Download PDF | Patricia Blessing_ Rachel Goshgarian - Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100-1500-Edinburgh University Press (2017).
304 Pages
Foreword . Scott Redford
One year, close to the end of the semester, I overheard one of my undergraduates talking to a fellow student. ‘It’s really easy,’ he said. ‘After the Romans came the Byzantines. Then came the Seljuks and the Ottomans.’ In giving a class on the architecture of classical and medieval Anatolia, I had, of course, also mentioned Georgians, Armenians, Beyliks, Danishmendids, Mengüjekids, Trapezuntines, Crusaders, and other states and cultures. But this was cram time, and the boileddown version was being prepared for examination booklets.
The readers of this volume are most definitely not be served the boiled-down and canned version of medieval Anatolia. Instead, the editors and contributors have served up a new set of dishes: crossing traditional ethnic, chronological, confessional and disciplinary borders; in a phrase, stirring things up. One of the editors is an art historian, the other an historian: the contributors are a mix of the two. And yet all the authors are engaged with the material culture of medieval Anatolia, from the rural to the urban, from the sacred to the profane, with topography and geography as well as with inscriptions and a wide variety of textual sources. This mixes things up as well, but not in a random way; in each of these essays is a sense of place, of regional specificity, and of the issues of the time. Another thing the contributors take for granted is cultural interaction and complexity.
They are suspicious of master narratives and truisms, be these clichés concerning Oriental despots, gender roles, nomads, dervishes, monks, gazis, craftsmen, guilds or motivations that are somehow not based on war or religion. No one can learn equally well the languages and literatures of all the cultures of the area that is now Turkey, and so there is a lot of cross-referencing going on between the essays – all to the advantage of the reader, and to the study of medieval Anatolia, a study that is progressing beyond paradigms of nationalism, provincialism, periphery and orientalism (in both the traditional and Saidian senses of the word). In exploring cultural experimentation, byways, gardens, stables, the tombs of holy men, exclusive male clubs, not to mention cities and monuments off the beaten track, the reader will be moved to explore new trajectories, both chronological and geographical, and the research of a new generation of historians and art historians, itself diverse. Where will this lead?
There is no saying. I do not think that the authors are moving towards one particular new paradigm. But especially at a time when Turkey itself is changing in response to perceived visions of past glories, and at a time when its historical monuments are being rebuilt to reflect not constructional truths, but perceived economic and societal aims, there is a certain solace in encountering essays that tread roads not (often) taken, that question verities and paradigms, and make us think of this complex, challenging and creative period in new ways.
Introduction
Space and Place: Applications to Medieval Anatolia Patricia Blessing and Rachel Goshgarian Imagining late medieval Anatolia presents a unique challenge. The geographical region is most usually referred to as the Asian portion of the modern Republic of Turkey. During the twelfth–sixteenth centuries, it became home to increasing numbers of Turkish-speaking Muslims. Even the most nuanced of thinkers can experience difficulties when trying to see this series of centuries as anything other than a process of Turkification and Islamisation. And, to some, insisting that terms such as ‘Anatolia’ or ‘Lands of RËm’ are most appropriate when discussing the region during this time period might seem like an historiographical version of René Magritte’s La trahison des images, which in this case might be represented by an imaginary map of Anatolia with a cursive ‘This is not Turkey’ written underneath. Years after the original painting became a part of public discourse, Magritte explained: The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And, still, could you stuff my pipe? No, right? It’s just a representation.
So, if I had written on my painting ‘This is a pipe’, I would have been lying!1 Similarly, representing this time period in Anatolian history primarily through the lens of Turkey and Turkification keeps us from approaching a more nuanced and honest representation of the past. The overarching goal of this volume is to use both art historical and historical approaches to expand our knowledge of complex, medieval Anatolian societies by looking beyond political structures and towards: a reconsideration of the interactions between the rural and the urban; an analysis of the relationships between architecture, culture and power; and an examination of the region’s multiple geographies (perceptional, physical, political and religious).
In order to widen historiographical perspectives, the contributors use a broad variety of sources (architectural, artistic, documentary and literary), including texts composed in several languages (Arabic, Armenian, Byzantine Greek, Persian and Turkish). Each chapter’s study actively engages with the permeable kind of boundaries that existed in late medieval Anatolian society, and suggests the possibility of (and need for) deeper and more nuanced examination that can help us to better understand how inclusions and exclusions, participation and indifference, proximity and distance might have been understood in the medieval Anatolian experience. An engagement with the conversation on space and place, based initially on Henri Lefebvre’s work, is central to this volume’s foundation and will also situate the study of this time period within a larger theoretical and intellectual discussion of the ways in which space is represented and place is experienced.2 The conceptual framework of space and place offers a useful window through which to view Anatolia during this time period, specifically due to the fractured nature of its political history and the overwhelmingly complex ‘factography’ it inspires.3 The authors in this volume look beyond the histories of transition and ethnocentric narratives and towards a more intimate collaboration between the fields of History and Art History.4 This step beyond disciplinary boundaries, coupled with a collective preoccupation with space and place, offers us an opportunity to look at the cultural landscapes of late medieval Anatolia as both conceived and physical products of the people who lived there.
Historical Overview and New Approaches In this volume, we engage with a version of the nouvelle histoire within which material formerly perceived of as peripheral is placed at the centre of our canvas.5 Explicitly rejecting ethnocentrism, the chapters present in this volume paint focused, realistic images of the architectural, cultural and social landscapes of late medieval Anatolia, c. 1100–1500. During this time period, Anatolia was home to a large number of polities that ruled over various regions concomitantly and in relatively quick succession. Sometimes, the territories claimed by these polities even overlapped. Because of the seemingly consistent political fluctuation that characterised this time period, intellectual engagement with uniquely one polity, one ethnic or linguistic group, or even one kind of architectural structure ultimately limits our capacity to understand the realities of the time period. The spatial turn that has recently been embraced by historians and art historians allows us to ask questions about the relationship(s) between the representations of space and experiences of place. In the case of late medieval Anatolia, these kind of questions are particularly useful as they help us to detect and analyse continuities across regions, religions and languages.
The administrations and intellectuals living in these polities expressed themselves using different languages; some used Arabic, others used Armenian, Byzantine Greek, Georgian, Latin, Persian or Turkish. Leaders of these realms practised various faiths; some embraced Sunni Islam and some practised Byzantine (Chalcedonian) Christianity. Still others made Shia Islam or non-Chalcedonian Christianity their official faith. And each of these political administrations ruled over heterogeneous populations that included both people who shared their language and the faith practices, and also relatively large sections of the population who spoke languages and practised religions that differed from those embraced by the administration.
Nomadic peoples in Anatolia consistently challenged the organisational capacity and administrative dexterity of the polities located there. Some principalities (and cities) were able to strike a relatively happy modus vivendi with the nomads living within their boundaries, while others struggled to live peacefully with them. During this long period of complex cultural engagement and political fracturing, the twelfth-century Anatolian experiences appear similar enough to those of the sixteenth century that consideration of these four centuries of history as a unit allows for useful investigation. As Cemal Kafadar has suggested, these centuries represent a unique and long period of Anatolian history that he likened to the †awå’if (Party Kings) of medieval Iberia and should be ‘characterized in its own right’.6 Whether engaged with the study of art history or history, many scholars have focused on this region and time period of study either through the lens of the slow decline of Byzantium or through the framework of an inevitable rise of the Ottomans.
This kind of teleological scholarship aims to illustrate a process and has encouraged an acceptance of ideal, exact moments (i.e., beginning and end) and, in turn, the building of exclusive narratives that obscure the multiple realities of medieval Anatolian experiences.7 At the same time, a unique combination of circumstances has led to a certain degree of ‘ghettoisation’ of the various fields associated with the study of this time period.
The effects of nationalism, the political estrangement of various countries – such as Iran, Turkey, Greece, Georgia and Armenia – from one another (and, often, of intellectuals in those countries), the type and availability of source materials, and the linguistic challenges associated with those sources have left us with disconnected histories of Anatolia. A critical body of scholarship has recently emerged that considers the porous nature of the various frontiers (physical, cultural, linguistic, social, religious, philosophical) that existed in late medieval Anatolia as central to the production of local cultural, political and social fabrics. Increasingly, scholars have begun to engage with analyses across the perceived boundaries between nations and religious communities that allow for improved comprehension of a time period that can best be understood as a collection of complex moments of cultural, political and social competition, interchange and overlap. This volume takes a step further in this direction.
Anatolia: Discourses on a Medieval Geographical Entity In any discussion of late medieval Anatolia, it is crucial to begin with the question of both temporal and geographical definitions and descriptions. What do we mean when we use the term ‘Anatolia’? What has this term meant and how have its meanings changed over time? What are the benefits of using this term? What might be some of its limitations and prejudices? First, however, we need to consider the problematic of geohistorical terms in and of themselves. In the introduction to his Toward a Geography of Art (2004), Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann explains the need to re-evaluate the relationship between geography and art history via the use of ‘geohistory’. According to Kaufmann, geohistory emphasises the historical aspects of geographies; individual circumstances (rather than spatial processes); and the specificity of ‘places where processes and factors are actually evinced’.8
These same kind of contextualisations and emphases are also necessary for post-nationalistic historical analysis and its treatment of geography, issues that are central for any study of medieval Anatolia. Today, the term Anatolia is most commonly used to describe the area roughly defined as mainland Turkey, extending from the Sea of Marmara in the west to the eastern borders with Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Iraq and Syria, and from the Black Sea coast in the north to the Mediterranean in the south and southwest. Using the term Anatolia to describe a medieval region presents us with a teleological approach, understanding medieval geography through the lens of the inevitable emergence of a modern nation-state. During the late medieval period, the regions that constituted what is today considered Anatolia were defined in different languages and cultural contexts by a range of terms.
These include RËm, Anatolia, Trebizond, Nicaea, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Mesopotamia and Kurdistan, terms that were both dynamic and coexistent. The geographies of the region in question, as understood and experienced in medieval texts composed in various languages, suggest that the boundaries of these regions were not necessarily static or universally understood during this time period. It is, perhaps, because of the dynamism of these regional boundaries and the ensuing question of their significance in everyday life that it becomes even more difficult to name the series of lands in question. To further complicate our already cluttered canvas, the factors that determined the naming of places were not always consistent. For example, the medieval Armenian scholar Mxit‘ar Goš (d. 1213) considered demography to be a decisive geographical factor and referred to large swaths of land that were: (1) neither a part of a geographical area that had previously been considered ‘Armenia’, nor (2) under the control of an Armenian polity, as Armenia because the populations there were either significantly (or, predominantly) Armenian.9 In modern scholarship, the different terms used for the region have various implications.
The Latin expression Asia Minor suggests a link with Roman heritage, while Anatolia is a Greek term that was adopted into Turkish as ‘Anadolu’ (a term whose folk etymology is ‘full of mothers’), in order to point to the old and layered civilisations there, but is often associated with the rise of late Ottoman and early republican Turkish nationalism.10 The term ‘lands of RËm’, which means the eastern Roman domains and designates both Anatolia and the Balkans, has been increasingly used in recent studies. Scholarship that uses this term engages with a critique of Orientalist and nationalist discourses, and embraces the multiple cultural geographies of the region – part Roman by way of Byzantium, part Islamic by way of the Arabic term for the Byzantine realm. A remarkably supple term, ‘RËm’ can refer at once to Rome, Byzantium, Anatolia and the Balkans, while the adjective ‘RËmÈ’ can mean Greek, Byzantine, Anatolian or Ottoman.11 Moreover, the term ‘lands of RËm’ alludes to certain concepts that are central to the study of the medieval Mediterranean: namely, a preoccupation with mobility, frontier and geography. Within the framework of a re-evaluation of this region as a frontier zone, scholarship that engages with the term ‘lands of RËm’ generally encourages broader discussions of artistic geographies as well as centres and peripheries in the medieval and early modern worlds.12
As the work at hand does not engage with research on the Balkans and because the region of Anatolia can be considered a self-contained area (albeit problematic), we embrace the term ‘Anatolia’ as a representation of an amalgam of spaces that share a geohistory in the medieval period and constitute a conceived space whose borders are grainy and fluid. In fact, we use it because it is a term that lacks clarity and consistency, similar to conceptions of this region during the late medieval period, and reflective of the complex nature of the cultural and political setup that characterised it. Even though Anatolia itself has been increasingly studied as a frontier region, comparisons with other medieval frontier zones have yet to be clearly established. Still, places with similar dynamics of religious exchange and military conquest that challenge commonly held geographical and national narratives should become part of a larger discourse on frontier regions as zones of crosscultural exchange in the Middle Ages. Within such a context, medieval Anatolia could easily be viewed in comparative perspective with other frontier zones, such as twelfth-century northern India, medieval Sicily or Iberia, a region in which the dynamics of conquest and reconquista fostered a similarly fraught and complicated political milieu.13
It is within this larger context of medieval borderlands (or frontier studies) and centre–periphery dynamics that consideration of Anatolia will become useful beyond simple reflection upon itself. Considering medieval Iberia through the lenses of diversity and multiculturalism has been a significant academic course of inquiry. In the 1940s, Spanish historian, Américo Castro, coined the term convivencia (coexistence) in order to describe the tolerant interactions between Christians, Jews and Muslims in medieval Iberia.14 He understood convivencia as a kind of medieval multiculturalism and focused much of his research on architectural, literary and religious engagements, generating an image of peaceful and productive cohabitation and exchange. About fifty years later, American historian David Nirenberg reconsidered the notion of convivencia and suggested that these religious groups coexisted in a relatively constant state of competition; the landscape of relatively peaceful coexistence was punctuated by brief, violent episodes.15
With regard to medieval Anatolia, scholars are beginning to engage with the ways in which its multiculturalism affected the interactions between various people(s) and have been interested primarily in the notion of considering this through the lens of ‘frontier studies’. While conceptually, the comparison and contrast between the two regions is useful, and can be beneficial in exploring the issue of frontier in medieval history, the limits of this approach must be acknowledged. Specifically, terms such as convivencia and Party Kings are most meaningful in a Spanish context, and are not easily directly applied to Anatolia. Nevertheless, as Peacock, de Nicola and Yıldız have suggested, certain benefits can arise from the adaptation and adoption of the abstract concepts raised in the study of medieval Iberia for the study of medieval Anatolia.
General Notes on Historiography There are two central problems related to the study of medieval Anatolia in a general context: no recent overarching history of the region exists and earlier historical surveys tend to focus either on the Turkification of the region or on the decline of Byzantium. Because of this, in some cases, the dynastic divisions established by Islamic historiography dominate the telling of historical events and many nuances are lost. At the same time, a preoccupation with the fall of Byzantium has encouraged studies that consistently debate when, where and how Byzantium experienced decline. For general overviews on medieval Islamic Anatolia after the Seljuk conquest, the reader unfamiliar with Turkish must still rely on Claude Cahen’s work, first published in 1968.16 Cahen accepts an overall narrative that explains the medieval political history of Anatolia through the lens of a history of ‘Turks’ and a land yet to be known as ‘Turkey’.
This narrative has been almost completely absorbed by political historians.17 A counterargument to the Turkish-centred narrative offered in Cahen’s work, and many subsequent Turkish works on the subject, is proposed in The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century. The title of the monumental tome written by Speros Vryonis perfectly describes the book’s framework and aims. A robustly researched work, Vryonis’ book focuses specifically on central and western Anatolia and suggests that the combination of nomadisation and Islamisation in these regions led to the decline of Byzantine civilisation.18 This ‘history of cultural transformation’19 assigns blame for the Byzantine disaster to Turko-Muslim conquerors and analyses the destruction of towns and church administration by carefully studying nomadic life and the establishment of Islamic institutions in Anatolia. Other influential presentations of the region have focused on specific polities.
While often overlapping, possessing changing borders and varying degrees of direct political and economic control, these polities have traditionally been studied separately, organised into the following general categories: Byzantine, Seljuk, (Armenian) Cilician, Mongol, Beylik, Ottoman. Most medieval chronicles had polity-focused orientations, thereby making history writing along polity lines very practical, both in terms of organisation and language skills; this kind of intellectual exercise has contributed to the excavation of significant historical evidence. Still, the modern temptation to explain events through an ethnocentric (and occasionally nationalist) lens has dominated many of these polity-focused studies and, ultimately, limited their analyses. More recent scholarship has turned away from these models and towards comparative and integrative histories with general success.
Nevertheless, Osman Turan’s Selçuklular zamanında Türkiye (Turkey in the Seljuk Period) remains one of the most important and complete works on the Seljuks and on Anatolia in the late medieval period. Turan’s nationalist approach sought to combine Turkish and Islamic history (in what has come to be known as the Türk-I · slam sentezi or the Turkish-Islamic synthesis) and to validate the idea of a unique kind of ‘Turkish Islam’ with a linear historical progression.20 The first edition of his book was published to coincide with the 900th anniversary of the battle of Manzikert in 1971, clearly suggesting the kind of linear narrative the author embraced.21 Beginning with the first Mongol incursions into Anatolia in the 1230s, Sara Nur Yıldız has provided a new account of the political history of Anatolia after the Mongol conquest in 1243.
Her work is one of the first attempts at directly studying the Ilkhanid presence in Anatolia, and specifically looks at the ways in which the Mongol and Seljuk dynasties interacted with each other.22 Yıldız’s insights are unique and significant in that they offer a superior analysis of how two different entities vying for control over the lands and peoples of Anatolia engaged with each other and represents a real shift in our understanding of medieval Anatolia. The decline of Ilkhanid power in the fourteenth century led to the rise of numerous new, local powers across Anatolia. Many of them, particularly in central and eastern Anatolia, were former Ilkhanid governors who saw the moment as an opportunity and took their chances at independence, experiencing varying levels of success. I · smail Hakkı Uzunçar∞ılı’s work on these Anatolian Beyliks, first published in 1937, is still considered the standard work on the period.23 Still, much more attention is devoted to the Beyliks of western and central Anatolia (e.g., the GermiyanoÌulları, the Karamanids and the ÇandaroÌulları) than is offered to their contemporaries further east. The dizzying number of principalities coexisting in post-Mongol Anatolia – the Eretnids, Qadi Burhaneddin, the Dhu’l-Qadir and others – along with the major Turkmen dynasties of the Qaraquyunlu and Aqquyunlu, effectively forced Uzunçar∞ılı to provide only a summary survey. Subsequent studies fall into the dynastic model and, for the most part, are available only in Turkish.24 One exception is a survey by John Woods on the Aqquyunlu that focuses on Iran, but includes the dynasty’s activities in Anatolia beginning in the late fourteenth century.25
Byzantine histories that deal with Anatolia during the time period under consideration here predominantly consider Constantinople as imperial centre (or, for a while, as the seat of the Latin Empire, 1204–61), or at Trebizond, Epirus or Nicaea as alternate centres of Byzantine power.26 Other studies of later Byzantium look to links between the Byzantine world and European intellectual, religious and commercial currents.27 More recently, however, scholars have turned their interest towards the relations between Byzantium and the East, and to a certain extent to the relations between the Byzantine Empire and the Ottomans.28 While these recent, more comparative and boundary-breaking studies indicate a turn in the field, the tendency amongst Byzantine historians to analyse most things through an imperial lens is almost inevitable. However, Byzantine Studies is a field that has long been invested in a diverse array of historiographical approaches, including social, cultural, economic, minority, agrarian and rural histories. Armenian history has consistently been studied as the ‘history of the Armenian people’ (in Armenian, hayoc patmut‘iwn).
Thus, the work of scholars writing histories in Armenian has almost always been ethnocentric in focus, albeit often less polity-focused than other historiographical traditions, as the Armenian people have lived a polycentric diasporic existence since at least the fifteenth century. At the same time, the history of Armenians – whether in Greater Armenia, Cilicia or beyond Anatolia – has frequently been equated with the study of non-Chalcedonian Christians surrounded by Muslims, Chalcedonians or Catholics. Robert Bedrosian’s dissertation turned a new page in the understanding of Armenian history during this time period; it specifically addresses the ways in which Armenian noble families were affected by Seljuk and, later, by Mongol rule.29 Bedrosian managed to reorient the field of late medieval Armenian history towards the greater framework of the geopolitical realities of the Seljuk and Mongol invasions.
Over the course of the past nearly forty years, scholarship on Armenia both inside the Republic of Armenia and outside it has looked more and more towards connections between Armenians and the world(s) around them. While nationalist tendencies continue to inspire certain scholars in the region, some histories and art histories of Armenia and Georgia have been moving in similar directions and towards less narrowly drawn definitions of culture and identity in the medieval world, as have various treatments of Syriac histories of the region. Still, the most successful of these efforts have often been conceived in a Byzantine framework.
Ottoman Exceptionalism One Beylik is conspicuously absent in Uzunçar∞ılı’s work: that of the Ottomans. Already in the 1960s, the pre-imperial Ottoman experience had been formally separated from competing contemporaries in intellectual discourse. Uzunçar∞ılı seemingly participated in the establishment of what has come to be understood as an Ottoman historiographical exceptionalism: the early Anatolian context of the dynasty is almost completely erased. In fact, this tendency to isolate the study of the Ottoman dynasty deeply affected not only the ways in which the Ottoman Empire itself has been examined, but also the ways in which medieval Anatolia has been considered. Much ink has been spilt over the question: how was the Ottoman Empire established? For nearly a century, scholars have tried to understand what drove the Ottoman conquests and how inclusion in the Ottoman experience was promoted and encouraged. The identity of the Ottomans, whether framed in reference to their inherited lifestyle, religious orientation or genetic code, is a central focus of this debate. In the 1930s, Austrian historian Paul Wittek proposed that the Ottomans were able to transform their early polity into a great empire because they were inspired and driven by gaza, or religious plunder.31
This framework has shaped the way in which generations of scholars have considered the rise of the Ottomans. In 1959, Mehmet Fuad Köprülü, drawing from a much richer source base, suggested that it was the Turkish tribal tradition of the Ottomans that contributed to their success in building an empire.32 Various other scholars have reconsidered the success of the Ottomans through different lenses. In 1986, Rudi Lindner used anthropological methodologies to analyse the tribal aspects revealed by fourteenthcentury Ottoman sources; he argued that Ottoman successes can best be understood via the administrative decline of Byzantium and an Ottoman desire for economic control of Bithynia.33 Similarly, Colin Imber has criticised Wittek’s understanding of the term gazi and suggested that the Ottoman Empire was anything but exclusively Islamic or Turkish.34 Cemal Kafadar re-evaluated sources and scholarship and pointed out the dangers of using essentialising terms and arguments.35 Kafadar’s work encourages a move away from the notion that identities can be defined and inspires an intellectual engagement with the fluidities and liquidities of life in the border regions.
Heath Lowry’s more recent analysis of the early Ottoman experience also rejects the gazi thesis and presents his version of a re-evaluation of the early Ottoman Empire.36 In her review of said monograph, Kate Fleet suggested that: ‘as we move into the 21st century, perhaps it is time to relinquish Wittek and, for the health of early Ottoman studies, to advance bravely without him’.37 Slowly, but surely, it seems that scholarship is beginning to move away from an embracing of Ottoman exceptionalism. As this trend continues, we will begin to better understand the late medieval Anatolian – and Ottoman – experience(s) as something more complex and profound than a simple backdrop or context for the eventual establishment of the Ottoman Empire.
Narratives in Art History Due, in part, to the ways in which linear national narratives developed in the context of history writing, the field of Art History has also been highly influenced by national(ist) narratives; initially, some of the main scholars of medieval Anatolian history were also involved in elaborating narratives for art history. Thus, Köprülü was involved in commissioning the French archaeologist Albert Gabriel (1883–1972) to write a two-volume history of the ‘Turkish’ monuments of Anatolia.38 Gabriel also produced further volumes on southeastern Anatolia, and on Bursa as an Ottoman capital.39 The introduction of formalist methods in art history, based largely on Köprülü’s collaboration with Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941), and thanks to the presence of Strzygowski’s student Heinrich Glück in Turkey, had a far-reaching impact on the way in which medieval Anatolia was studied.40 Even though he did not visit Turkey, Strzygowski was commissioned to write an article on Turkish art that encompassed a pan-Turkic vision, from Central Asia to Anatolia.41 This narrative was a break with the nineteenthcentury discussion on the subject. Scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the context of the Ottoman and German empires, viewed Seljuk architecture in Anatolia as Persian. The German art historian Friedrich Sarre, in particular, emphasised the larger Persianate culture of the Seljuk court and highlighted connections to Iran.42 With these conflicting narratives – Persianate culture and Turkish nation – the historiography of medieval Anatolia is fraught with tensions and contradictions. The historiography of Armenian architecture appears separate from that of other monuments in Anatolia for much of the twentieth century. Only recently have projects begun to look at Armenian monuments in Anatolia alongside contemporary Islamic structures. In addition, scholars have also begun to look at architecture produced in the modern Republic of Armenia (and Georgia) in a larger Anatolian context, as part of a larger movement towards considering aspects of the cultural and political situations of medieval Anatolia and the Caucasus together.43 In the early twentieth century, the arts of Iran and Armenia were often discussed together.44 In addition to his focus on a consistent transmission of Persian culture over centuries, Pope discusses the possibility of an Armenian influence on the formation of the Gothic in Europe in a paper that focuses on the structure of vaults. Ultimately, Pope opts for the primacy of the older Persian tradition over Armenian influence, a decision that is understandable within the context of his own work, which is notably dominated by the study of Iranian art of all periods.45
This is one of the instances in which the historiographies of medieval Iran and Armenia intersect, reaching all the way back to Strzygowski’s studies of Armenian architecture.46 In a deconstructive work that criticises the oeuvre of Strzygowski for its deep links to the theories of ‘race’ and ‘nation’, Christina Maranci demonstrated how Islamic influence was painted as a factor that led to a decline of Armenian architecture both by Strzygowski and by those scholars who had been influenced by his book. For the most part, the early Arab incursions of the seventh and eighth centuries and the Seljuk conquest of the second half of the eleventh century are regarded as detrimental to Armenia and the work of its builders.47 Strzygowski’s book is very much a product of its own time, situating Armenian architecture within the context of Indo-Aryan studies and of nationalistic tendencies in the wake of the collapse of the AustroHungarian Empire after the First World War. Strzygowski argued that a combination of Armenian and Islamic traditions shaped an architectural vocabulary visually similar to what in Western medieval architecture is considered Gothic.48
Donald Wilber returned to the reflections on a connection between Gothic and Iranian architecture, perhaps feeling the need to address a discussion that was widespread in the 1930s and 1940s; he refers to the two directions that this trend in scholarship took, and highlights a controversy that took place between scholars focusing on the construction of vaults.49 Overall, Seljuk and Ilkhanid presence in today’s Armenia is little studied, and monuments such as the few caravanserais that have survived since the fourteenth century have often been rather poorly preserved in the recent past, a period where the restoration of monasteries and churches has likely been deemed more important in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In more recent studies, however, the Mongol period in Armenia (and beyond) has been portrayed as a period of relative religious freedom, which is especially the case for the time before the Ilkhanid sultans’ conversion to Islam in 1295.50 In fact, the period of Mongol rule – despite the devastations of the initial conquests – appears to have led to a renaissance in the construction of monasteries in the first quarter of the fourteenth century.51 In Turkey, the long-neglected medieval Armenian monuments most visible at Ani, but present in various regions of Anatolia, have recently begun to receive more attention primarily from academics outside and inside Turkey, but also buttressed by recent support from local and global NGOs and the Ministry of Culture.
Social and Cultural History
As shown above, historians who tend to analyse and explain the past within the framework of political actors have dominated scholarship on medieval Anatolia. More recently, however, scholars working on this time period have turned towards social and cultural history writing. By engaging with the approaches and methodologies of both cultural anthropology and literary criticism, the work of cultural and social historians is generally seen as a response to political history. Art historical approaches are often better aligned with social and cultural history, as the study of material culture and the built environment entails engagement with a sociocultural understanding of the past that stretches beyond the facts of political history. Both cultural and social histories reconstruct dynamics of expression and tell us about daily life through analysis of the structures and processes that are often seen as the background to economic and political history. Thanks both to the development of exciting contemporary historiographical approaches and also to newly available sources, much of these new social and cultural histories of medieval Anatolia aim to augment or to provide correctives to established narratives. This turn towards cultural and social histories has led to more enthusiastic collaboration between historians and the fields of archaeology, architectural and art history. For the period before the Mongol conquest, and especially the peak of centralising Seljuk rule under Ala al-Din Kayqubad (r. 1220–37), Scott Redford has provided a wide range of studies engaging architecture, archaeology and epigraphy. In her recent dissertation and article on the same patron, Suzan Yalman has carefully explored the place of the Seljuk sultan and his patronage within medieval Anatolia, but also in a broader Mediterranean context.53 Studies on the architecture of this period have focused on the role of Sufi communities and, most recently, on Anatolia’s place within the global context of the Mongol Empire.
The political and social history of the time period has been understudied by Armenologists both inside and outside the Republic of Armenia. However, scholars engaged with the literature of this time period have produced exciting research that suggests, once again, the importance of interdisciplinarity and the use of a range of sources and methodologies when attempting to understand this time period. At the same time, Armenologists have made particularly good use of the relatively large amount of poetry that was composed in late medieval Anatolia and have begun to analyse it in order to shed light on social and cultural attitudes and experiences.55 An important key to better understanding the social history of late medieval Anatolia is an intellectual engagement with the large number of homosocial, semi-spiritual organisations that were housed both in structures inside city walls or in relatively remote monastic complexes. Whether self-identifying as Christian or Muslim, these associations offered members a series of prescriptions both for everyday life and for a spiritual journey to some kind of illumination. Recent scholarship on these associations has moved away from analyses limited by ethnocentrism and nationalism and towards a more meaningful pondering of the complexities of identity, social performance and the political engagement they encouraged.56 At the same time, a deeper engagement with the kind of spaces (both physical and cultural) that these associations occupied has allowed us to better understand the ways in which places were experienced during this time period.
Cities and their Hinterlands Scholarship has frequently focused on the study of the cities of late medieval Anatolia. This includes Konya and Bursa first and foremost, as the respective capitals of the Seljuks and Ottomans, but also other cities such as Sivas, Erzurum and Kayseri that served as trade centres in the thirteenth century and beyond.57 Moreover, an emphasis on an urban, Persianate culture of the Seljuk realm has led to an approach that may appear skewed, yet that also reflects the places of production of chronicles in medieval Anatolia.58 For similar reasons, Byzantine studies on this time period generally focus on the study of Constantinople, Trebizond and Nicaea. Scholars of medieval Armenian history have, by and large, neglected the study of ‘Greater Armenia’ in favour of the study of ‘Lesser Armenia’ (or the Kingdom of Cilicia) and the monasteries and cities there that produced more accessible documents and also provide certain scholars with the kind of state-oriented paradigm that can make political history writing easier.59 Still, historians have studied certain cities beyond the borders of Cilicia and more recently have engaged enthusiastically with study of cities like Ani and Erzincan.60 Cities were the nodes of trade, and hence also at the forefront of networks of merchants, patrons, religious scholars (and leaders) and craftsmen who moved across the region. These individuals produced historical documents (religious texts, poetry, buildings, inscriptions, miniatures) in a range of languages and cultural or religious contexts.
The fact that they left behind material that is accessible today makes them easier to trace in written sources, but when we imagine how many documents have been destroyed (either naturally or intentionally) and how many individuals did not produce materials that are accessible to us today (either because they were illiterate or because they did not make art or build lasting structures), we understand the pressing need for engagement with a broader source base that involves archaeological investigation. This will be discussed in greater detail below. Only recently has more work emerged on rural areas and central places in the hinterland of Anatolia, dominated by nomads, but also home to Muslim and Christian shrines, and villages with mixed populations, often tied to endowments in urban centres.61 In his recent book on food and food production in medieval Anatolia, Nicolas Trépanier shows how using a wide range of sources makes it possible to write social histories of this time period. Specifically, he investigates agricultural production in urban and rural contexts, as well as the preparation and consumption of the foods that are made from produce.62
In her study of the shrines of Seyyid Battal Gazi and Hacı Bekta∞, two thirteenth-century complexes constructed within Seljuk and Mongol territories, respectively, and expanded due to Ottoman patronage in the fifteenth century, Zeynep Yürekli has traced the history of two important sacred sites located beyond urban centres. By using a range of source materials, including hagiographies, architecture and chronicles, she analyses the ways in which the cultural place of these structures evolved as the political contexts around them changed from fluid frontier zones to integrated regions of a centralised (Ottoman) empire.63 Effectively, many shrines that we think of today as urban, such as the Mevlana Complex in Konya, were built extra muros and were thus part of a liminal space between the city and its hinterland, accessible to both urban and rural populations.64
In this context, the dynamics of and perceived boundaries between urban and rural spaces and their populations need to be reconsidered, as well as how, when and why these dynamics changed over time. Scholars of Byzantium have engaged with rural-oriented histories for more than fifty years. In 1958, Paul Lemerle published his Agrarian History of Byzantium, and the field has engaged in several waves of activity.65 With regard to the history of late medieval Anatolia, Helen Ahrweiler’s work on thirteenth-century Smyrna (Òzmir) and Antony Eastmond’s oeuvre on Trebizond (Trabzon) offer great insights into the ways in which Byzantine urban elements engaged with the hinterlands and also with Turkish peoples and cultures.66 A recently published monograph by Sharon E. Gerstel, Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology, Ethnography, suggests that the turn in medieval Anatolian studies towards an interest in daily life and cultural production is not unique to individuals using primarily Turkish- and Persian-language sources. One would hope that as the boundaries and borders between Art History and History begin to blur, so might the borders between Byzantine Studies and other histories of late medieval Anatolia.
Sources: Strengths and Weaknesses For many years, scholars were discouraged from studying medieval Anatolia because of the supposed lack of sources available.67 While it is true that the kind of sources available have produced a longstanding challenge for any art historian or historian, this particular sense was amplified by the popularity of political history writing in that there are few sources related to dynastic entities (as compared with other regions and/or time periods). The reality is that there are many sources, but of different genres and composed in a dizzying number of languages. Scholars have more recently begun to look at sources across languages, genres and fields and to consider them in creative ways in order to write different kinds of histories.
The field of archaeology, for example, has proven to be instrumental to scholars in terms of providing novel kinds of material evidence related to the study of medieval Anatolia. In the 1940s, Köprülü pointed to the lack of available sources, and suggested that vast amounts of material may still be hidden in manuscript libraries.68 Even though more manuscripts have been discovered since his time,69 and others have been edited in recent years, major texts such as the full-length version of Ibn Bibi’s history of Seljuk Anatolia up to the 1280s are not yet available in critical editions or translations.70 At the same time, it has become clear that expectations about sources that grew out of the study of the central Islamic lands need to be revised when it comes to medieval Anatolia: thus, chronicles of single cities are scarce; and biographical dictionaries of regional ulema simply do not exist prior to the sixteenth century, although several recent studies have attempted to reconstruct relevant information from other sources and later compilations.71
Other sources such as waqf documents, hagiographies and even monumental inscriptions (further discussed below) have become crucial for the re-evaluation of medieval Anatolia. Moreover, the wide array of languages (Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Syriac and others) that can be used is a major challenge and only collaborative projects can bridge the divides imposed by linguistic boundaries. Sufi hagiographies as sources for Islamic history are relatively new even for regions outside Anatolia, and our field would greatly benefit from engagement with scholarship that takes these texts seriously, and takes into consideration the limitations and possibilities of a genre that is not interested in straightforward history writing.72 Byzantine studies, for example, has a long tradition of editing, translating and using hagiographies to analyse the ways in which Byzantine society engaged with religious practice and various aspects of morality, especially considering that, as Kazhdan pointed out, ‘the most edifying genre of literature was, at the same time, the most entertaining’.73 In fact, as early as 1968, Evelyne Patlagean (a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss) published a paradigm-shifting article that demonstrated just how useful hagiographies could be in the writing of social histories.74 More recent work has shown the ways in which this genre developed over time; in fact, for the time period that concerns us, hagiography writing changed substantially.75 A difficulty in assessing the material culture of medieval Anatolia lies both in the lack of sources that discuss workshops, craftsmen and architects, and in the absence of texts that address aesthetic and visual understanding among contemporaries. This poses a central methodological problem for art historical studies, as style becomes an essential tool in assessing art and architecture. Written sources of the period, such as chronicles and hagiographies, do not inform us about the creators of the monuments, only about their patrons.
Occasional mentions of prominent buildings or of major projects, such as the reconstruction of a city’s walls appear, yet they are neither coupled with descriptions of the monuments, nor with judgement on their aesthetic merit. Still, we know little about the reception of these monuments at the time of construction, and can only infer which aspects of a structure might represent a prevalent local or regional style and which aspects we might attribute to the tastes of a specific patron. Rare signatures of architects and craftsmen, carved into the stone of portals or into the wood of mosque furniture, are the only hints at the identity of those who created these monuments. A similar case is to be made for manuscripts, where colophons are relatively rare. (Although the Armenian example paints a different picture within which colophons are much more prevalent and have been used relatively frequently in scholarship.76) Even though nisbas (such as al-Qunawi, al-Balkhi, etc.) at the end of names in signatures often refer to places, this should not necessarily be pinned to the immediate place of a specific figure’s origin.77 Thus, we do not know whether Qaluyan al-Qunawi, a possible master-builder whose name appears on several mid-thirteenthcentury monuments in central Anatolia was indeed from Konya, as his nisba suggests, trained there or had a remote family connection.78 Similarly, the Sufi master Rumi (as he is most commonly known in English) is named on his cenotaph as Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn al-Husayn al-Balkhi. This usage refers to the family’s origin in Balkh in today’s Afghanistan, and eschews the name Jalal al-Din Rumi, the known modern Persian and Arabic version of the name, while in Turkish, he is usually referred to as Mevlana.79
The study of monumental inscriptions is fundamental to an analysis of medieval architecture around the Mediterranean. Studies published as part of a recent volume co-edited by Òrvin Schick and Mohammad Gharipour place increased importance on epigraphic texts that are not historical inscriptions (poetry, Qur’anic passages, for instance) across the Islamic world.80 These texts were mostly disregarded in the epigraphic surveys of the early twentieth century, and still need to be documented in many cases. Irene Bierman’s groundbreaking work on the visual and propagandistic language constructed by inscriptions in Fatimid Cairo seems to have had far-reaching influence.81 In the Byzantine context, Amy Papalexandrou has shown how inscriptions function as material objects, and a recent collection of essays on inscriptions in the eastern Mediterranean edited by Antony Eastmond includes chapters on medieval Anatolia.82
Monumental inscriptions are central to all studies of the architecture of medieval Anatolia as they are the written source most closely related to each monument: written on buildings, these inscriptions are texts as much as works of art. Often, these texts are even the single source on a specific patron, or can otherwise provide details that are absent from the written record that we more conventionally regard as such, such as manuscripts. J. Michael Rogers opened up this vein of research for Anatolia in his article on epigraphy as a source on patrons and their waqfs.83 The Répertoire chronologique d’épigraphie arabe (RCEA), edited beginning in 1931 with significant sections from medieval Anatolia, has been an important source for historians of the region. Recent detailed studies of the full epigraphic programmes of city walls, first and foremost for Sinop by Redford, and for Antalya by Redford and Leiser, have shown how monumental epigraphy can be considered a particularly productive source as it can be analysed both from a textual perspective as well as from a material standpoint.84 Calligraphers would have created templates to be used on the monuments, translated from paper into different media.
Carved in stone or inlaid in tile mosaic, foundation inscriptions and other monumental inscriptions in medieval Anatolia are almost exclusively in Arabic (very few exceptions exist, and are often bits of Persian poetry). Qur’anic passages are important elements in overall programmes of inscriptions, yet they have not been well studied, and are neglected in many of the epigraphic surveys.
These observations also point to the problem of literacy, and the question of how widespread an understanding of the formulaic Arabic in these texts might have been in Anatolia, where Greek, Armenian and Turkish were dominant, while Persian was the literary language of the Seljuk court. As is widely accepted, Arabic was the principal language of Islam, and the converted section of the population would have known enough Arabic to complete their daily prayers and participate in other rituals, but this was unlikely to entail the literacy necessary to decipher inscriptions. Hardly any archival documents are available for pre-Ottoman Anatolia.
The exception is a corpus of endowment deeds (waqfiyyas). These documents belong to Islamic foundations (waqf) that were established and served to ensure the maintenance of a building, to provide an income to caretakers and other employees (such as the imam of a mosque), and to carry out charitable tasks such as feeding the poor in a city or neighbourhood. Endowment deeds were written down in order to specifically delineate the property that belonged to such a foundation, the salaries to be paid and the charitable functions to be carried out. In medieval Anatolia, these legal documents were often drawn up a few years after the completion of a monument and may reflect a status quo at the time of composition, rather than the endowment’s ‘ideal’ state. As legally binding documents, these deeds had to be approved by a kådÈ (judge of Islamic law) in the presence of several witnesses, who signed the bottom of the document. Thanks to their detailed descriptions of property – urban real estate, gardens, fields and sometimes entire villages – these documents offer a glimpse of the wealth of a patron, but also give great insight into urban spaces that have often not been preserved.
Our record of the medieval urban Anatolian fabric is far from complete, but endowment deeds can at least give us insights into the scale of properties, and sometimes mention monuments that are no longer extant.85 The few thirteenth- and fourteenth-century examples of these deeds that have been preserved in their original form are scrolls, unfurling on a length of several yards as the writing appears on their short side. These examples are very rare, and many other such documents survive only in later copies, written into the journals (defters) of the Ottoman administration. These copies date from the sixteenth into the early twentieth century and show the longevity of many of these endowments. The last ones were abolished in the 1920s as part of the secularisation movement in the newly founded Republic of Turkey .
Landscape and Architecture in Medieval Anatolia Considering medieval Anatolia through the lens of landscape and architecture offers us an opportunity to intentionally remove a focus on any singular polity or collectivity and to reposition our lens on the webs between people and the spaces and places around them. While a conversation on space and place as originally conceived by Lefebvre was associated primarily with post-capitalist societies, when imagined as a bit of a wider net, it is a particularly useful framework for integrating fields and for cross-disciplinary activities. A central point of this volume is to move beyond identity politics and towards understanding the ways in which individuals interacted with and understood the spaces around them and the places they occupied by considering both a range of sources of analysis and different methodological approaches. An important goal of the volume is to ensure the applicability of the studies, specific to Anatolia, and informed by a thorough knowledge of its social, cultural and political history, to larger theoretical conversations across medieval studies. The chapters gathered in this volume, each focusing on a distinct problem, region or medium related to medieval Anatolia, move in this direction. The chapters in this volume cover a wide range of subjects and represent a cumulative of research composed using a diverse array of materials and languages. All these chapters, however, are linked by their insistence upon a reconsideration of various aspects of medieval Anatolian history and art history and the concern of their authors to reconfigure aspects of the ways in which the myriad regional landscapes were constructed and experienced.
The authors of the chapters in this volume question the (im)permeability of boundaries (spatial, linguistic, religious), consider the kind of communications that took place between different groups of people (whether understood by the language(s) they spoke, by the association to which they belonged or by their craft or trade) and the architecture they produced, and show how architectural styles were created using an array of creative traditions and material elements. Each chapter is, in essence, a microhistory. Each chapter attempts to understand and contextualise the individual circumstances behind the construction of the particular geography under consideration. In his work on stone and brick, Richard McClary uses the monuments he analyses in a new fashion; he considers them as testaments or memorials to the craftsmen who built them. Through his skilled analysis, he is able to show that in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, local stone masons (most likely Byzantine or Armenian) worked hand-in-hand with newly arrived Muslim craftsmen and that, together, they created a new architectural aesthetic in central and eastern Anatolia. In a close study of construction techniques and building phases in several thirteenth-century caravanserais, Cinzia Tavernari shows that these monuments were carefully constructed prestige projects. Thus, unlike in Ayyubid Syria, contemporary caravanserais were often quickly built brick constructions, the monuments built under Seljuk royal patronage were as much a mark of presence as an attempt to create unified infrastructure for trade. From this point of view, Tavernari argues, caravanserais in the first quarter of the thirteenth century were part of a centrally planned initiative that did not, however, extend to other types of monuments.
The relationship between Sufis, akhis and the city has long been a topic of scholarly scrutiny. While many attempts to understand this complex web of relationships have failed, I · klil Selçuk new research on land grants in Bursa – buttressed by a detailed contextual framework – sheds important light on the relationship between akhis, Sufis and the Ottoman enterprise in the fourteenth century. Selçuk posits that under the Ottomans, the akhis lost power early on, suggesting that their social and trade functions were quite different from those of the local Sufis. In the subsequent chapter, Rachel Goshgarian postulates that performing manliness was central to the medieval Anatolian experience of futuwwa, in the same way that performing Islam (as opposed to Christianity) was central to futuwwa participation.
Still, the definitions of both masculinity and Islam (and, the ways in which they were performed) were filled with ambiguities and contradictions that, ultimately, made them less than exclusive and allowed both individuals and organisations a certain degree of freedom. Considering both current and art historical narratives on the Byzantine Cappadocian site at Açıksaray, Fatma Gül Öztürk suggests that the boundaries between the secular and the sacred might not have been as distinct as architectural historians have previously thought. Suggesting that Byzantine structures in Cappadocia were ‘shared spaces’, used by both Muslims and Christians (particularly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), her chapter insists upon the notion that ethnic and religious differences might not have been experienced as exclusive boundaries in the landscape of Açıksaray. Mattia Guidetti’s contribution engages with the ways in which communication and exchange might have taken place between Mosul and Anatolia and between Armenians and their Muslim neighbours. His complex and new interpretation of ‘Islamic’ elements in the early thirteenth-century Armenian construction programme at Ani insists on something more than an idea of ‘influence’.
In fact, Guidetti suggests that certain members of the Armenian population at Ani (and, possibly, elsewhere) were invested in engaging with what Guidetti calls ‘outerness’, and intentionally altered what was considered a traditional form of Armenian architecture in order to illustrate this liminality. His chapter suggests that Armenians in Ani actively participated in the ‘Islamisation’ of the thirteenthcentury Anatolian landscape. Working from a philological standpoint, Nicolas Trépanier paints an exciting picture of the ways in which Arabic, Persian and Turkish co-existed in the linguistic landscapes of medieval Anatolian Muslims in his analysis of various terms used to describe gardens.
His research suggests that the Turkish incorporation of various Persian terms (and complete rejection of any Arabic ones) allude to a kind of bridge-building between the new literary Turkish and the Persian linguistic elitism thought to have permeated all areas of the Anatolian Muslim world. Patricia Blessing’s chapter shows that the practices associated with patronage and construction in post-Mongol central and eastern Anatolia must be applied to the ways in which early Ottoman architecture developed in western Anatolia. Her contribution highlights the important interactions that took place between regional architecture, local styles and fragmented patrons. Blessing illustrates the important reality that the Ottomans were a Beylik quite similar to other Beyliks in the late medieval period: a centralised architectural aesthetic did not exist and much of what was designed took place on the ground, between a single patron and a team of skilled craftsmen and local labourers. Finally, Suzan Yalman analyses the ‘complex’ identity of Mahperi Hatun, the Armenian or Georgian wife of Kayqubad I and mother of Kayqubad II. Her contribution suggests that the ‘dual identity’ paradigm (recently elaborated by Rustam Shukurov) is essential to understanding the ways in which the Seljuk elites experienced the social and religious landscapes in which they operated. In the case of Mahperi Hatun, it is also clear that the message of her patronage projects is one that reduplicates or re-emphasises this complex framework of identity. Yalman tells us, however, that Mahperi was not alone in this kind of endeavour, although she was a unique female actor of the thirteenth century.
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