Urban Agency in the Borderlands: Turkmen Rulers and Administrative Elites in 13th-century Kastamonu

Abstract

After the Battle of Manzikert (1071), in which the armies of the Great Seljuqs defeated the Byzantine Empire, different waves of Turkmen people settled across Anatolia. By the 12th century, many of these groups had organised under the command of local warlords and established military control over different areas of Asia Minor under the tutelage of the Seljuqs of Rum. However, the mechanisms by which the new rulers articulated their control, especially over the urban settlements located in the regions they conquered, are poorly understood. This is even more dramatic in the case of northwestern Anatolia, a region that, during the 13th century, was a borderland between an expanding Turco-Islamic world and a defensive Christian Byzantium. The lack of narrative sources dealing with this particular part of Asia Minor has aggravated this lacuna, often excluding the city of Kastamonu from the studies of urban settlement in 13th-century Anatolia. This article attempts to change this situation by looking at surviving architectural evidence and non-narrative-literary sources that offer a particular view of the agents and agencies at work in the interaction between Turkmen rulers and urban elites in 13th-century Kastamonu.