THE KAPLICA ZAVIYE AND THE EMERGENCE OF SULTANIC FUNERARY COMPLEXES IN OTTOMAN ARCHITECTURE IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

This study focuses on a key building to expand on the architecture and archaeology of the Ottoman Empire in its formative centuries: the Kaplıca Zaviye of Sultan Murad I, today known as Hüdavendigar Mosque. Murad’s zaviye (Arabic zāwiya, meaning dervish lodge or convent) is the first Ottoman sultanic funerary complex. Founded in the latter half of the fourteenth century in a suburb of Bursa, the zaviye went through multiple phases and the architectural complex around it grew with additions until the end of that century. Its early-fifteenth century form served as a model for generations of sultans who built similar funerary zaviye complexes in Bursa. This dissertation elucidates the diverse strands of cultural heritage, as well as the competing political allegiances and visions of social order, that went into the production of this model, demonstrating its ties to Anatolian, Balkan, Iranian, and Italian practices and traditions. This study also offers the first extensive comparative analysis of the waqfiyyas (endowment deeds) of the fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century Ottoman zaviye complexes. Treated critically here in relation to the buildings themselves, these legal documents reveal the institutional and socio-economic framework of the zaviyes prior to their transformation into mosques as part of the centralization of the classical imperial order (ca. 1453–1600). The changes made to the buildings and their institutions speak to complex negotiations between patrons, builders, and users. These social groups included not only the Ottoman elites, but also the indigenous Bithynians, as well as multiple waves of immigrants arriving through the globalized networks of the post-Crusader Mediterranean and post-Mongol Eurasia. The sponsorship of zaviyes by elite patrons attests to a centralized project of standardization, sedentarization, and acculturation at the hands of Ottoman rulers from the 1330s onward. The incorporation of elite tombs into these complexes beginning in the 1360s was part of a related but distinct process of dynasty building vis-à-vis popular piety.