Migration and the Making of Cultural Landscapes in Medieval Anatolia: a Eurasian Regional Perspective from Inner Pontus

Abstract

Different communities of medieval Anatolia lived in different worlds while inhabiting the same physical grounds. Focusing on a small region – the valley of the Iris River around modern Turkish cities of Niksar, Tokat, and Amasya – this dissertation seeks to conceptualize the coexistence of difference in medieval Anatolia. Visiting this part of Anatolia in the period between the eleventh and the fourteenth century one could find oneself enmeshed in transregional, even global currents and cultures. Depending on one’s ability to decode symbolic and natural languages, in this one region, one could experience one’s self as being at once in Byzantium, in western Iran, or in western Armenia, in the Islamic world or in the homeland of Christian Church Fathers and martyr saints. To explore the workings of the different languages that created communities and shaped cultural landscapes within and beyond medieval Anatolia, this dissertation follows the lives of four migrants: a Byzantine villager whose bronze cross was recently unearthed in an excavation, an Armenian prince whose name is inscribed in Greek on a lead seal preserved in Tokat, a Sufi who became the overseer of Tokat’s first known dervish lodge and a six-year old girl who was buried in what is thought to be one of Anatolia’s earliest cemeteries of pastoralist nomads of Central Asian origin. Weaving together evidence from archaeological, architectural, and literary sources, as well as ethnography and oral history, this dissertation explores how different communities constructed their own worlds and how they perceived, translated, or altogether failed to see the worlds of others. Those constructions, and their far-flung connections, create a very different picture from the paradigms of doomed Hellenism or triumphant Turkism that have hitherto prevailed in the study of medieval and early modern Anatolia, the crossroads of Asia and Europe.