THE POLITICS OF PATRONAGE: POLITICAL CHANGE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF DERVISH LODGES IN SIVAS

Abstract

From the second half of the thirteenth century to the second half of the fourteenth, centralized rule broke down in Anatolia to be replaced by a largely independent local landed aristocracy. Research into the personal, political, and religious reasons for the support of building activity during this period usually argues from assumptions about building patronage and its history.2 One of these assumptions is that building activity was either a product or a reflection of political and economic change. As a result of this assumption, patronage as a topic of inquiry is generally analyzed either as an act of largess or a posthumous statement of the patron's political or religious ideology. Conclusions from such important studies as Howard Crane's work on Seljuq architectural patronage in thirteenth-century Anatolia, however, compel us to delve further into the relationship between changes in political power and the endowment of buildings. For example, Crane shows that at the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth architecture was patronized not by sultans but by amirs, and the types of institutions they chose to support changed from mosques, fortifications, and caravansarais to madrasas, tombs, and dervish lodges. His conclusion that this change paralleled the rise of regional administrative figures could suggest that the endowment of buildings was an important part of securing political power, especially if we consider that in the late Seljuq and early Beylik period, the patronage of architecture was one means by which amirs were able to control newly available land, one of the bases for their political power and economic security. A second assumption affecting studies of late Seljuq and early Beylik patronage stems from a static understanding of the nature of pious institutions. This viewpoint has led scholars to make a distinction between the religious and secular realms. In this framework, pious institutions affect only the religious topography of cities.4 For many periods of Islamic history, however, the patronage of pious buildings was a viable and often profitable form of investment as well as one that regulated the economic life of the city and its inhabitants.5 Although the lack of certain kinds of source material for the late Seljuq and early Beylik periods makes it extremely difficult to analyze building patronage as an investment tool and an instrument for urban transfor-