The Chobanids of Kastamonu

The Battle of Manzikert (1071 CE), where the Seljuq Turks defeated the armies of the Byzantine empire, became a turning point in the history of Anatolia. Since then, this territory became a borderland between Islam and Christianity, witnessing the colonisation of these deeply Christian territories by lightly Islamised Turkmen tribes that settled in the region. By the early 13th c., the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum, with its capital in Konya, has consolidated power in most parts of the peninsula but was still relying on the support of local Turkmen groups for the control of more peripherical parts of the realm. Some of these groups managed to establish themselves as crucial political, military and economic actors in the peninsula and played a fundamental role in the cultural milieu of a territory undergoing deep social and religious transformations. This book provides a novel approach to the history of one of these regions of medieval Anatolia by analysing political, religious and cultural developments in the region of Kastamonu during the reign of the Chobanid dynasty (c. 1211-1309). During the thirteenth century, the Chobanids consolidated a local dynasty in western Anatolia a borderland between Islam and Christianity becoming cultural actors patronising the production of religious, scientific and administrative works in the Persian language. These works, though surviving today in manuscript form, have received little attention in modern historiography. This book, therefore, attends to this gap in the research, incorporating a detailed study of texts by little- known authors from the time. The book explores the relationship between Islam and the Chobanid dynasty in the context of the wider process of Islamisation in medieval Anatolia, hypothesising that Turkmen dynasties played a fundamental role in this process of Islamisation and acculturation. While local dynasties such as the Chobanid of Kastamonu often receive little attention in contemporary historical chronicles, this book shows that by incorporating surviving manuscripts from the period into the historical analysis, it is possible to reconstruct the cultural history of a region otherwise neglected in the more traditional sources. The Chobanids of Kastamonu: Politics, Patronage and Religion in 15th century Anatolia, then, offers an in-depth study of a Turkmen local dynasty that achieved political autonomy, financial independence and cultural patronage in medieval Anatolia vis-à-vis the main political powers of the time.