Karamanid Beylik

Out of the mountains

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

A dozen Turkmen principalities filled the marches of Anatolia as the Sultanate of Rum stopped being able to restrain them. This was the largest, it lasted the longest, and for a century and a half it was the one thing standing between the Ottomans and the Anatolian plateau.

The Karamanid family were Oghuz Turkmen of the Salur, and they arrived in Anatolia the way a great many people did in the 1230s: pushed west ahead of the Mongols. They settled in the Taurus, the mountain country between the central plateau and the Mediterranean, and in the middle of the century Karaman Bey took a string of castles there — Ermenek, Mut, Silifke — mostly at the expense of the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia below them.

Mountains are the usual answer to how a small polity survives a large one, and they are the answer here. Konya and the plateau are open country that any strong power can ride across; the Taurus is not, and a family that could retreat into it could not be finished by a single campaign.

That is the whole shape of Karamanid history. They came down onto the plateau whenever the power there was distracted, took Konya more than once, were driven back up, and came down again. They did it against the Seljuks under Ilkhanid supervision, against the Ilkhanids, and then for a hundred and fifty years against the Ottomans, who needed six separate campaigns and two annexations before it stopped.

The claim, and the decree that may not have happened

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

In 1277 Mehmed Bey of Karaman marched onto the plateau and took Konya.

The moment was chosen. The Sultanate of Rum had been an Ilkhanid tributary since Kösedağ, its sultans installed and removed by Mongol governors, and a Mamluk army under Baybars had just come north and beaten the Mongols at Elbistan, which meant the Ilkhanid grip on Anatolia was, for one season, in question. Mehmed Bey took the Seljuk capital and put on the throne a man presented as a son of the Seljuk house, remembered in the sources by the nickname Cimri, the miser.

It lasted weeks. Mongol and Seljuk forces retook Konya, Cimri was killed and displayed, and Mehmed Bey was executed in 1278.

The claim outlived him by two hundred years. The Karamanids held that they, not anybody else, were the heirs of Rum — they had taken its capital, they held its heartland, and they were the senior Turkmen house on the plateau. That is the argument the Ottomans spent the fifteenth century having to answer, and it is why the Ottoman conquest of Karaman was politically harder than the conquest of Constantinople: taking a Christian empire was holy war, and taking the leading Muslim Turkish principality in Anatolia was not.

The other famous thing about that year is probably not true, and it is worth the paragraph.

It is widely stated that in 1277 Mehmed Bey decreed that Turkish alone would be used in the divan, the court and the chancery — the first official promotion of Turkish over Persian, and a foundation stone of modern Turkish national history. The evidence is a passage in Ibn Bibi, a Persian-writing historian of the Seljuk court with reason to present the Karamanids as barbarians, and there is no independent corroboration that the Karamanids ever conducted official business in Turkish. Their own surviving inscriptions and documents are largely in Persian and Arabic.

A story that is repeated everywhere is not thereby attested. The taking of Konya is an event with corroboration; the language decree is a sentence in one hostile source, and it has been carried for seven hundred years because it is the kind of thing people want to be true.

What is likely underneath it is real enough and less quotable. The Karamanids were a Turkmen dynasty in a country whose administrative prestige language was Persian and whose religious one was Arabic, and their following spoke Turkish. Whether or not anybody issued a decree, that tension existed, and it was resolved in Turkish's favour over the following two centuries by nobody in particular.

Larande

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

In about 1332 Ibn Battuta came into Konya and found it large and handsome, abounding in water and gardens, and belonging to Badr al-Din ibn Karaman — though the king of Iraq, he adds, has occasionally had the rule of it, on account of the nearness of some of his states in those parts.

That single qualification is the beylik's whole position in one clause. The Karamanids held the old Seljuk capital, and everybody understood that they held it at the sufferance of somebody stronger who could take it back when it suited him, and had.

The capital that was not Konya

Ibn Battuta then went on to Larande, and records something the chronicles tend to skip:

I next proceeded to the city of Larande, the Sultan of which is El Malik Badr al-Din ibn Karaman, who makes this place his capital. I met him, and was entertained with the greatest kindness as his guest.

Konya was the prize and Larande was where the ruler actually lived. It sits at the foot of the Taurus, with the mountains at its back and the plateau in front of it, which is precisely the position the dynasty occupied for two centuries: a seat you cannot be forced out of, within a day's ride of the seat that confers legitimacy.

Every Karamanid campaign is a variation on moving between those two places.

What he found in the city

At Konya he lodged with the qadi, a member of the brotherhood of youths, in a cell he calls most beautiful, with a great many disciples who traced the authority for their legal opinions back to Ali and who dressed as Sufis did, in the patched cloak and close trousers.

And he went to the tomb of the Shaykh Jalal al-Din, better known by the title of Mawlana, who was, he says, very highly esteemed.

That is the Karamanid claim from the outside, seen by a visitor with no stake in it. A learned judge running a house of law and hospitality; a shrine that people came a long way to visit; a prince who kept an open table forty miles off in the hills. It is a small state doing exactly what a large one does, and doing it in the room the Seljuks had built.

What holding Konya was worth

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

The Karamanids took Konya in 1277 and lost it within weeks, took it again in the early fourteenth century, were driven out by Ilkhanid governors, and took it again — and from the 1320s held it, on and off, for most of the following century and a half. Why they kept coming back for a city that was hard to hold and sat on open ground they could not defend is worth asking.

Part of the answer is the obvious one. Konya had been the Seljuk capital, and a dynasty claiming the inheritance of Rum needed to be sitting in the place the inheritance was administered from. A claim asserted from Larende in the mountains is a claim by a hill lord; the same claim made from the Seljuk palace is something else.

The other part is the tomb. Jalal al-Din Rumi died at Konya in 1273 and was buried there — the most widely read Persian poet who ever lived, who had spent his working life in a Turkish sultanate in a Greek-speaking country under Mongol overlordship. Within a generation of his death the order that formed around his memory, the Mevlevis, was an institution with a lodge, an endowment and a hereditary leadership descended from him — and the Karamanids became its patrons. They endowed the lodge, built at the shrine, and married into the family.

That is a specific kind of authority and it is easy to underrate. A Turkmen dynasty with a thin genealogy and a contested claim acquired standing by attaching itself to the burial place of a saint whose following was already international — Persians, Turks, Greeks and Armenians came to Konya — and by being the house that maintained it.

The Ottomans understood exactly this. When they finally took Karaman they took the shrine with it, continued the endowments, and the Mevlevi order became one of the institutional fixtures of the Ottoman empire for four hundred years, with sultans girded with a sword at a Mevlevi ceremony on accession.

So the thing the Karamanids fought for two centuries to hold transferred intact to the people who beat them, and went on working for them for four hundred years.

Nobody ever claimed the Karamanids. They claimed Rum, held its capital and its saint, and were beaten by a family that took the lot and then claimed Rome instead — which is a larger claim, made from further away, by people with no inherited right to either.

What the Burgundian was sent to find out

Drafted from Broquière, The Travels of Bertrandon de la Broquière to Palestine, and His Return from Jerusalem Overland to France, During the Years 1432 and 1433 (1807)contraction

In 1432 Philip the Good of Burgundy sent his first esquire-carver east in the guise of a pilgrim, with instructions to come home overland and report whether a crusading army could be got through. Bertrandon de la Broquière rode from Antioch across Anatolia to Bursa and on to the Danube, and the notes he brought back are a quartermaster's: which lord holds what, how many men he can raise, who hates whom, and whether that hatred could be used.

He spent sixteen days crossing Karaman, and what he wrote about it is the closest thing to a survey that any outsider made of the place.

The prince

The ruler was Ibrahim II — Broquière renders the name Imbreymbas and explains that he is called Karaman only because he is lord of the country. He saw him ride through the town on a Friday on his way to prayers, with about fifty horsemen, most of them his slaves, and thirty foot around him, a sword in his belt and a drum at his saddle-bow. He was about thirty-two, handsome, well obeyed, and married to a sister of Murad II.

Broquière's Christian informants in the country told him the rest. That the prince was cruel, and few days passed without noses, feet or hands being cut off; that a rich man could be condemned to death so his fortune could be taken, and most of the nobility had gone that way; that eight days before Broquière arrived one had been torn to pieces by dogs, and two days after that the prince had had one of his own wives killed — the mother of his eldest son, who did not yet know. This is hostile testimony collected from a man who had been forced to renounce his religion to save his life, and it should be read as what the country's foreign residents said about their ruler, which is a real fact of a different kind.

Of the country itself: its territories began a day's journey short of Tarsus and ran sixteen days' ride to the frontier of the Ottoman lands, reaching north-east as far as the borders of Persia; it held the coast from Tarsus toward Cyprus, which produced the most expert sailors known, though they had revolted against him. And the inhabitants, Broquière concludes with the traveller's usual generosity, were thieves, cheats and great assassins who killed one another without anyone being arrested for it.

The finding

The point of the mission was the last part, and it is precise.

Although Ibrahim was allied to the Ottoman sultan by marriage, he detested him for having taken a portion of Karaman from him. He was afraid to make war, because the sultan was stronger. But Broquière was persuaded that if he saw the sultan successfully attacked by Europeans, he would not leave him in peace.

Broquière had also been told how Ibrahim had taken Ramedan and then given it up. He had a brother whom he had banished, and who had found asylum at a neighbouring court. That court did not dare declare war on him, but let it be understood that unless Ramedan was handed over, the brother would be sent back with troops to take it. Ibrahim handed it over without hesitation. His informant's verdict — that the prince was weak and cowardly although his people were the bravest in all Turkey — is a courtier's spite, but the mechanism it describes is not. A banished brother in a neighbour's keeping was a standing instrument that could be used against the man on the throne without a shot being fired, and everyone in Anatolia knew it.

That is the whole Karamanid position in one page of a spy's notebook: the largest principality left, a frontier sixteen days across, a marriage into the dynasty it hated, a brother in somebody else's hands, and a ruler waiting for someone else to strike the first blow. The crusade Broquière was scouting for never came. Fifty-five years later the Ottomans finished the job themselves.

Two centuries of being the rival

Drafted from Finkel, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923 (2005)contraction

From about 1330 to 1487 the Karamanids were the other power in Anatolia, and the record of it is a list of the enemies of the Ottomans.

They allied with the Mamluks, whose sultans regarded Anatolia as their northern frontier and the Ottomans as an upstart. They allied with Venice, which wanted anything that slowed the Ottoman advance and could supply money and ships at the Mediterranean ports the beylik held. They welcomed Timur, and after Ankara in 1402 got their territory back from him and took and burned Bursa, the Ottoman capital, while the Ottoman princes fought each other. They supported the Crusade of Varna in the 1440s by attacking Ankara and Kütahya while the Ottoman army was in the Balkans. When Mehmed II was besieging Constantinople, the possibility that Karaman would move behind him was one of the things he had to price.

None of it worked, and the reason is instructive. The Karamanids could never convert an opportunity into a permanent gain, because their strength was defensive — the Taurus, from which they could not be dislodged, and onto the plateau, where they could not stay. The Ottomans by contrast had Rumelia. Balkan revenue and Balkan manpower on the far side of a strait meant that losing Anatolia cost them a province; losing Anatolia cost Karaman everything, because Anatolia was all there was.

None of that changed between 1330 and 1487, and the beylik kept making the same bet anyway — that if enough outside powers pressed the Ottomans at once, the plateau would come loose. Timur came closest to proving it right, and even Timur only bought them twenty years.

1487

Drafted from Finkel, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923 (2005)end

Mehmed II annexed the beylik in 1468 and it did not stay annexed.

Rival Karamanids reappeared with Akkoyunlu backing and then with Mamluk backing, held parts of the mountains, and had to be dealt with again. Bayezid II finished it in 1487 — not by winning a decisive battle but because by then Akkoyunlu power had collapsed, Mamluk power was in decline, and there was nobody left willing to supply a Karamanid claimant.

That is how these things actually end. A dynasty in mountains is not destroyed; it is starved of patrons.

What was done with them

The family was resettled across the Ottoman provinces, which was the standard treatment and was not a punishment so much as a filing system. A displaced ruling house given estates four hundred miles from its own following stops being a political problem inside a generation.

The territory became the province of Karaman, which is the beylik's name attached to Ottoman administrative geography, and it kept that name for the rest of the empire's existence.

Nineteen years

Between the fall of Karaman in 1487 and the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 there is a shift worth marking.

Taking Constantinople in 1453 had been holy war and could be presented as such anywhere. Taking Karaman was not. It was the annexation of the leading Muslim Turkish principality in Anatolia by another Muslim Turkish principality, against a dynasty with a better claim to the Seljuk inheritance and a longer pedigree on the plateau, and it needed six campaigns and two annexations across a hundred and fifty years because it was politically difficult in a way that fighting Christians never was.

The Ottomans solved the problem of legitimacy afterwards rather than before, and they solved it by going elsewhere for it: to Cairo for the caliphal succession, and to Constantinople for the Roman one. Neither answer had anything to do with Anatolia, which is where the argument had actually been.

Still called Laranda

Drafted from Ramsay, The Historical Geography of Asia Minor (1890)afterlife

In 1890 W. M. Ramsay, working through the ancient place-names of Anatolia against the modern ones, came to the town at the foot of the Taurus and wrote down one sentence:

Laranda is still called Laranda by the Christian population, as well as Karaman, which is the official and usual name.

Four hundred years after the dynasty was extinguished, the town it had made its capital was officially named after it — and the Greek-speaking Christians of the place were still using the name it had carried under Rome, Byzantium and the Seljuks.

Two afterlives, running at once

That sentence contains both of them.

The official one is that the name won. A Turkmen family that was beaten, annexed twice and scattered across the Ottoman provinces left its name on a province, a town and a mountain district, and it is still there: the modern Turkish city is Karaman and the province is Karaman. Nothing else about the beylik survived — no dynasty, no institution, no claim anybody pressed — and the name outlasted the empire that erased the state.

The local one is that the older name did not go away. Ramsay does not say much about the people who kept it — only that they were the Christians of the place, and that Laranda was what they called it. They were the descendants of the population the Karamanids had governed, and they had gone on using the town's pre-Turkish name for six hundred years, alongside the official one, without anybody recording that they were doing it until a Scottish geographer walked through and noted it in passing.

Thirty-three years after he wrote that sentence, the population exchange of 1923 moved the Orthodox Christians of Anatolia to Greece. The second name stopped being said in the place it belonged to, and Ramsay's aside is one of the last times anybody wrote it down as a living usage.

The shrine

The other inheritance transferred whole and is still working.

The Karamanids had made themselves patrons of the Mevlevi lodge at Konya, endowed it, built at it and married into the family that ran it — which was the best available substitute for a pedigree. When the Ottomans took Karaman they took the shrine, continued the endowments, and made the order one of the institutional fixtures of the empire for four hundred years, to the point where sultans were girded with a sword at a Mevlevi ceremony on their accession.

So the object the beylik had fought two centuries to hold went on doing exactly what it had been held for, in the hands of the people who took it.

There is a lesson in that about what a small state's inheritance actually is. The Karamanids' claim to be the heirs of Rum died with them and convinced nobody. The tomb they had endowed, the town they had named and the mountains they had held are all still there, and two of the three are still called after them.