Chapter 1 connects the ongoing Ottoman conquest of Anatolia in the second half of the fifteenth century to monuments built in Istanbul, and discusses the relationship between these buildings and Byzantine and Timurid architecture.

Chapter 5 turns to the centralization of design processes in the period around 1500, when architecture became integrated into the practices of the centralized workshops that were being established. Design intersected with collection practices that integrated the visual arts into the Ottoman epistemological project of gathering, sorting, and classifying that was fully underway.

Chapter 4 focuses on the funerary complex of Murad II in Bursa. In its commemorative function, the Muradiye served to enhance dynastic prestige; tombs for members of the Ottoman family continued to be added until the mid-sixteenth century.

Chapter 2 discusses shifts in Ottoman architecture after Mehmed I commissioned the construction of this mosque-zāviye complex in Bursa in 1419. This period shows the beginning of a new engagement with the Saljuq past and the Timurid present in Ottoman architecture, leading to deep stylistic and technical transformations.

Chapter 3 discusses how elements of Mamluk architecture were introduced into Ottoman architecture and explores the broader interconnections of intellectuals and makers in the fifteenth century. In particular, it addresses the ambiguous and flexible roles of workers and overseers on construction sites and the use of paper for architectural design.

It has become clear that in the sixteenth century, architecture was made more uniform in imperial projects as a result of the Ottoman Empire’s performance as a centralized state. Eventually, the fifteenth century receded into a distant past that was hard to comprehend from the point of view of the empire’s so-called Classical Age. This is true for history, reshaped by sixteenth-century historians in ways that made sense in their own present, and it is also true for the built environment, which was transformed by later uses and perceived in new ways. This aspect of the long-term development of the Ottoman Empire with its closely intertwined administrative, imperial, and artistic interventions emerges in the material politics of the architecture analyzed in this book.

I have followed the trajectory of Ottoman architecture as it unfolded from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries.

The buildings designed and built by the architect Sinan (d. 1588) in the imperial capital Istanbul, with their stripped-down aesthetic of impressive volumes and monumental domes, have become the epitome of Ottoman architecture. Active from the 1530s until the 1580s, Sinan designed monuments at both the large scale required by the sultans and the smaller one accorded to viziers, admirals, and princesses, as seen in the mosques built for Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent in 1550–77 and for one of his grand viziers, Rüstem Pasha, in 1563. Sinan’s work and the work of the office of imperial architects (hassa mimarları) define our understanding of architecture in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century onward, and they were integral parts of the functioning of a centralized empire that tightly regulated its administration and its aesthetic outlook.