Suna Cagaptay - The First Capital of the Ottoman Empire: The Religious, Architectural, and Social History of Bursa

The First Capital of the Ottoman Empire

The Religious, Architectural, and Social History of Bursa

Suna aaptay

This book is about how the Ottomans made the city of Prousa their Bursa. It deals with the first hundred years of the Ottomans, a nomadic tribe of humble origins in Central Asia, as they came into Prousa and began mixing in with the local populace and their new urban setting. During this time, the Ottomans were in the process of creating a cultural identity for themselves, both internally and externally.

Prousa was founded by Prousias I (also known as the Lame or ) in the third century BC. It was sacked by another Lame ruler, Timur ( Temr(-i) Lang), in 1402. It was the native city of the golden-mouthed Dio, orator and philosopher of the Roman Empire, who constructed a colonnaded street to rival Antiochs in the Roman East. Its holy mountain functioned as a refuge for both Byzantines and Ottomans, and the clergy fleeing from Constantinople in the Iconoclastic period settled there. Its luscious green and verdant landscape gave inspiration to Michael Psellos, an important political and literary figure of the middle Byzantine period. During a year spent at Horaia Pege, the Monastery of Beautiful Spring on Mount Olympus, he wrote letters to John VIII Xiphilinos (106475), Patriarch of Constantinople, which included phrases praising his surroundings including a Platonic lotus, a plane tree, and myrtles.

S. Papaioannou, Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2013) , 176. A shrine was built on the foothills of the same mountain to bless the memory of Abdal Murad, an early Ottoman nomad raiderturned-saint. Its madrasa s laid the groundwork for Sheikh Bedreddin, an early fifteenth-century influential mystic and theologian, to spread his revolutionary thoughts on promoting a new commune based on the principles of justice, equality, and fraternity. Bedreddins religious mission and teachings resonated anew in the prose of Nazm Hikmet Ran, a renowned poet who was imprisoned at Bursa in the mid-1940s. The following lines by Ran echo the starting point of this book:

Galloping full-tilt from furthest Asia,

craning its mares head to reach the Mediterranean;

this land is ours.

So far, several studies have covered the religious, cultural, and political setting of the period. This book tries to do something else. It situates Bursa at an intersection of cultures and peoples and analyzes the character and context of the architectural production. It examines the buildings as cultural artifacts and considers the impact of multiple actors, such as donors, builders, tradesmen, and saintly figures. In the following pages, the reader will learn about the creation of an urban culture in Bursa as a city witnessing the rise of the Ottomans and their assumption of power from the retreating Byzantines. These two cultures were not monolithic, and the transition of power was by no means binary and sudden. Many players, including Greeks, Jews, Turks, Armenians, Rum Seljuks, Latin Crusaders, Genoese, Venetians, Mamluks, MongolIlkhanids, and non-Ottoman Muslim principalities, also played a political role in the peninsula at the time, and the Byzantine to Ottoman shift often took the form of a cultural and political marketplace.

This book focuses mostly on the Ottoman urban enterprise, and much of the narrative revolves around the city itself, its walls, and its suburbs. It follows the Ottoman rulers and their expansionist agendas as they made alliances and arranged intermarriages to gain an upper hand in the early fourteenth century. Vignettes will paint pictures of an Ottoman sultan conversing with Byzantine captives or another modeling himself as Alexander the Great; of a French traveler being so captivated by the hot springs of the city that he linked their therapeutic qualities to the foundation myths of the city; and of Genoese tradesmen stopping over to sell and buy products. Rather than looking at Bursa as iconic, this book explores how the city and its fourteenth-century actors of different backgrounds were perceived and imagined. By looking at the multifaceted milieu of its fourteenth-century dynamics, one can see the exchange of skills, ideas, and forms. I hope this book acts as my ultimate tribute to the citys continuity, diversity, and multiplicity in architectural production in the medieval period, allowing the early Ottomans to claim Bursa as their own.

Walled cities and towns have always attracted my interest. I grew up living very close to one in eastern Anatolia, and I finished the final corrections of this book while admiring the views of another in Istanbul. I visited Bursas walled city for the first time in 1993 while working as a nurse for the Turkish Red Crescent Society summer camp. It loomed large when I decided to change careers to archaeology, later earning a PhD in architectural history and theory. I will always remember how the Bursa walls clung tenaciously to the foothills of Mount Olympus and how the city within had beautiful vistas onto the plain. My memory also recalls a mash-up of details belonging to different periods, such as the tombs of the Ottoman founders, which were rebuilt in the nineteenth century on the remains of fourteenth-century conversions of Byzantine religious edifices, the nineteenth-century clock tower, and the cannonballs and tombstones of the Turkish Independence War.

The present book branches out from my dissertation, in which I examined the fourteenth-century cultural transition from Byzantine to Ottoman rule and its reflection on the built environment in Bithynia, with Bursa at its center. Over the years, I have published various sections from my dissertation as articles. Because no comprehensive study exists examining the birth of the first Ottoman capital, I decided herein to narrow my lens to Bursa, narrating the first century of Ottoman-era transformations in the walled city and the suburbs.

I would like to thank Robert Ousterhout for supervising my doctoral studies and dissertation, as well as my committee members, Dede F. Ruggles, Anne D. Hedeman, and Rick Layton. I owe them all my knowledge about art and architectural production in the Byzantine and Medieval worlds (East and West), and I am so deeply grateful. Each also shaped and redirected my approach to teaching and my goal to inspire my students to care about what they are looking at so that they understand why it matters and can grasp the ways cultural and artistic legacy shapes our understanding of the world.

I extend my thanks to Tomasz Hoskins, Rory Gormley, James Tupper, and Yasmin Garcha of I. B. Tauris for carefully editing my work, and Adriana Brioso for designing the elegant cover. I am grateful to Mohammed Raffi, Aarthi Natarajan, and Nandini Sathish for their kind assistance and prompt response in the typesetting process. Many thanks are due to the constructive comments of the anonymous reader. I am also grateful to Jason Warshof for teaching me how to write and also reading almost everything I have written in my postdoctoral years. I thank Alyssa De Villiers for reading and meticulously editing this whole text.

I am also grateful to several institutions for supporting my pre- and postdoctoral fieldwork and archaeological survey in Bursa. These include the Alan K. and Leonarda F. Laing Fellowship at the University of Illinois, the Barakat Trust at the University of Oxford, the Dan David Foundation at Tel Aviv University, the Turkish Cultural Foundation, the American Research Institute in Istanbul, Dumbarton Oaks, the Consulate General of Sweden in Istanbul, and the Anatolian Civilizations Center at Ko University. For granting me a permit to conduct an archaeological study, as well as opening their storage and discussing the results of the salvage excavation notes and visuals with me, I am most grateful to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Bursa Archaeological Museum. The Ministry of Defense in Turkey granted me a permit to carry out my fieldwork on their premises, and the Metropolitan Municipality of Bursa assisted me in the best possible way they could. Asuman Arslan was the representative from the Ministry overseeing my work, and I appreciate her kind assistance in overcoming bureaucratic and fieldwork problems. I did most of the revisions on the book while working as a postdoctoral associate in The Impact of the Ancient City, a project funded by the European Research Council (Grant/ERC Advanced Grant Agreement n693418) at the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. I am grateful to the members of the project, especially Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Elizabeth Key Fowden, and Beth Clark. The project meetings encouraged me to rethink the concepts of the classical versus Islamic city and the formation of the Ottoman city.