let objects and buildings speak for themselves as we work to appraise them within this same framework. Therefore style remains an indispensable tool in the analysis that follows. Furthermore, as transregional exchange and connections are crucial throughout the fifteenth century, the conceptual issue of international styles needs to be addressed at the outset. Also crucially related to the aesthetic interpretation of objects and buildings, I trace the notion throughout the book that monuments built in this period reflect a complex engagement with sensory perception that reaches from the built environment onto the written page. In poetic inscriptions and poems, monuments were praised for their beauty using natural and cosmological metaphors. Poetry at times serves to guide sensory perception, highlighting ways in which a site should be experienced and providing points of comparison with natural, spiritual, and imaginary worlds. Within buildings, the visitor was immersed in spaces decorated with tiles, eliciting wonder at the artifice of their creation, and enveloped in the sounds of water features and prayers. In analyzing these aspects of architecture, approaches to aesthetics, poetics, and wonder are crucial.93 Thus the engagement of the senses was pursued in the establishment of complex aesthetic frameworks that lay at the root of an imperial Ottoman architecture. With this in mind, the book engages with the sensory turn in medieval and Islamic art history, new approaches that strongly rely on attention to the intersection of poetic works, objects, and architecture, as well as on theoretical avenues connected to perception that extends to senses beyond vision: touch, smell, and sound.94 These observations supplement those based on stylistic analysis. An international Timurid style, spanning the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, has long been a central tool for understanding the arts of the eastern Islamic world. The concept was consolidated for art history with the 1989 exhibition Timur and the Princely Vision, which examined manuscripts and objects from Central Asia, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire within the framework of Timurid aesthetic hegemony derived from the central role of Timurid rulers such as Ulugh Beğ (d. 1449) and SultanHusayn Bayqara (r. 1469–1506) as patrons of the arts. As Binbaş explains, Russian historian Vasiliy V. Bartol’d (Wilhelm Barthold) first recognized the importance of Timurid courts in the intellectual and cultural life of the fifteenth century and of their rulers’ outstanding patronage of scholars and artists alike.95 This historical premise was firmly established by the time Timur and the Princely Vision was displayed in the United States, the first major exhibition on Timurid art and its impact within the Islamic world. Transregional in scope and marked by post-Mongol ideals of kingship translated into a refined visual mode, a Timurid style is visible in miniature paintings and can also be traced in woodwork, in metalwork, and to some extent in architecture. The Timurid formulations of kingship were crucial for the Ottomans beginning in the fifteenth century and were adopted by the Safavids and Mughals in the sixteenth century.96 Among these formulations, the title s ˙ a¯h ˙ ib-qira¯n, lord of the auspicious conjunction, was a cosmological construct consolidated by occult philosophers in the service of the Aqqoyunlu and Timurids, closely tied to astronomy/astrology (ʿilm al-nuju¯m).97 The engagement with the Timurid cosmology of rulership came with an artistic side that was dominated by the works the Timurid kitabkha¯na produced and put into circulation through its patrons’ far-flung networks. The dissemination of this visual idiom throughout the eastern Islamic world, from the eastern Mediterranean to the Deccan, was the result of the association between style and rule that lay at the core of Timurid art, which persisted beyond the fall of the dynasty in the early sixteenth century and was seen as conferring prestige on the patrons who commissioned works in this international Timurid style.98 Focusing on the ancient Near East, Marian Feldman observes that “[t]he term international style has entered art historical parlance to describe the use of shared visual forms across multiple cultural regions.”99 As such, the concept of international style is used in contrast to national styles, which are defined in monolithic and culturally homogeneous terms. Feldman notes that two central examples of the use of the concept of international style are Gothic art in Central Europe in the fourteenth century (hence the term “international Gothic”) and global modernist architecture beginning in the 1920s.100 In presenting the phenomenon of an “international Gothic style” – which included various media – two exhibition catalogues published in 1962 highlighted sculpture produced around 1400, when an elegant style commonly referred to as the “beautiful style” spread from Bohemia to Germany, France, and northern Italy.101 In this respect, the 1960s iterations of the concept of international Gothic are in stark contrast to the first formulations of the international Gothic in nineteenth-century France, when it was stated that the Gothic was inherently French and its international spread was a sign of French cultural dominance.102 However, Scott Nethersole notes that problematic notions emerge in these 1960s iterations through the positing of an internationalism rife with political undertones related to post– World War II ideas of Europe rather than medieval realities.103 The exhibition catalogues reflect the historical moment of a reunified Europe in the 1960s, when the notion of an international style was based on the premise that artistic exchange and transfer, not political domination, form the core of an overarching yet not entirely unified stylistic mode.104 Such issues of equating rule with style and imperial hold with nation, or of origin and reception, are inherent in any use of the concept of international style.105 In the case of the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, Feldman notes that it is productive to consider international style as “the visual expression of a specific, intercultural, supraregional community of rulers that coalesced as a distinct socio-political entity.”106 Though caution is necessary if we apply a similar definition to a period several thousand years after the one Feldman studies, these ideas ring true for the international Timurid style. Timurid visual modes were used across the eastern Islamic world in the fifteenth century, and while studies have assumed a degree of homogeneity, regional variants are readily admitted – especially in the Ottoman context, where certain divergences are highlighted.107 Thus, rather than a fixed style, international Timurid is perhaps best seen as a shared aesthetic framework that also had political dimensions. In the early sixteenth century, the international Timurid style slowly faded, perhaps victim of the decline of Timurid power and prestige and the rising tensions between Ottomans and Safavids. With the Shaybanid Uzbeks’ conquest of Herat in 1506, soon followed by a Safavid takeover in the city, Timurid rule ended and the kitabkha¯na of Sultan-Husayn Bayqara, which for decades had produced many of the works admired elsewhere in the Islamic world, was dissolved.108 Thus, as Necipoğlu notes, the shared culture of ornament of the fifteenth century, which included Ottoman, Turkman, and Timurid art from the Balkans to Central Asia, slowly disappeared.109 Within the Ottoman context, this period brought with it the emerging creation of a unified visual idiom that stretched from tiles to silks, from ceramic vessels to carpets, promulgated by the court workshops responsible for creating designs – especially those with the stylized tulips, carnations, and peonies that were articulated in various media in the midsixteenth century.110 While that particular period exceeds the scope of this book, the developments of the fifteenth century are nevertheless crucial for what would happen during Sultan Süleyman’s long reign. Even if styles shifted with the formation of imperial identity, many of the structures of artistic production that were fully developed in the sixteenth century have their roots in the fifteenth century.
CHAPTER SUMMARIES
I open the book in the mid-fifteenth century, after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, in order to first reexamine the shifts in architecture brought about by this turning point in Ottoman history, focusing particularly on aesthetics and the question of styles. Chapter 1, “Imperial and Local Horizons: Looking East and West,” connects the continuing Ottoman conquest of Anatolia in the second half of the fifteenth century to monuments in Istanbul. This chapter takes as its centerpiece the Çinili Köşk, built in 1472 on the premises of Topkapı Palace: this building was in part a direct reaction to the Ottoman defeat of the Karamanids in 1468 – a crucial step in expansion into Anatolia, allowing the Ottomans to secure a region that had been troublesome for centuries – and in part a complex negotiation between Islamic and Byzantine forms of architectural decoration. Poetry integrates the monument into a complex cosmological imaginary aimed at inciting wonder, and the building’s tile mosaic, attributed to tile cutters from Iran, projects connections to the international Timurid style; the latter aspect, however, is ambiguous in that it has also been thought to evoke contemporaneous, no-longer-extant palatial structures in Karaman. I also examine the exterior use of tiles that appeared on the Mahmud Pasha Mausoleum in Istanbul and the Alaca Türbe in Skopje during this period, raising the question of how this technique traveled – with workers or on paper. In the following chapter, I move back in time to the period after the interregnum, when Sultan Mehmed I (r. 1413–21) set about rebuilding the Ottoman realm. Thus Chapter 2, “Immersive Space: Empire Building and the Ottoman Frontier,” discusses shifts in Ottoman architecture after Mehmed I established his base in Bursa. With the construction of his mosque-za¯viye complex, beginning in 1419, Mehmed I consolidated Bursa’s role as an Ottoman dynastic lieu de mémoire. This period shows the beginning of a new engagement with the Anatolian past and the Timurid present in Ottoman architecture, leading to deep transformations. Mehmed I’s foundation in Bursa demonstrated an engagement with Timurid aesthetics and the Byzantine architecture of Bithynia, but also an interest in Anatolian architecture that was intentionally tied to claims to a connection to the Saljuq dynasty aimed at bolstering the Ottomans’ legitimacy. The site’s tile decoration, signed by the Masters of Tabriz, allows me to discuss the question of workshops’ claims of origin. In the interior, this tile decoration plays a central role in creating an immersive space aimed at evoking wonder, while the foundation inscription raises complex questions about the building process. Chapter 3, “Under the Influence: Creating Cosmopolitan Architectures,” takes a discussion of how elements of Mamluk architecture were introduced into Ottoman architecture – quite likely along with the presence of traveling builders – and uses it as a departure point to explore the broader interconnections of intellectuals and makers in the fifteenth century. In particular, it addresses the ambiguous and flexible roles of workers and overseers on construction sites, including issues surrounding what are often assumed to be unified workshops and the potential use of paper for architectural design in a period before it is definitively documented. Mamluk architectural influence seems to have arrived in Ottoman lands partly by way of the beyliks of western Anatolia, briefly restored by Timur but largely reabsorbed into the Ottoman realm by circa 1430. In the early fifteenth century, Mamluk-style elements appear in Amasya, a city the Ottomans never lost to Timur and that was used as a base, along with Bursa, from which to reconsolidate the Ottoman Empire. A look at Amasya also lets us see how the establishment of Ottoman monumental presence played out in a central Anatolian city that was the site of important Saljuq and Ilkhanid monuments. Local power holders like Bayezid Pasha and Yörgüç Pasha reached beyond the region for inspiration in the buildings they constructed, with stylistic connections to Mamluk and local Saljuq and Ilkhanid architecture apparent in their stone carving. Such transregional connections, fostered by multilingual networks, also appear in monuments commissioned by Murad II in Edirne – the Üç Ş erefeli Mosque and the Muradiye Mosque. The blue-and-white underglaze-painted tiles and wall paintings used in the latter raise the question of fifteenth-century convergences in taste between the Timurid, Mamluk, and Ottoman realms, as well as sites of production for ceramics. Chapter 4, “Building Paradise: Afterlife and Dynastic Politics,” focuses on the funerary complex of Murad II in Bursa, where concepts of immersive space already established in Mehmed I’s mosque-za¯viye are developed further. In its commemorative function, the Muradiye served to enhance dynastic prestige; tombs for members of the Ottoman family continued to be added until the mid-sixteenth century, creating an Ottoman necropolis that has both intriguing parallels to and crucial differences with the site of Eyüp in Istanbul. While Murad II’s mosque-za¯viye with its tile decoration offers elements similar to those in Mehmed I’s earlier monument, the mausoleum of Murad II is a site of further experimentation with materials and immersive space. The marble cenotaph emerging from a marble floor, which emulates a body of water, and the open skylight that allows rainwater to reach the earth of the sultan’s grave at once establish an architectural representation of paradise and foreground the element of artifice in the built space. Here and in other sites, representations of paradise are strengthened with the use of wall paintings showing landscapes and the cladding of large sections of walls to create immersive spaces. Chapter 5, “An Ottoman Aesthetic: Consolidation circa 1500,” turns to the centralization of design processes in the period around 1500, when architecture became integrated into the practices of the centralized workshops that were being established. As a discussion of the so-called Baba Nakkaş album shows, design intersected with collection practices that integrated the visual arts into the Ottoman epistemological project of gathering, sorting, and classifying that was fully underway at the time.
In artistic practice, this included designs on paper that were adapted in a wide range of media as well as the establishment of centralized production sites for objects, such as Iznik as the main site for ceramics. Focusing on buildings in Amasya, Edirne, Istanbul, Serres, and Skopje, I show that architecture increasingly took on a distinctly Ottoman shape in this period, imposing a distinct visual presence, especially in its exterior volumes and decorative elements, yet also retaining easily overlooked references to the architecture of previous decades. The chapter concludes with a study of monuments built in Adana in the sixteenth century, to show what was being built in a region that did not come under Ottoman rule until that period. I conclude by returning to the question of how a reexamination of Ottoman architecture in the fifteenth century profoundly changes our understanding of the empire’s architectural endeavor. This is true for the fifteenth century itself, when a wide range of elements drawn from the Mediterranean, Anatolia, and Iran and Central Asia were integrated into Ottoman architecture, both through the contributions of workers from these regions and through the wide-ranging networks of exchange of ideas in which the Ottomans actively participated. But our changed view also extends to the sixteenth century, in particular allowing us to better understand the extent to which the narratives created in the sixteenth century transformed the Ottomans’ view of their own past and the monuments that remained from previous centuries.
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