Ottoman architecture before the “classical” sixteenth-century stage is often described as consisting of two major periods divided by the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. This event heralded a shift in the political center of the Ottoman state, with Istanbul as the new capital of an emergent world empire. Cultural production under the city’s conqueror, Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–46 and 1451–81), deliberately engaged with the local Romano-Byzantine heritage and launched a vibrantly hybrid style. In contrast, the fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries are, justifiably, characterized as steeped in the more fluid frontier culture of western Anatolia. This frontier had multiple centers that formed dynamic allegiances among themselves and with the shrinking Byzantine Empire, as well as with a number of Muslim principalities in central and eastern Anatolia that were tied to the Mongol Ilkhanids, who had defeated the Seljuk Turks in 1254.

In Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-Century Ottoman...

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