A full essay on the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm — its conquest of Anatolia, its capital at Konya, the road system of caravanserais, the Karatay and İnce Minareli madrasas, and the Mongol crisis at Köse Dağ — is being written. The first chapter, on the spiritual figure of the period, is published below.
i.From Manzikert to Konya
On 26 August 1071, on the steppe near the modern town of Malazgirt in eastern Türkiye, the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes met the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan and lost. The defeat of Manzikert opened Anatolia, more or less at once, to Turkic settlement; within a generation a cousin branch of the Great Seljuk dynasty had set up a sultanate of its own with capitals first at İznik (Nicaea), then at Konya. The dynasty took the name Sultanate of Rûm — Rûm meaning Rome, the Persian and Arabic shorthand for the eastern Roman world the new arrivals were now governing.
By the early thirteenth century, under Sultan Alâeddin Keykubâd I (r. 1220–1237), Konya was one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Islamic world. Persian was the language of court and culture; Arabic was the language of religion and law; Turkish was spoken by the army and the streets; Greek and Armenian survived in the Christian quarters. Sufi orders, jurists, calligraphers, architects, and merchants gathered here from as far as Bukhara and Andalusia. The architectural language of the Seljuks — pointed brick portals carved with stalactite muqarnas, glazed-tile interiors, the slender minaret with its decorative banding — is still the deepest architectural layer Anatolia carries between the Byzantines and the Ottomans.
The full essay on the Seljuk civilisation (Manzikert, the great hans of the Anatolian trade roads, the madrasas of Sivas and Kayseri, the Mongol crisis after Köse Dağ in 1243, and the gradual settlement of the Beyliks) is forthcoming. For now, the most important figure of the period — and the one whose presence in Konya still defines the city — has his own essay below.
ii.Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi Featured essay
The Persian-speaking Sufi poet known to Anatolia as Mevlâna ("our master") and to the world as Rumi was born in Khorasan in 1207, came to Konya as a refugee child, and lived there until his death in December 1273. Out of his work and the order founded after him by his son Sultan Veled emerged the Mevlevî tradition — the Whirling Dervishes — and the December commemoration of his Şeb-i Arûs, the Wedding Night, that the city still holds every year.
Read the long essay on Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi — his life, the encounter with Şems-i Tebrizi, the Mesnevî and the Dîvân, the Mevlevî order, the Sema ceremony in detail, the 1925 ban and the modern Konya museum, and Şeb-i Arûs every December.