The First Capital of the Ottoman Empire

The Religious, Architectural, and Social History of Bursa

Suna Cagaptay

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838605513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

From 1326 to 1402, Bursa, known to the Byzantines as Prousa, served as the first capital of the Ottoman Empire. It retained its spiritual and commercial importance even after Edirne (Adrianople) in Thrace, and later Constantinople (Istanbul), functioned as Ottoman capitals. Yet, to date, no comprehensive study has been published on the city's role as the inaugural center of a great empire. In works by art and architectural historians, the city has often been portrayed as having a small or insignificant pre-Ottoman past, as if the Ottomans created the city from scratch. This couldn't be farther from the truth. In this book, rooted in the author's archaeological experience, Suna Çagaptay tells the story of the transition from a Byzantine Christian city to an Islamic Ottoman one, positing that Bursa was a multi-faith capital where we can see the religious plurality and modernity of the Ottoman world. The encounter between local and incoming forms, as this book shows, created a synthesis filled with nuance, texture, and meaning. Indeed, when one looks more closely and recognizes that the contributions of the past do not threaten the authenticity of the present, a richer and more accurate narrative of the city and its Ottoman accommodation emerges.

1

Becoming Bursa

The city of Bursa (Map 1), located in the mountains of northwestern Anatolia (Bithynia), stretches along the lower slopes of Mount Olympus, or Ulu Dağ (also known as Keşiş Dağ, or “the mountain of the monks”).¹ Between the city and coastal mountains to the north lies a fertile alluvial plain called Yeşilova (“Green Plain,” or the ancient Mygdonia). This plain is irrigated by the Nilüfer (Odrysses) River, which originates in the southern foothills of Mount Olympus and flows along a route to the northeast of the Sea of Marmara, west of Mudanya (Apamea Myrlea).² The Nilüfer is joined by smaller rivers in the valley. Amid the ravines created by these tributaries, on a bold rock terrace, the city now known as Bursa has stood for over two thousand years.

The foothills and streams that mark the city’s topography shaped its growth and gave it a different character from the Anatolian Plateau to the east and from Istanbul, a hundred kilometers to the north. This connection between the built environment and the natural landscape is often overlooked, according to Oya Pancaroğlu.³ Making Bursa distinctive, Pancaroğlu said, was “its rich soil, healthy climate and idyllic topography.”⁴ Ravines divide the city into three sections and water sources, both hot and cold, abound.

An Emerging Ottoman Identity

The significance of Bursa far predates the arrival of the Ottomans. The city, then Prousa, was founded in 202 BC by the Bithynian king Prousias I (r. 228–185 BC).⁵ It lay near the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, which overshadowed its growth,⁶ but the city’s location along major trade routes on both land and sea made it an important urban center.

After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the defenses of Byzantine Anatolia collapsed in the face of the invasion of seminomadic Turks.⁷ Within twenty years, only small pockets of Anatolia remained under Byzantine control, and the Rum Seljuks, a cadet branch of the Great Seljuks of Iran had set up a state based in Nicaea (İznik).⁸ Aided by participants in the First Crusade and by astute diplomacy, the Byzantines were able to drive the Rum Seljuks back onto the Anatolian Plateau, where they established a capital at Iconium (Konya). Later, the Mongol threat and the defeat of the Rum Seljuks at the Battle of Köse Dağ in 1243 changed the position completely.⁹ By the 1300s, both the Mongols and the Byzantines were in decline. The Byzantine capital was lost to Latin Crusaders in 1204. Although Michael VIII Palaiologos (r. 1259–82) was able to restore Constantinople and some parts of the empire’s lands in Anatolia, the overall Byzantine domain had been reduced to an isthmus in western Anatolia. From the end of the thirteenth century into the fourteenth century, a scattering of Aegean islands ruled by the Latins and the Byzantines. The Genoese controlled Chios and Lesbos (Mytilene) and Phokaia; while Venice ruled the islands of Crete, Negroponte, Naxos, Andros, Mykonos, Karpathos, and Santorini; and in 1344, Christian-allied forces captured the harbor in Smyrna and retained control of the port until its fall to Timur in 1402.¹⁰

Broadly, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the eastern Mediterranean consisted of a patchwork of small political powers burgeoning and large ones in demise. The ruler of several Turkish principalities had reached the Aegean coastline. The group that had entered Anatolia consisted of not only Turcoman invaders but wandering mystics and townsfolk too.¹¹ Various petty states emerged, the Ottomans most prominent among them. Ottoman territory enclosed the vestiges of Byzantine territory in Phrygia and Bithynia,¹² and in 1326, the middle of this fluid period, Prousa became the capital of the emerging Ottoman state.¹³

With these changes, and shaped by two centuries of cross-cultural encounters, a new society began to develop within the city. By the late fourteenth century, the city’s approximate population was 10,000, a figure calculated by Heath Lowry based on travelers’ accounts and archival documents, and included a mix of ethnic, religious, and cultural demographics.¹⁴ In the old city, a new multireligious and multiethnic capital was being built as a part of the earliest efforts toward Ottomanization.¹⁵ People of various ethnic and religious backgrounds, including Turkish and other Muslims, Byzantine Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, began adopting a new identity as Ottomans. Rather than relinquishing their own religions and cultures, they added a broader identity layer.¹⁶ Indeed, this is what the architectural styles reflect: people from all over Bithynia kept their own artistic or architectural styles even as the Ottomans developed architecture that symbolized their control over the native population.

The inhabitants of early fourteenth-century Prousa/Bursa found themselves in a new society and faced the challenge of forming understandings of the place. The environment and geography, located between the Marmara basin and the Anatolian hinterland, played a central part in this. The historian Rudi Paul Lindner believed that the region’s agricultural fertility attracted the Ottomans, and that they realized that Bithynian geography opened up still wider possibilities. In its generally northern and northwestern movement toward areas of greater agricultural and pastoral productivity, important trade routes, and proximity to the sea, the fourteenth-century Ottoman conquest suggests Ottoman interest in urban life, control of trade routes, and easy access to resources.¹⁷ Soon after these conquests, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, the Ottomans shifted their resources in order to sponsor new imperial buildings.

Roman Roots of Byzantine Prousa

Two important written accounts describe urban life in Roman Prousa. The first of these is by a local known as Dio of Prousa or Dio Cocceianus Chrysostom (c. 40–c. 115 AD), a writer, philosopher, and leading figure involved in the city’s politics who served as municipal ambassador to Rome. He wrote a series of Discourses or Orations to share insights on municipal matters such as reimagining the city plan. As discussed further in Chapter 2, he lobbied in particular for the construction of a colonnaded street to beautify the city and keep up with other Anatolian cities, such as Ephesos and Tarsos, and Syrian cities, such as Antioch.¹⁸ The second account is by Pliny the Younger, who was governor of Bithynia from 111 to 113 AD and whose epistolary exchanges with the Roman emperor Trajan (r. 98–117 AD) discuss renewing the bathhouses, the library, and the temple. These letters show that Trajan looked fondly upon the city, which he rebuilt to feature a colonnaded street, along with temples and water mills.¹⁹

Dio was determined to build not only colonnades and fountains but also “fortifications, harbours, and shipyards.”²⁰ He wanted to make Prousa

the head of a federation of cities and to bring together in it as great a multitude of inhabitants as I can, and not merely dwellers in this district either, but even, if possible, compelling other cities too to join together with us.²¹

His colonnades and workshops enhanced the city but also created tensions by supplanting the old urban fabric.²² Despite his many adversaries, Dio managed to complete his colonnade project. The timing corresponded roughly to the reign of the emperor Trajan, predating the wave of remodeling led by his successor, Hadrian (r. 117–38 AD), in the eastern provinces.²³ Dio’s ambition to beautify Prousa was complemented by the assignment of Pliny the Younger to the governorship of Bithynia under Trajan.²⁴

The correspondence between Pliny the Younger and Trajan gives further insight into urban activities in Prousa. In one letter, for example, Pliny the Younger speaks of a dilapidated bath and his efforts to collect taxes to revitalize it. In another, he describes a different bathhouse “once beautiful but . . . now an unsightly ruin” and recommends abandoning the site. It had been bequeathed by a notable Prousan, Claudius Polyaenus, fifty years prior, with the goal of erecting a shrine to the memory of emperor Claudius (r. 41–54 AD), but nothing had been done and the area was “tumbledown with age.” Instead of reviving this area, Pliny the Younger suggested that new baths be constructed “on an open area . . . to enclose with a recess and porticoes the place where the buildings stood” and dedicated to Trajan.²⁵ In his reply, however, Trajan asked about the state of the shrine to Claudius and did not approve of Pliny’s idea to build a new bath complex.²⁶

Prousa was renowned for monastic establishments both within the urban walls and on holy Mount Olympus.²⁷ Menthon claims that the monasteries built in and around Mount Olympus numbered more than a hundred. In the middle Byzantine period, Iconophile patriarchs sought refuge in Prousa from pressure exerted by the Iconoclasts in Constantinople, expanding the town’s monastic presence at sites such as Sakkoudion, Medikion,²⁸ and Horaia Pege.²⁹ In the thirteenth century, when the Latin Crusaders sacked Constantinople, the Latins also besieged Prousa (1204–5), although they were unsuccessful in the end. The Nicaean emperors-in-exile made donations to enhance Prousa’s monastic and civic infrastructure. Byzantine authors such as Gregoras, meanwhile, recorded that in the thirteenth century, Irene, the wife of Emperor John III Vatatzes (r. 1221–54), commissioned the refurbishment of the main church in the monastery dedicated to Saint John Prodromos, which was later reused as mausolea for the early Ottoman sultans.³⁰

From Prousa to Bursa

As the city underwent the transition from Prousa to Bursa, the old city’s urban legacy was preserved and revitalized, and new residential and commercial areas were developed around it (Figure 2). Three boroughs were founded: one just outside the walls from the time of Orhan, the second to the west and named after Murad I, and the third to the east and named after Bayezid I. The city’s inhabitants, its commercial life, and its cultural and military interactions showed a fascinating range of details, as reflected in the writings of travelers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. During its formative period, no other city in Bithynia was comparable. These lesser cities included Nicaea/İznik and Nicomedia/İzmit, conquered shortly thereafter by the Ottomans. The former was the capital of the thirteenth-century Byzantine emperors-in-exile; the latter became an imperial residence under the Tetrarchy of the late antique period. Ottoman conquests in the latter part of the fourteenth century included Adrianople/Edirne in 1361³¹ as well as cities in the Balkans, such as Komotini/Gümülcine, Didymoteichon/Dimetoka, and Thessaloniki/Selanik in 1430.³²

Figure 2 Siting of the socioreligious complexes (külliyes), neighborhoods, and landmarks in Bursa. (Google Earth-generated image by Suna Çağaptay).

Beyond the Ottoman world, other cities had comparable transformations. The ancient city of Ephesos and its Byzantine counterpart Ayasoluk were conquered by the Aydinids in 1304, a princedom rivaling that of the Ottomans. The Rum Seljuk capital of Konya fell to the Mongol-Ilkhanids in 1243. And Trebizond, on the Byzantine-Caucasian frontier, was the capital city of the Grand Komnenoi, a Byzantine offshoot founded after the fall of Constantinople to the Latin Crusaders in 1204. These cities differed in many ways, but each was a testimony to the changes in Anatolia’s urban landscape.

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