Almost every text that mentions Amasya carries a list of titles. Bağdâdü'r-Rûm, Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ, Kubbetü'l-Ulemâ, Dârü'l-İzz and Kasrü's-Selâtîn are strung together in a single sentence, and the reader is rarely told who said them, in which era, or on the strength of what facts. Yet each title has its own history, its own basis and, in some cases, a doubtful side. The city's scholars, from Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Çelebi to Zenbilli Ali Efendi, have been treated in a separate article; the concern here is why such weighty names were given to Amasya and who first recorded them.

The Source of the Titles

The earliest and most frequently cited work that lists the titles of Amasya together is the Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya) by the city's local historian Abdizâde Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar. Hüsâmeddin was born in Amasya in 1869 and died in Istanbul in 1939. He planned the work in twelve volumes, but only four could be printed between 1912 and 1928. Selim Özcan, who studied Amasya in the period of the princely governors, and Tülay Metin, who compiled the titles of medieval Turkish-Islamic cities, both take the list from the same place, the opening pages of Hüsâmeddin's first volume. It reads: Medinetü'l-Hükemâ, Bağdâdü'r-Rûm, Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ, Ermeniyye-i Kübrâ, Hısnü'l-Mir'ât, Kubbetü'l-Ulemâ, Türbetü'l-Evliyâ, Dârü'n-Nasr, Dârü'l-İzz, Dârü'l-Fütûh and Kasrü's-Selâtîn.

Hüsâmeddin's value and his limits have to be weighed together. His biography in the Islamic Encyclopedia of the Turkish Religious Foundation notes that he gathered a wide body of material from manuscripts, court registers, endowment deeds, inscriptions and gravestones. The same entry records that he mostly did not name his sources and that on some subjects he indulged in excessive etymological analogies, which has given rise to doubts about the scholarly value of his writing. Franz Babinger, for his part, called the work a true treasure on certain subjects and recommended that at least a part of it be translated into a Western language. For the list of titles the consequence is plain: it may rest on writers earlier than Hüsâmeddin, but none of the studies available to us shows in which earlier text each name first appears.

There are other testimonies as well. Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, a historian of the city in the early nineteenth century, describes Amasya as a city of students. Various authors have also used expressions such as "the pearl of Anatolian cities", "Bağdâdü'r-Rûm", "medînetü'l-hükemâ" and "city of madrasas" for it. It appears that the titles are not a list issued by a single pen but a later gathering of epithets spoken by different people in different centuries.

The Custom of Giving Titles

Amasya was not an exceptional case in this respect. In the medieval Islamic world it was an established custom to give important cities a descriptive title alongside their proper names. According to the examples collected by Metin, Mecca was "Ummü'l-Kurâ", Isfahan was "nısf-ı cihan" (half the world), Konya, being the capital, was "Dârü'l-Mülk", Sivas was "Dârü'l-Âlâ", Kayseri was "Dârü'l-Feth", Malatya was "Dârü'r-Rıf'a", Aksaray was "Dârü'z-Zafer" and Niğde was "Dârü'l-Pehlivâniyye". Erzincan, like Amasya, bears the title "Dârü'n-Nasr"; in other words, the same name was used for more than one city. Even Athens, though it was not Islamic territory, appears in the work of Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî as "medînetü'l-hükemâ". These examples show that one of Amasya's best-known titles was not peculiar to it alone.

The same study says that the titles of Seljuk cities were gradually abandoned, and that in the Ottoman period the cities regularly mentioned with their titles were chiefly centers such as Istanbul, Bursa, Edirne, Damascus, Aleppo and Belgrade. In this light Amasya's titles show an unusual continuity. Dârü'l-İzz comes from the Seljuk age, Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ from Ottoman administrative language, and the Oxford of Anatolia from the pen of a French traveler in 1861. Three different eras speak in the same list.

Bağdâdü'r-Rûm

This title is explained as "the Baghdad of the lands of Anatolia". The word Rûm denotes Anatolia in Islamic sources, and Baghdad was one of the most brilliant centers of learning in the Islamic world under the Abbasids. The basis offered for the comparison is Amasya's network of madrasas. This network begins in the Seljuk age with Halifet Gazi (1209-1210) and the Gökmedrese (1266-1267), takes in practical medical teaching in the Ilkhanid period with the Dârüşşifa in 1308-1309, and expands in the Ottoman age with Hızır Paşa (1466), the Darülhadis (1485), the madrasa of the Bayezid II Complex (1486), and buildings such as the Büyük Ağa and Küçük Ağa. According to one encyclopedia entry, the number of scholarly institutions reached its peak between 1398 and 1592, and a stagnation began after Amasya ceased to be the pasha sanjak and was attached to the province of Sivas.

Accounts of the number of madrasas do not agree with one another. Some texts say that Amasya held more than forty madrasas over its history; the figure looks like the total of a compilation, and none of the sources examined lists them one by one. The figures that rest on documents vary with the period. Perrot counted eighteen madrasas in 1861, and the Sivas Salname recorded thirty-one in 1870. These three numbers do not measure the same thing: one stands for the accumulation of a whole age, the others only for the institutions standing and active in a given year.

The available sources do not show who first used the title. They only record that Amasya was known by this name because of its character as a center of learning in the Islamic period. The Baghdad comparison does not give a number or a standard; it is an epithet of praise, and it is therefore sounder to read it not as a document but as a phrase reflecting the city's reputation.

The Principal Buildings of the Learning Network

The best known of the institutions behind these titles is the Bayezid II Complex. It stands on the bank of the Yeşilırmak, in a setting that recalls the complex built beside a river at Edirne. In the middle of the broad group of buildings is the mosque, with the madrasa on its right and the soup kitchen and imaret on its left. According to its three-part building inscription, the mosque was completed in Rajab 891 (July 1486); the inscriptions in thuluth script were written by a calligrapher named Ali b. Mezîd. Hüsâmeddin claims that construction began right after the sultan's accession, in September 1481, and, citing İdrîs-i Bitlisî, reports that the building, begun as an act of thanks for the sultanate, was entrusted to Prince Ahmed. Later historians repeat this. An official promotional text says the building was commissioned through Prince Ahmed in 1485-1486; the starting date therefore ranges between 1481 and 1485, while the completion date, resting on the inscription, is 1486. The endowment deed was written in January 1496 and describes the complex as consisting of a mosque, an imaret, a madrasa and a children's school.

The mosque is described as one of the finest examples of the zaviye-type plan with side rooms; it consists of two square spaces divided by a large arch in the middle, with three domes on each of the east and west sides. Its window shutters are counted among the distinguished examples of fifteenth-century kündekâri woodwork. Over time the whole complex has suffered repeatedly. In the earthquake of 1590 the domes and arches were damaged; in that of 1668-1669 the domes collapsed and two minarets were bent, yet the administrator Merzifonlu İbrahim Ağa completed all the repairs within a year. Floods of the river have also affected the building many times, and in the flood of 1980 a deposit seventy centimeters deep accumulated inside the mosque. In the nineteenth century the clock room and the ablution fountain built by Hacı Hüseyin Zeki Efendi in 1840 were added to the courtyard, and the tomb southeast of the mosque is accepted as that of Prince Osman, son of Prince Ahmed, who was put to death by Selim I in 1513. The encyclopedia entry also notes that there is no sarcophagus inside the tomb today.

The second leg of the learning network is the Dârüşşifa. According to the Arabic inscription on its portal, the building was commissioned in 708 (1308-1309) by Anber b. Abdullah, a slave of İlduş Hatun, wife of the Ilkhanid ruler Öljeitü Khan, together with the Emir of Anatolia, Ahmed Bey; its architect is unknown, and its endowment deed, drawn up in 712 (1312), has not survived. In some accounts the year appears as 1308; the difference arises because the year in the inscription spans two Gregorian years. The building was constructed on a madrasa plan and worked both as a hospital and as a place of medical teaching. The name Bîmarhane became widespread from the notion that only the mentally ill were kept there; the inscription itself names the building a dârüşşifa in the general sense.

The best known physician of this institution is Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin. His birth year is given in the sources as 1385 or 1386 and his death year as 1468. It is written that he began practicing medicine at seventeen, worked in the Amasya Dârüşşifa and served as chief physician for about fourteen years; that he practiced as a physician and surgeon there is learned from his own Mücerrebnâme. He completed his Cerrâhiyyetü'l-Hâniyye in 1465, at the age of eighty, and presented it to Mehmed the Conqueror. The book, in three chapters, is regarded as the first Turkish surgical book to show operations and instruments in pictures and one of the first illustrated surgical atlases. Of the three surviving manuscript copies, two are in the author's own hand, and none is complete. The book was rediscovered in 1939 by Süheyl Ünver. The details of his biography are given in the article on the city's scholars.

Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ and Ermeniyye-i Kübrâ

In works based on Hüsâmeddin, Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ is rendered as "Little Rome". The entry on the Province of Rûm gives a different explanation. From the fifteenth century onward the whole of Anatolia was called iklîm-i Rûm or memleket-i Rûm, while the area comprising Amasya, Tokat and Sivas was given the name Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ. According to this, the epithet is not a comparison with the city of Rome but the name of a small region within the greater Rûm; that is, it is a geographical and administrative name rather than a title of learning. When this region was organized as a province in 1413 (816 AH), it came to be called Vilâyet-i Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ.

Amasya forms the core of the province. According to the entry, Amasya was attached to the Ottoman state in 1393 (795), and Tokat and Sivas in 1398 (800), in the time of Yıldırım Bayezid. The provincial center moved for a while between Amasya and Tokat, and in a summary register drawn up in 1520 (926) the pasha sanjak of the province is recorded as Sivas. As Özcan relates, Amasya kept this position until Şehzade Mustafa was appointed sanjak governor in 1538; with the appointment it separated from Sivas and became an independent province, and when Mustafa was killed in 1553 it became once more a sanjak attached to the province of Rûm. From the middle of the seventeenth century the province was also called the province of Sivas, and after 1864 it passed to the vilayet system.

The rendering of Ermeniyye-i Kübrâ varies from study to study: Özcan says "the city of Greater Armenia (Armanyak)", while Metin translates "Greater Ermeniyye". In which century and by whom the name was used is not explained in the sources examined, so its inclusion among the titles of learning rests not on firm information but on the traditional order of the list.

Little Bukhara

It is often written that Amasya was called "Little Bukhara", and in some accounts this expression is presented as an addition explaining the scholarly side of Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ. It must be said plainly: in the works of Özcan and Metin, who relay Hüsâmeddin's list, in the encyclopedia entries on Amasya, the Province of Rûm and Hüsâmeddin, and in the other academic sources consulted, the name "Little Bukhara" for Amasya is not encountered. It is not in Hüsâmeddin's list either. It should therefore be treated not as a historical title but as a later coinage or a comparison of uncertain origin.

The logic of the comparison can still be understood. From the age of the Samanids, Bukhara was a city full of scholars, men of letters and poets, with a large palace library, and it is recorded that Ibn Sînâ made use of this library. Because of its scholarly standing, Bukhara was given the title "Kubbetü'l-İslâm" together with other centers of learning such as Balkh, Merv and Ahlat. Amasya's name "Kubbetü'l-Ulemâ" is very close to this pattern; the parallel with Bukhara seems to arise not from a nickname peculiar to Amasya but from belonging to the same family of titles. Comparisons built on the word "little" are not unknown in this geography either: according to Ibn Battûta, Nishapur was called "Little Damascus". This information does not prove that "Little Bukhara" existed; it only gives an idea of how it might have arisen.

Medinetü'l-Hükemâ, Kubbetü'l-Ulemâ and Türbetü'l-Evliyâ

These three names describe the scholarly and spiritual side of the city. Medinetü'l-Hükemâ is rendered "the city of those with reason and wisdom", Kubbetü'l-Ulemâ "the center of scholars", and Türbetü'l-Evliyâ "the place where saints gathered and were buried". All three rest on the same fact: in Amasya, madrasa education and dervish lodge life ran side by side. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the city is recorded as having nine mosques, ten madrasas, four lodges, six soup kitchens and fifteen baths. According to the 1520 survey cited by Özcan, the city had fifty-two quarters; fifteen of them bore the names of mosques, small mosques, soup kitchens or madrasas, six bore the names of markets and bazaars, and fifteen bore the names of scholars, sheikhs and dervishes. That roughly a third of the quarter names derive from scholars and sheikhs shows that the phrase Türbetü'l-Evliyâ also had a counterpart in the city's everyday geography.

The soup kitchens were a quiet but indispensable part of this network. According to Özcan, the kitchens where madrasa students ate free of charge also served the poor of the quarter and passing guests morning and evening. The soup kitchens of Yakup Paşa (1412), Yakutiye (1413), Bayezid Paşa (1414) and Hatuniye (1509) performed this task. A title like Kubbetü'l-Ulemâ is therefore related not only to the number of scholars but also to the endowment system that housed them, fed them and had them lecture.

Dârü'l-İzz, Dârü'n-Nasr, Dârü'l-Fütûh and Kasrü's-Selâtîn

These four titles belong less to learning than to a political and military frame. Dârü'l-İzz, in the sense of "abode of glory and felicity", is the name by which the city was known in the Anatolian Seljuk period. Dârü'n-Nasr means "abode of victory" and, as Metin notes, was also used for Erzincan. Dârü'l-Fütûh is, in Özcan's explanation, "the starting point of conquests", and Kasrü's-Selâtîn means "the palace of the sultans".

From which events the names may have drawn nourishment can be seen from the city's position as a border city opening to the east; the sources draw no direct link between the names and the events, so this is a suggested reading. After the Battle of Ankara (1402), Çelebi Mehmed used the city as his base of operations against his brothers İsa and Süleyman, and from then until the end of the sixteenth century the city was regarded as a strategic center on the Ottoman eastern frontier. Yavuz Sultan Selim wintered here after the victory at Çaldıran, Süleyman the Magnificent stayed in the city for a while on his return from the Nakhchivan campaign, and during his stay the Treaty of Amasya was concluded with Iran (1555). Hans Dernschwam, who came to Amasya in the same year with the Austrian embassy, describes the princely palace as a simple single-storey brick building at the foot of the mountain, surrounded by gardens, and records that Süleyman stayed there. The word "palace", in other words, corresponds to a modest structure rather than a residence of the kind one might imagine today.

Hısnü'l-Mir'ât is rendered "mirror fortress" or "fortress of mirrors". The sources record the name but do not explain why it was given; going beyond a guess about its meaning is therefore not possible.

City of Princes

Amasya's most widely used title today is "city of princes" (şehzadeler şehri). Its difference from the other titles is that it rests on a concrete administrative fact, the city's status as a princely sanjak. Selim Özcan writes that for about 182 years twelve princes were appointed to Amasya as sanjak governors, and that six of them later ascended the throne as sultans. According to the encyclopedia entry by İlhan Şahin and Feridun Emecen, from Çelebi Mehmed onward Murad II, Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II served here as sanjak governors; in addition, Murad II's son Alâeddin, Bayezid II's son Şehzade Ahmed, and Süleyman the Magnificent's sons Şehzade Mustafa and Şehzade Bayezid also held office in Amasya. Princes sent out to a sanjak were called "Çelebi Sultan".

The beginning of this picture is disputed. Özcan starts the period of the princes in 1386, when Yıldırım Bayezid came to Amasya and attached the principality to the Ottomans, and counts him as the first sanjak governor; Çelebi Mehmed is the second. In a footnote the same author also notes that the belief that Bayezid was the first sanjak governor is drawn from events between 1384 and 1388, when Amasya's Emir Ahmed accepted Ottoman sovereignty. The entry on the Province of Rûm gives 1393 for Amasya's joining the Ottomans; the Amasya entry cites 1398 and says that the city's administration was left by Yıldırım Bayezid to his son Çelebi Mehmed. The date of the incorporation thus appears in the sources as 1386, 1393 and 1398. The Province of Rûm entry ties Amasya's rise as a princely sanjak to the arrival of Şehzade Murad, Çelebi Mehmed's son, as sanjak governor one year after the province was organized, that is in 1414.

The princes resided in the Beyler Sarayı (Palace of the Beys) in the inner citadel. This building, where sultans and commanders had resided since the Danishmendids, took its definitive form, according to Özcan, in 1396, during Çelebi Mehmed's governorship, when the place called the Gümüşlüzâde mansion was bought from Gümüşlüzâde Hoca Celâleddin Çelebi and a large palace was built on it. It was used as a palace for about 350 years in the Ottoman period, and Murad II's son Ahmed Çelebi, Bayezid II's son Şehzade Ahmed and Selim I were born there. Artists, calligraphers and poets gathered around the palace. One of the poets in Şehzade Ahmed's gatherings was the Amasya-born woman poet Mihrî Hatun, who presented most of her odes to Ahmed. According to an account in the Gülzâr-ı Savâb, when Bayezid II became sultan he recognized the handwriting of his calligraphy teacher Şeyh Hamdullah in a petition written for a palace doorkeeper, had him sought out and appointed him calligraphy teacher in the palace.

Being a princely sanjak gave Amasya a distinct weight. According to the encyclopedia entry, many of the princes who served here as sanjak governors regarded themselves as the strongest candidate for the throne, thinking that being at the center of a sanjak close to the eastern frontier, with the glory and honor of successes won on the frontier, would be a great advantage on the road to the throne. This feature also prepared the end of some princes. Şehzade Mustafa was killed in 1553. Şehzade Bayezid interpreted his transfer from Kütahya to Amasya as Selim being chosen heir to the throne in his place, rebelled, fled to Iran after his defeat, and was executed in Qazvin in 1562. According to Özcan, the period of the princes closed in 1566 with the twenty-one-year-old Şehzade Murad, whom Selim II sent after accession; Murad stayed in Amasya for about a year and a half and was then appointed to Manisa. The growing importance of the princely sanjaks closer to Istanbul and Amasya's distance from the capital were influential in this. The same study records that the sanjak was in those years also affected by the Celali disturbances and by troubles caused by madrasa students.

The title "city of princes" therefore describes a period with definite limits. Özcan writes that the cultural, commercial and social vitality of the period of the princes began gradually to fade when the city lost its status as a princely sanjak; the encyclopedia entry likewise states that from the middle of the sixteenth century Manisa came to the fore as the sole princely sanjak. The title has remained the name of an age rather than a quality the city carries today.

The Oxford of Anatolia

The source of this title, unlike the others, is a text that can be read at first hand. During his Anatolian journey of 1861, the French archaeologist Georges Perrot set out for Amasya on 25 November 1861, two days after reaching Çorum, covering the two days' road across heaths covered with dwarf junipers. He published his travel notes in Paris in 1864 under the title Souvenirs d'un voyage en Asie Mineure. In the table-of-contents line of the Amasya chapter the city is called directly "a university city".

The phrase rendered briefly in Turkish as "Anatolia's Oxford" stands in a more complicated context on Perrot's page. The author says that Amasya has been a university city, a city of learning, since the age of the Seljuks, but immediately adds a qualification: whether one may use the word learning for this "vain and dead scholasticism" whose tradition is still kept up in the shade of the mosques. He then writes that one can say of Amasya that it is "the Oxford of Anatolia": against a population of about twenty-five thousand there are two thousand softas in eighteen madrasas. As in the English universities, each madrasa has properties of its own, lands and farms in the province, houses in the city and shops in the bazaar. Students are given, besides lodging in the small rooms opening onto the courtyards, a certain weekly quantity of bread, rice and oil, and some madrasas also pay a small sum of money. What Perrot understood by Oxford was, in short, a system of independent colleges endowed with foundations, owning property and feeding their students.

The same pages also show the shadowed side of the picture. According to Perrot, since the reign of Mahmud II these institutions no longer collected their revenues themselves but received them through the officials of the evkaf nazırlığı, a ministerial-level office in Istanbul. At the time of Perrot's arrival in Amasya the local evkaf nazırı had just been dismissed; the author reports that the nazır's embezzlements had gone so far as to starve the students and mullahs and to build his own fortune, and that the Sublime Porte had therefore taken notice of the complaints coming from Amasya. In the same chapter he also writes that Christians made up about a quarter of the population, that the old spirit hostile to progress was stronger in Amasya than in Ankara, and that the condition of the Christians there was found to be worse. For this reason the phrase "Oxford", in the context of the book, carries both praise and criticism.

It is also interesting to compare the figures with other records. According to the Sivas yearbook (salname), in 1870 Amasya had, in thirty-one madrasas, a total of twenty-six preachers, twenty-three imams, forty-four professors and 278 students. Between this number and the two thousand softas Perrot counted nine years earlier there is a large gap. The reason for the gap is not known; it might be that Perrot counted everyone lodging in a madrasa as a softa, or that the scope of the official record was narrower, but there is no document to settle it. Meanwhile, according to the Türk Maarif Ansiklopedisi, in 1864 the Ministry of Education had the Alaca Yahyâ Madrasa demolished and a rüşdiye school built in its place; the same entry also gives this demolition as the work of the Amasya governor Ziyâ Paşa in 1865, and records that the Narlı Bahçe Madrasa was also demolished by him in 1865. The institutions Perrot saw were thus seen at a moment when the old educational order was beginning to dissolve.

City of Madrasas and City of Students

Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi's description of a "city of students" is the nearest testimony to Perrot among the local sources. Vâzıh was born in Çorum in 1763, took his first lessons in the Sungurlu Madrasa in Amasya, where his father was a professor, studied with Gümüşhaneli Ebubekir and Şeyhzâde Abdullah Vecihî and received a license (icâzet) from them, and obtained a professor's certificate by studying in various madrasas in Istanbul. On returning to Amasya he was appointed professor at the Sungurlu Madrasa and, on his father's death, became the mufti of Amasya. His work el-Belâbilü'r-Râsiye fî Riyâzi Mesâ'ili'l-Amasiyye was written to be presented to the governor of Sivas, Köse Mehmed Paşa, on the occasion of his visit to Amasya, and was completed in 1235/1236 (1819-1820). Resembling in part a register of legal opinions, the work was prepared from general history books, court registers and inscriptions, and is regarded as the first example of Amasya urban historiography. Vâzıh's observation of a "city of students", written some forty years before Perrot, independently supports his observation.

Two distinct layers can therefore be told apart among the titles. On one side stand epithets from the Seljuk and Ottoman periods, Arabic in form and largely of uncertain source: Bağdâdü'r-Rûm, Kubbetü'l-Ulemâ, Dârü'l-İzz, Kasrü's-Selâtîn. On the other are the "city of students" and the "Oxford of Anatolia", supported in nineteenth-century texts by concrete figures and first-hand observation. After the period of the princes ended, madrasa life continued; according to the encyclopedia entry, although the city began to lose this quality, it kept its character as an important cultural center of Anatolia. Another source says that the decline continued from 1800 and that the scholarly and charitable institutions were in the end destroyed.

Dating the Titles

The titles fall into groups of differing reliability as far as dating is concerned. Dârü'l-İzz is tied to a specific period, the Seljuk age. The basis of Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ is seen in Ottoman administrative records and can be documented from 1413. "City of princes" is tied to a practice that began between 1386 and 1398 and ended in 1566. The Oxford of Anatolia rests on a first-hand description by a traveler in 1861 and has a real source text. By contrast, the place where names such as Bağdâdü'r-Rûm, Medinetü'l-Hükemâ, Hısnü'l-Mir'ât and Ermeniyye-i Kübrâ first occur cannot be clearly shown before Hüsâmeddin. Little Bukhara is found in none of the sources examined.

Chronology

1209-1210: The Halifet Gazi Madrasa and Tomb are built.

1266-1267: The Torumtay Madrasa (Gökmedrese) is built.

1308-1309: According to its inscription, the Dârüşşifa (Bîmarhane) is commissioned by Anber b. Abdullah, a slave of İlduş Hatun, together with the Emir of Anatolia, Ahmed Bey; practical medical education is given.

1386 / 1393 / 1398: Amasya's coming under Ottoman sovereignty is cited in the sources with these three dates.

1396: According to Özcan, Çelebi Mehmed has a large palace built on the site of the Gümüşlüzâde mansion (the Beyler Sarayı).

1402-1413: After the Battle of Ankara, Çelebi Mehmed makes Amasya his base; he becomes sultan in 1413.

1413: The Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ region is organized as a province under the name Vilâyet-i Rûmiyye-yi Suğrâ.

1465: Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin completes the Cerrâhiyyetü'l-Hâniyye.

1466: The Hızır Paşa Madrasa is built.

1481: According to Hüsâmeddin, construction of the Bayezid II Complex begins.

1486: The Bayezid II Complex is completed (July 1486 in the inscription).

1496: The endowment deed of the complex is written.

1520: The pasha sanjak of the province of Rûm is recorded as Sivas.

1538-1553: Şehzade Mustafa is sanjak governor; Amasya becomes an independent province and, with Mustafa's killing, returns to sanjak status.

1555: The Treaty of Amasya is signed; Hans Dernschwam arrives in the city on 7 April.

1566: Şehzade Murad becomes the last princely sanjak governor sent to Amasya.

1819-1820: Mustafa Vâzıh completes his work on the history of Amasya.

25 November 1861: Georges Perrot sets out from Çorum for Amasya.

1864: Perrot's Souvenirs d'un voyage en Asie Mineure is published.

1870: According to the Sivas yearbook, Amasya has thirty-one madrasas.

1912: The first volume of Hüsâmeddin's Amasya Tarihi is printed.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Georges Perrot, Souvenirs d'un voyage en Asie Mineure, Paris 1864, pp. 439-455 (Amasya chapter), https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_VHizelDj7E4C
  • Abdizâde Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin, Amasya Tarihi, I, Istanbul 1912 (via the citations of Özcan and Metin).

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources