Reframing the Lands of Rūm: Architecture and Style in Eastern Anatolia, 1240-1320

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the development of Islamic architecture in Asia Minor (today's Turkey) throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It proposes a study of the architecture of medieval Anatolia within the parameters of cross-cultural exchange, and of trans-imperial networks fostered by trade and the general mobility of craftsmen, merchants, and scholars.

These far-reaching economic and cultural networks were facilitated by the span of the Mongol Empire, into which Anatolia was integrated in the second half of the thirteenth century, under the so-called Pax Mongolica. They fostered the exchange of ideas and the formation of fluid styles - Byzantine, Seljuk, Armenian in the case of Anatolia - and identities among different religious (mostly Christian and Muslim) and ethnic groups. Paying close attention to the fluid identities of medieval Anatolia, this dissertation discusses cultural networks within a geographical, rather than a political framework, that serves as the breeding ground for creativity and innovation in architecture as Anatolia progressively developed from a Christian to a Muslim region.

This dissertation questions the exclusive role ascribed to dynastic patronage in the shaping of architectural style, which is especially relevant in a frontier region such as Anatolia, rife with instability and shifting boundaries. Thus, this study argues that in medieval Anatolia, the discrepancy between the levels of politics, patronage, and stylistic developments is particularly acute, even more so with the increasing influence of the Mongol Ilkhanids throughout the second half of the thirteenth century. Political, economic, and cultural factors shaped the ways in which the potential of Eurasian networks was translated into architecture differently in adjacent regions.

In Anatolia, these dynamics shifted several times within a matter of years, taking the complexity of architecture beyond the correlation between rule, patronage, and style suggested by historiographical categories such as Seljuk or Ilkhanid. Close analysis of selected monuments, paying attention to the details of structure and decoration, are combined with primary sources in order to render both the visual and textual understanding of architecture in thirteenth-century Anatolia