Manisa

i.Mount Sipylus and the Manisa Plain

Manisa sits on a wide alluvial terrace at the southern foot of Mount Sipylus (Spil Dağı, 1,517 m) — the long limestone ridge that runs east-west across the heart of the southern Aegean province. The city itself is at 71 metres above the sea; the country to its south falls to the Gediz river (ancient Hermos) and beyond it to the open Aegean coast at Çeşme and İzmir. The geography of the province is the geography of three converging valleys: the Gediz south of Mount Sipylus, the Bakırçay (ancient Caicus) running northwest toward the Aegean at Pergamon, and the smaller Kumçay system between them. All three were, in antiquity and through the Ottoman centuries, principal grain-and-textile producing valleys.

Manisa lies thirty-six kilometres directly east of İzmir; the two cities have been administratively, commercially, and culturally paired for at least three thousand years, and the Manisa province today is, in many respects, the working agricultural and industrial hinterland of the İzmir metropolitan area. Mount Sipylus itself is sacred in Greek myth as the burial place of Niobe, whose tears, in the legend, formed the streams that still descend the mountain's southern face.

ii.Magnesia ad Sipylum — the Magnetan Foundation

The historic-period city on this site is traditionally associated with the Magnetes — the Greek-speaking people of the Pelion mountains in Thessaly — who, in the migration traditions preserved by Greek writers, founded several Anatolian colonies in the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. The Manisa Valiliği's official chronicle traces the foundation to the 12th century BCE. The Anatolian city carried the qualifier ad Sipylum ("by Mount Sipylus") to distinguish it from the other, larger Magnesia of antiquity — Magnesia ad Maeandrum in modern Aydın province, on the Maeander.

Through the long Iron Age the city was a small but persistent regional centre under successive Lydian, Persian, Macedonian, and Pergamene rule. It was overshadowed by its larger and more famous neighbour to the southeast: the capital of the Lydian kingdom, Sardis.

iii.Sardis — the Lydian Capital

Eighty kilometres east of modern Manisa, at the foot of the long Tmolus ridge, lay the city of Sardis (Greek Sárdeis, modern Sart, in Salihli district) — the capital of the Lydian kingdom through the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. The Lydians were a non-Greek-speaking people of western Anatolia, related linguistically to the Carians and Lycians, who from about 1200 BCE onward dominated all of western Anatolia between the Aegean coast and the Halys (modern Kızılırmak) — see our Civilisations page for the wider Lydian context. From the late 7th century BCE Sardis was the residence of the Lydian royal house, and one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean.

The most consequential cultural innovation of Lydian Sardis was the invention of coinage. Under King Alyattes (c. 619–560 BCE), the city became the first place in the world to strike standardised, state-guaranteed metal coins — initially of electrum (a natural gold-and-silver alloy mined from the gold-bearing sands of the Pactolus river that ran through the city); under his son Croesus, of pure gold and pure silver, in a calibrated system that became the model for almost all subsequent metallic currencies. The Lydian invention of coinage is, in Britannica's plain summary, "the foundational moment of the modern monetary economy."

iv.Croesus and the Fall of Lydia

The last and most famous of the Lydian kings was Croesus (reigned c. 560–546 BCE), who completed his father's conquests in western Anatolia and made Sardis the wealthiest city of the Greek world. The phrase "rich as Croesus" entered every European language. He is said, in Herodotus's account, to have presented gold dedications to the Oracle of Delphi and to have sought the advice of the philosopher Solon of Athens on the nature of happiness.

In 546 BCE Croesus crossed the Halys with his army to confront the rising Persian empire under Cyrus the Great; an inconclusive battle at Pteria led to a Persian counter-march into Lydia, the siege and fall of Sardis, and the absorption of Lydia into the Persian empire as the satrapy of Sparda. Croesus's life after the city's fall is one of the most-debated narratives in ancient history — saved from the funeral pyre by Apollo (Herodotus), executed by Cyrus (Bacchylides), or kept as an advisor at the Persian court (others). The standard archaeological account of Sardis is George Hanfmann's Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times (Harvard, 1983).

v.The Battle of Magnesia (190 BCE) and Roman Rule

Persian Sardis became the seat of the western satrapy of the Achaemenid empire; it was burned by the Ionians during the Ionian Revolt (498 BCE), rebuilt, and passed to Alexander the Great after the Battle of the Granicus in 334 BCE. After Alexander's death the Lydian country fell to the Seleucid empire of his generals; under Antiochus III the Great, the Seleucids ruled all of western Anatolia from Sardis in the early 2nd century BCE.

The decisive change came in 190 BCE with the Battle of Magnesia — fought on the plain north of Magnesia ad Sipylum, immediately south of modern Manisa — between the Roman army of Lucius Cornelius Scipio (with his brother Scipio Africanus serving as legatus) and the Seleucid army of Antiochus III. The Romans, with the support of Eumenes II of Pergamon, defeated Antiochus comprehensively; the resulting Treaty of Apamea (188 BCE) reduced the Seleucid empire to its Asian core and assigned most of western Anatolia to the Pergamene kingdom. Magnesia gave its name to the battle that ended Seleucid power west of the Taurus. After the death of Attalus III of Pergamon in 133 BCE, the entire region — Magnesia, Sardis, and the rest of Lydia — was incorporated into the new Roman province of Asia.

vi.Byzantine Magnesia and the Manisa Citadel

Through the long Byzantine centuries Magnesia ad Sipylum continued as a working provincial centre under the eastern Roman empire. The city is mentioned regularly in the Byzantine chronicles as a fortified town on the southern face of Mount Sipylus. After the Latin sack of Constantinople in 1204, the city was a brief residence of the displaced Byzantine emperors in exile — the Empire of Nicaea under the Laskarid dynasty occasionally summered at Magnesia, and the body of the emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes (d. 1254) was buried at the monastery of Sosandra above the city.

The Manisa Kalesi (citadel) on the southern face of Mount Sipylus, perched on a rocky shoulder above the modern city, is a Byzantine work of the 11th–13th centuries, much rebuilt under the Saruhanids and the Ottomans. The walls still circle the upper ridge; the modern visitor reaches them by a steep walking path from the central Atatürk Caddesi.

vii.The Saruhanid Beylik (1313–1410)

The Turkish takeover of Magnesia came in 1313, when the Turkmen emir Saruhan Bey — one of the frontier princes of the late Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm — captured the Byzantine city, renamed it Manisa (the Turkish form of the Greek Magnesia), and made it the capital of his new principality. The Saruhanoğulları Beyliği ruled the lower Gediz valley and the Mount Sipylus country for nearly a century. Saruhan Bey died in 1346 and was succeeded by his son İlyas Bey; the late-14th-century Saruhanid ruler İshak Çelebi built the city's principal early-Islamic monuments — the Ulu Camii (the Great Mosque, 1376), the Ulu Camii Medresesi, the adjoining bath, and the Mevlevihane (Mevlevi lodge).

The Ottoman annexation came in stages. Yıldırım Bayezid I first incorporated Manisa into Ottoman territory in 1390/1391; the disaster at Ankara (1402) returned the city to local Saruhanid rule for a decade; and Çelebi Mehmed definitively annexed it in 1412, organising the country as the Saruhan Sancağı of the Ottoman state.

viii.The Ottoman Princely City — 1437 to 1595

Manisa's golden age came in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the Ottoman dynastic practice of sancakbeylik — sending princes (şehzadeler) to govern provincial sancaks as training for the throne — made the Saruhan Sanjak one of the two or three most important "princely cities" of the empire. Between 1437 (when Sultan Murad II first sent his sons to govern Manisa) and 1595 (when Mehmed III, the last şehzade-governor, became sultan), sixteen princes of the Ottoman house served terms as governor of Manisa, often with the future succession to the imperial throne resting on the outcome of their tenure.

The most famous of these princes — and the one who served the longest — was Süleyman the Magnificent, who was sent to Manisa in 1513 at the age of nineteen and governed it for seven years until his accession to the throne in 1520. His mother Hafsa Sultan remained at Manisa as vâlide, and from 1522 she sponsored the building of the great Sultaniye Külliyesi (the Sultaniye Complex) — mosque, medrese, hospital (the darüşşifa), imaret, and primary school — completed in 1539 by the architect Acem Ali. The Sultaniye is the principal Ottoman-era monument of the city, and the architectural symbol of the princely period. The other great şehzade who served at Manisa included Mehmed II as a child (sent at twelve), Selim II, and the future Murad III. Each şehzade's tenure left buildings: the Muradiye Camii of Murad III (1583, designed by Mimar Sinan in his late years), the İvazpaşa Camii, the Çukur Hamam, the Hatuniye Camii, and the small bazaars that radiate from the Sultaniye complex.

ix.Mesir Macunu and Hafsa Sultan

One particular Manisa cultural tradition has lasted continuously from the princely period to the present: the Mesir Macunu Festival. The mesir macunu — a sweet-spicy herbal paste of forty-one ingredients, formulated as a folk-medicinal compound — was, according to local tradition, prepared by the chief physician of the Sultaniye darüşşifa, Merkez Efendi, in the early 16th century to treat the illness of Hafsa Sultan. On her recovery, by tradition in 1539, she ordered the paste distributed to the people of Manisa from the minarets and domes of the Sultaniye Camii during the Nevruz festival in March.

The custom has been observed continuously since. Every March, on the day around Nevruz, paper-wrapped pieces of mesir macunu are thrown to a great crowd from the dome and minarets of the Sultaniye Camii; the festival is one of the principal civic events of Manisa. The Mesir Macunu Festival was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2012.

x.The Republic and the Modern Province

The princely-city period ended in 1595, after which Manisa returned to ordinary provincial status. The city was occupied by Greek forces during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22; it was retaken by Turkish forces on 8 September 1922, the day before the recovery of İzmir, in the closing phase of the Pursuit Operation. Republican Manisa was the seat of the Saruhan Vilâyeti from 1923; in 1927 the province was renamed Manisa.

Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population was 1,475,353 — one of the largest of the Aegean provinces. The metropolitan municipality (constituted in 2012, with the new central districts of Yunusemre and Şehzadeler split out of the older central Manisa) covers seventeen districts. The largest by population are Yunusemre (~269,000, the modern western Manisa), Akhisar (~181,000, the major industrial town in the northern Bakırçay valley), Turgutlu (~178,000, on the Gediz), Şehzadeler (~166,000, the historic central district), and Salihli (~165,000, the easternmost large district that includes the site of ancient Sardis at Sart).

The provincial economy is one of the most diversified of the Aegean: raisins (Manisa is the principal sultana-grape producing region of the country), olives and olive oil from the Akhisar plain, tobacco (Akhisar is the centre of the Turkish leaf-tobacco trade), cotton on the lower Gediz, and a substantial manufacturing base around Manisa city (white goods, electronics, automotive parts). The province is the seat of Manisa Celal Bayar Üniversitesi (founded 1992).

xi.What to See, in Order

The walking circuit of historic Manisa concentrates on the Sultaniye axis. From the central İstasyon Meydanı the route runs up to the Sultaniye Camii ve Külliyesi (1522–39, the Hafsa Sultan foundation) — mosque, medrese, darüşşifa, imaret — and continues to the slightly older Ulu Camii (1376, the Saruhanid foundation), the Muradiye Camii ve Külliyesi (Sinan, 1583), the İvazpaşa and Hatuniye mosques, and the Manisa Müzesi in the converted darüşşifa. The Manisa Kalesi citadel on the mountain face above the city is reached by a half-hour walking path. The Mesir Macunu Festival, if the visit is in March, takes place in the square in front of the Sultaniye Camii.

For the wider province, the principal excursion is east to Sart (ancient Sardis, 75 kilometres east of Manisa in Salihli district), with the great Lydian-Roman Temple of Artemis, the Lydian-period royal tombs at Bin Tepe ("Thousand Mounds") on the slope above the modern village, and the partially restored late-antique synagogue at the Sardis bath-gymnasium complex. North of Manisa, in the Bakırçay valley, the Roman-period town of Thyatira (modern Akhisar) — the fourth of the Seven Churches of Asia — is preserved within the modern town.

The Aegean province at the foot of Mount Sipylus — Magnesia of the Magnetes, Croesus's Sardis, the Saruhanid capital, the Ottoman princely city of sixteen şehzades, and the modern industrial Manisa.

For the Aegean coast immediately to the west, see İzmir; for the parallel Aegean provinces, see Muğla and Denizli; for the Lydian civilisation in the wider sense, see our planned Lydian essay. For Türkiye's Aegean coast in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.