Aydinid Beylik

The beylik that took to ships

Drafted from (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013)formation

A dozen Turkmen principalities replaced the Sultanate of Rum. One of them went to sea.

When Byzantine authority in western Anatolia dissolved after 1261 — the restored empire at Constantinople had its attention and its money on Europe, and the Anatolian frontier troops it had disbanded went over to the other side — the Aegean coast fell to Turkmen bands under their own leaders.

The Aydinids took the Cayster valley, Birgi and then Ayasoluk, which is Ephesus, and in 1329 the harbour and lower town of Smyrna.

At which point they inherited a fleet, some Greek crews, and a coastline facing several hundred islands.

That is the whole of the formation and it took about forty years. What makes this beylik different from the other eleven is what it did with a harbour: every other Turkmen principality in Anatolia was a land power that happened to reach the sea, and this one turned into a naval state, using the ships, the sailors and the anchorages of the people it had taken the coast from.

The stone that fell from heaven

Drafted from Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Batuta (1829)expansion

In about 1333 Ibn Battuta arrived at Birgi, in the hills above the Cayster, and was presented to Mehmed ibn Aydın. What happened next is the best surviving scene of an Anatolian beylik court doing anything at all.

The king asked him whether he had ever seen a stone that came down from heaven. Ibn Battuta said he had not. The king said one had fallen in the country around the city, and sent men to bring it.

It was a black, solid, exceedingly hard, and shining substance. If weighed it would probably exceed a talent.

Then he called for stone-cutters. Four came in, and he told them to strike it, and they hit it four times together with an iron hammer and made no impression on it whatever. Ibn Battuta says he was much astonished. The king had the stone taken back where it came from.

What a beylik was like from inside

The rest of the visit is the ordinary business of a court that wanted educated visitors and could pay for them. The emir sent fruit and food for as long as the party stayed. On leaving, Ibn Battuta was given a thousand dirhams, a hundred mithqals of gold, clothing, two horses and a slave; his companions were given money and clothes of their own.

That is a considerable outlay for a few days' hospitality by a Turkmen dynasty two generations off the plateau, and it is the point. These were not warbands camped in somebody else's country. They were governments with revenue, and they spent it on the same things governments in Cairo and Damascus spent it on: scholars, buildings, and the reputation for generosity that brought more of both.

The map in one paragraph

Ibn Battuta then walked on, and his itinerary is the political geography of western Anatolia in a single sentence each.

Tire, also the prince's. Ayasoluk, whose emir is Mehmed's son. Smyrna, which belongs to the sultan of Birgi, and whose emir is Umur Beg, one of the sultan's sons — a most excellent prince. Magnesia under Saruhan. Bergama under Bakhshi Khan. Balıkesir under Damur Khan.

And then Bursa, governed by Orhan Beg son of Osman, of whom he says something he says of nobody else on the coast: that he is the greatest, the richest, the most extensive in rule and commanding the largest army of all the Turkmen kings, and that his practice is never to stay a month in one place but to go continually round his fortresses and districts asking how things stand.

A traveller crossing western Anatolia in 1333 met eight Turkish princes, was handsomely entertained by several, admired the young governor of Smyrna, and identified the one who was going to win.

A most excellent prince

Drafted from (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013)peak

Umur Bey, who ruled from 1334, used it. Aydinid squadrons raided the Aegean islands, the Greek mainland, Thrace and the Black Sea approaches, and for about a decade were the strongest naval force in those waters. This is a Turkmen warband from the interior of Anatolia, two generations off the plateau, running a maritime raiding empire — with the ships, the sailors and the anchorages of the people it had taken the coast from, and largely with their crews.

Umur is also the beylik's best evidence for what fourteenth-century Anatolia actually looked like. He was a close ally and personal friend of John VI Kantakouzenos, the Byzantine claimant, and brought fleets and armies into the Byzantine civil war on his side in the 1340s — a Muslim Turkish emir campaigning in Thrace for one Christian Roman emperor against another. The Greek chronicler who records it, Kantakouzenos himself, writes about him warmly. Meanwhile the pope was preaching a crusade against him.

A mosque out of Ephesus

Drafted from (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013)aside?What aside means

The Aydinid capital was Ayasoluk, which is the hill above Ephesus. In 1375 Isa Bey had a congregational mosque built there, and it is still standing.

It is a good building — a wide prayer hall under two domes, a courtyard, a marble portal with interlace carving — and what makes it worth a chapter is what it is made of. The columns inside came out of the ruins below: Roman and early Byzantine shafts and capitals, carried up from Ephesus and the ruined basilica of Saint John, set into a mosque under a Turkish emir a thousand years after they were cut.

Reuse of that kind was ordinary and it is badly served by the two explanations usually offered for it. It was not simply iconoclasm and it was not simply economy. Taking the columns of an older and grander building and standing them up inside your own was a recognised way of appropriating what they had meant, and rulers on every side of the period's religious lines did it — Christian churches were built out of temples, mosques out of churches, and churches out of mosques, for centuries, by people who would have found the modern argument about it incomprehensible.

Ayasoluk is the easier case and therefore the useful one. Nobody was dismantling a functioning Christian church here: Ephesus had been declining for seven hundred years, the harbour had silted, the great basilica was already a ruin, and the columns were lying in it. What a builder in 1375 saw was good marble, cut, on site, in a place with no quarry. The mosque takes its proportions from the classical material it is built out of, because the material determined them.

The beylik that built it had lived by raiding and had lost its harbour thirty years earlier. This is what it did with the decades afterwards: it built, in a decayed Roman city, out of the decayed Roman city, the best surviving Aydinid object and one of the better fourteenth-century buildings in Anatolia.

Which is a fair image of the Turkish settlement of western Anatolia altogether. Not a clearance and not a continuation, but a new building standing on old columns, taking its proportions from them because the columns were what there was.

What happens when the harbour is taken

Drafted from (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013)contraction

In October 1344 a naval league assembled by the papacy — Venice, Cyprus, the Knights Hospitaller — attacked Smyrna and took the harbour castle. They held it, on and off, for the next fifty-eight years.

That single fortification ended the beylik as a power. The Aydinid state was built on raiding, and raiding required a defensible harbour to sail from and return to; without Smyrna the fleets could not operate at scale, and the revenue that had paid the crews stopped. Umur Bey died in 1348 assaulting the walls to get it back.

What a single fort was worth

It is worth dwelling on the scale, because it is small and the effect was total.

The crusaders took one castle, at the mouth of one harbour, and held it. They never took Birgi, or Ayasoluk, or Tire, or the Cayster valley, or any of the territory the beylik actually governed. The Aydinid state kept its towns, its land revenue, its court and its emirs for another eighty years.

What it lost was the ability to be dangerous, and with that the ability to be paid. A raiding fleet needs a harbour it can sail from loaded and return to loaded, and one fortified position at the harbour mouth removes it. The crews went elsewhere. The islands stopped paying to be left alone. Umur Bey spent the rest of his life trying to get the castle back and was killed under its walls in 1348.

Fifty-eight years is a long time to garrison one tower on a foreign coast, and it was the correct investment: the league that took it never had to fight the fleet again.

An ambassador from Altologo

Drafted from Clavijo, Narrative of the Embassy to the Court of Timour at Samarcand (1859)contraction

In September 1403 a Castilian embassy bound for Timur's court beat its way up the Anatolian coast against contrary winds, and the ambassador kept a journal. He had no interest in the emirates he was passing. He wrote down where the ship anchored and what he was told there, and in three entries he records what had happened to this coast in the year since Ankara.

Off a city on the Turkish mainland called Palacia nueva — Balat, at the mouth of the Maeander, in the neighbouring emirate — they were told that Timur had been in that city when he conquered the Turk and seized Turkey. The conqueror of Bayezid had wintered on the Aegean shore.

A few days later they anchored at a Hospitaller island for water, and the people there gave them the local news. The Turks of Palacia had ravaged the island and done much mischief; that very year a galliot had come over from Palacia and the raiders had carried off many sheep, and the men who were working in the fields.

What that meant

For nearly sixty years the Aegean beyliks had been contained. One fortified harbour mouth at Smyrna, held by a papal league, had been enough to end the raiding economy the Aydinid state was built on, and Umur Bey had died under its walls trying to take it back. Then Timur arrived, and in a single season the arrangement that had held since 1344 was gone. The emirates Bayezid had swallowed were handed back to their families, and the harbours were open again.

The Castilian journal shows what the coast did with that. Within a year the galliots were out, and the islands that had stopped paying to be left alone were losing their sheep and their farm workers again.

The embassy that went the other way

The journal's last observation on the subject comes from the return march. When the ambassadors left Samarkand on 21 November 1404 they travelled in company with the other envoys going west: one from the sultan of Egypt, one from the brother of a great lord of Turkey, one from Sivas, one from the city of Altologo and one from the city called Palatia.

Altologo is what Italian merchants called Ayasoluk, the Aydinid capital below the ruins of Ephesus. Palatia is Balat again. So within two years of Ankara both emirates had sent men the length of Asia to Samarkand and kept them there long enough to travel home with the Castilians, in a caravan of ambassadors from Cairo, central Anatolia and the Aegean, all of them attending on the same elderly conqueror.

That is what a restoration cost. The beylik that had once made the papacy assemble a fleet against it got its harbours back as a gift, and paid for them by maintaining a permanent presence at a court on the other side of Asia. The gift was also short. Timur was dead by the following February, and the Ottoman state the Aydinids had been rescued from spent the next decade putting itself back together.

Cüneyd

Drafted from (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013)end

Aydin was annexed by Bayezid I in 1390, restored by Timur after Ankara in 1402 along with every other beylik the Ottomans had swallowed, and finally annexed for good in 1426. The thirty-six years between the first annexation and the last are the career of one man.

Cüneyd was the last Aydinid ruler in anything but name, and he was a professional survivor of Ottoman civil wars. He changed sides in every one he could reach. He served whichever Ottoman prince was currently losing and therefore needed him, extracted a principality as the price, lost it when that prince lost, and reappeared attached to the next claimant. He held Smyrna, then did not; held Ayasoluk, then did not; was governor of a province of the empire he spent his life fighting, twice.

It worked for a remarkably long time and it worked for a structural reason. The Ottoman succession was contested — after 1402 there were four brothers with armies, and after that a rebellion led by a man claiming to be one of them — and every contested succession is an opportunity for somebody with local troops and no scruples about which side he is on.

Murad II ended it in 1426. Cüneyd was besieged, surrendered on terms, and was executed with his family. The line stopped there.

What the beylik never managed

Aydin had a harbour, and lost it, and could not replace it. Karaman had mountains, and could not be dislodged from them, and could not stay off them.

Neither could convert a strong position into a state that survived losing it, and that is the thing worth taking from a small record. The Ottomans, who began as the least promising of the dozen, had Rumelia — territory on the far side of the water — which meant a defeat in Anatolia cost them a province rather than their existence. Twice in this period an Ottoman ruler lost Anatolia comprehensively and came back from Europe.

The beyliks each had one asset. The winner had two, in two places, with a sea between them.

The silt

Drafted from (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013)afterlife

The Aydinid capital was Ayasoluk, the hill above Ephesus, and its harbour was already dying when the beylik took it.

Ephesus had been one of the great ports of the Roman world. The Cayster, which made the plain fertile, also carried silt, and over a thousand years the coastline moved west; the classical harbour works ended up several kilometres inland, and the city moved uphill to the citadel and the basilica of Saint John. What the Aydinids inherited in about 1304 was a decayed Byzantine town on a hill with a silting anchorage below it, and what they did with it was build.

Isa Bey's congregational mosque of 1375 is still standing, and the columns inside it came out of the ruins below.

What became of the ground

Aydin's territory became Ottoman provinces and its ports became Ottoman ports, and the naval habit went with them. The Aegean coast the beylik had raided from supplied crews, captains and shipyards to the Ottoman fleet for the next four centuries, and the men who beat Venice at sea in the sixteenth century were working out of the same harbours with the same populations behind them.

Ayasoluk itself did not survive as a port. The silt kept coming, the harbour closed entirely, and the town shrank to a village beside a ruin. It carries the dynasty's name now: the province and its capital are called Aydın, after a Turkmen family that held the coast for a hundred and twenty years, and the village by the basilica is Selçuk, after the Seljuks, who never governed it.

The residue

What is left of the beylik is therefore three things, and none of them is territory.

A mosque made out of a Roman city. A stretch of coast that carries the family's name on the map. And one afternoon at Birgi in 1333, when a Turkmen prince showed a Moroccan lawyer a meteorite and had four men hit it with a hammer to prove it could not be broken.