Built on both banks of the Yeşilırmak and known for the royal tombs cut into its cliffs, Amasya was for centuries a regular stop for travellers whose road led through the interior of Anatolia. The city lay on the caravan routes that linked Istanbul with the east, with Persia and with the Black Sea coast; the roads from Tokat, Zile, Merzifon and Samsun all met in this narrow valley. The list of those who saw Amasya is therefore a long one, and it includes very different people, from a Moroccan scholar on his way to Mecca and Habsburg envoys trying to reach the sultan's camp to English diplomats returning from Persia and French archaeologists in search of Pontic inscriptions.

The notes these travellers left behind are a valuable source, alongside the archival record, for understanding how the city looked in different periods. The registers tell us how many households and shops there were; the travellers tell us what the houses were built of, how many bridges there were, what colour the river was, what was sold in the bazaar and which inn the visitor stayed at. Each of them, of course, saw the city through his own learning, prejudice and haste; some stayed two months, others arrived after midnight and went on their way the next day. Read together, these notes show that a city squeezed into a narrow valley, joined by bridges across its river and ringed with vineyards and water wheels, changed remarkably little in its basic appearance over the centuries.

Medieval Travellers

One of the earliest travellers to describe Amasya was Ibn Battuta, the great traveller of the fourteenth century. Setting out from Tangier in the summer of 1325 with the intention of making the pilgrimage, Ibn Battuta spent some twenty-nine years on the road, covering a world that stretched from Spain to China, and later dictated his account to Ibn Juzayy. On his third journey, around 1333, he boarded a Genoese ship at Latakia and landed at Alaiye (Alanya); after touring the region of Antalya, Burdur, Eğirdir, Denizli and Muğla, he travelled by way of Konya, Karaman, Aksaray, Niğde, Kayseri and Sivas to Amasya.

Ibn Battuta describes Amasya as a city through which a great river flows, surrounded by vineyards and gardens, rich in fruit and trees. After the city he stopped at a place he calls Sunusa, where he lodged in the lodge of a Rifa'i dervish order. Scholars place Sunusa somewhere between the present-day district of Taşova and the town of Alparslan. From there the traveller went on to Gümüş, a populous town famous for its silver mines, where he spent three nights at the lodge of Akhi Majd al-Din and met the deputy of the Eretnid ruler who then held the region. Brief as his remarks on Amasya are, they show that at a time when Mongol rule was crumbling and the beyliks were dividing the region among themselves, the city appeared as a prosperous place on the riverbank, set among vineyards and orchards.

The Persian geographer Hamdallah Mustawfi, of the same century, is also among the writers who mention Amasya. This is known from the notes of the English diplomat William Ouseley, who passed through the city in the early nineteenth century: citing Hamdallah, Ouseley reports that the Seljuk sultan Alaeddin Keykubad had the city rebuilt and that it was praised for the variety of its plants and the mildness of its climate.

A German Traveller in Süleyman's Camp

The most detailed sixteenth-century description of Amasya is found in the diary of the Bohemian Hans Dernschwam. Born in 1494 in the town of Brüx, Dernschwam came from a well-to-do family; he had studied in Vienna and Leipzig and spent many years working in Hungary in the service of the Augsburg banker Anton Fugger. In 1553 he joined the embassy sent by the Austrian ruler Ferdinand I to Süleyman the Magnificent. The embassy was headed by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq. Dernschwam takes care to state at the end of his diary that he made the journey of his own will and at his own expense, paying all the costs of his servants, horses and carriages himself.

Amasya had not in fact been part of the plan. The sultan was away on his Persian campaign and not in Istanbul, and the embassy followed his trail deep into Anatolia. The envoys reached Amasya on 7 April 1555 and stayed in the city until 2 June, some two months in all. This period coincided with the busy days when the Persian peace embassy sent by Shah Tahmasp to Süleyman was also in Amasya. Barely a year and a half had passed since Şehzade Mustafa (Prince Mustafa) had been put to death near Ereğli, and Dernschwam writes that he found the people along the road sad and angry. In his account some grieved over the killing of the prince and others over the endless Persian campaign; everyone praised Mustafa, feared unrest once the sultan left the throne, and believed that the two remaining princes could never be like their father.

The City Dernschwam Saw

Dernschwam entered Amasya along the Yeşilırmak and noted that the city could not be seen from a distance until one was right beside it. Before reaching it, he writes, they crossed a narrow old stone bridge wide enough for only one carriage, passed through a narrow gorge walled by high bare rocks, and struggled along a cramped road on which it was impossible to make way for an oncoming carriage. He describes the castle as standing on a high and imposing rock, and records that servants and the castle commander lived in mud-brick houses within it, and that trumpets and drums were sounded towards the city every morning and evening.

The traveller's view of the city is mostly unfavourable, and this is clearest in his account of the houses. He calls Amasya a poor city built on both sides of the valley, made up of mud-brick houses piled one above the other like swallows' nests. Most houses had two storeys, with stables below and above them rooms built of planks and beams and covered with earth; there were no kitchens, and food was cooked on small hearths in the rooms. He both described and drew in his diary the roller stone used to compact the flat earthen roofs. The surroundings of the city he describes as mountains, vineyards and orchards separated from one another by mud-brick or stone walls, and small summer houses within the gardens.

Dernschwam's count of the bridges is an important contribution to the urban history of Amasya. On the Yeşilırmak, before and within the city, he counted three stone bridges and one wooden one, noting that all were narrow, that no carriage could cross them and that their parapets were of stone or timber. He writes that he counted eleven mosques in the city, the finest of them being the Mosque of Bayezid II, where the sultan went for the Friday procession. He also listened carefully to the call to prayer, describing the work of the two muezzins calling to each other from the minarets as both a form of worship and a great and far from easy art. He recorded as well that a great fire broke out in the city on 14 April 1555 and that the burnt houses were quickly rebuilt.

Perhaps the most valuable part of the diary concerns the palaces of Amasya, of which nothing survives today. Dernschwam writes that the residence occupied first by Prince Mustafa and now by the sultan stood at the foot of the mountain, a fairly large and plain palace surrounded by a garden. At the entrance was a wooden gate between mud-brick walls, and the rooms beside it resembled those of a village house. In the courtyard stood a long single-storey building of mud brick, and within the garden another single-storey structure of fired brick, in which the sultan was staying. The traveller compares it to the house of an ordinary tradesman in his own country. On 1 June he also visited the Lower Palace, describing its walls of stone, its interior of fired brick and its flat earthen roof, and noting that the sultan's great tent and the craftsmen who pitched and repaired it were kept there. He adds that almost a thousand camels were needed to carry this tent and its equipment, and that the litter he saw in the palace was so heavy that only four horses could draw it.

Dernschwam also describes in detail the sultan's procession to Friday prayers. Süleyman sets out dressed in green, preceded by three pashas and by seven riderless spare horses with gold-embroidered saddles, while the çavuşes push the people from the middle of the road to its edges. He describes the carrying of the sultan's meals as a ceremony in itself: eleven servers in silk kaftans enter with covered, tinned copper dishes and after a while come out holding the empty lids. Harsh judgements on the Turks and on Islam are mixed into the traveller's writing here and there; yet the same text shows open admiration when it compares the endurance of the Turkish soldier, content with yoghurt and water, with the comfortable plenty of Christian soldiers. The diary long remained in manuscript in the Fugger archive, was published in 1923 in Franz Babinger's edition, and was translated into Turkish by Yaşar Önen.

Evliya Çelebi and the Ottoman Sources

The great traveller of the seventeenth century, Evliya Çelebi, spent more than forty years crossing the Ottoman lands inch by inch and gathered what he saw in the ten volumes of his Seyahatname (Book of Travels). The second volume describes, besides Black Sea cities such as Bursa, İzmit, Sinop, Samsun and Trabzon, the towns of Düzce, Bolu, Gerede, Amasya, Niksar, Erzurum, Merzifon and Çorum. The date of his visit to Amasya is given differently in the sources; some publications place it in April 1640, while scholars working on the city generally speak of the middle of the century. Evliya Çelebi describes the places he visited in lively prose, recording in detail their location, history and buildings and the customs, dress and crafts of their people. The Seyahatname was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in June 2013.

Evliya Çelebi's Amasya is a busy Ottoman provincial city with fifty-three quarters, one thousand and sixty shops, its guilds, covered market, inns and the water wheels that irrigated its vineyards. The details of this account, with its quarters, bazaars and craft guilds, are discussed in our article on urban life in Ottoman Amasya as described by Evliya Çelebi. The works of the Ottoman geographer Kâtip Çelebi also contain information on the cities of Anatolia, but these are a geographer's compilation rather than a traveller's impressions.

English Travellers in the Eighteenth Century

English records of Amasya from the eighteenth century are brief and scattered. The English clergyman Richard Pococke published in London in 1745, in two volumes, the journeys he had made between 1737 and 1741 through Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Cyprus and Anatolia. Pococke mentions Amasya as the birthplace of the famous historian and geographer Strabo, notes that the old name of the river running through the city was the Iris, and refers to a few ancient remains. Thomas Howel, in the service of the East India Company, reached Amasya after Tokat in 1787 on the Diyarbakır-Istanbul road while returning from India to England. Howel describes Amasya as a large city through which the Yeşilırmak flows; he writes that there were mulberry trees around it but that the region on the whole looked barren, and he gives the city importance as Strabo's birthplace and the home of the ancient Amazons.

The most striking text of the period is not really a travel account at all. C. Wilkinson's book, published in London in 1806, sends its imaginary heroes overland from Istanbul eastwards by way of Osmancık, Merzifon, Amasya, Giresun, Trabzon, Bayburt and Erzurum. The author took much of his information from the work describing the French botanist Tournefort's journey of 1701. The Amasya of the book is a large and crowded town surrounded by many rugged mountains; on the steep face of one of them, rising some half a mile, there are hollows resembling a Hindu temple. Wilkinson also describes how the lower parts of the city were watered by wheels fitted with buckets and turned by the river, and how the water was carried from troughs through pipes to the baths and fountains. The same text exaggerates the non-Muslim population of Amasya and states that there was only one mosque in the city; scholars cite this error as an example of the problem of reliability posed by authors who turned their travels into fiction.

The First Half of the Nineteenth Century

In the early nineteenth century, English diplomats returning overland from Persia or India to Istanbul began to pass through Amasya regularly. The first of them was James Morier, later known for his Hajji Baba novels. On his journey of 1808-1809 Morier came by way of Erzurum and Tokat; he described the region as the sphere of influence of the Çapanoğlu family and mentioned the refuges, found every four hours along the road, where eight or ten men waited to keep the road safe. He describes Amasya as lying among mountains that rise like an amphitheatre, with houses ranged in rows on the slopes. He saw the castle in ruins to the north of the city and climbed with a young Turkish guide to the five monuments cut into the rock high on the same mountain, that is, the royal tombs. Looking down from there, he writes, the flowing river and the water mills made a fine view, and the minarets of the great mosque on the riverbank rose among houses with similar roofs. He set out for Merzifon in the evening.

The English diplomat William Ouseley, returning from his post in Persia in the years 1810-1812, reached Amasya at night. He relates that gardens and villas began two or three miles before the city but that he could not make them out in the dark. After walking for at least an hour through narrow streets between houses whose balconies almost touched overhead, they settled into an inn at four in the morning. He admits that he could not examine the city properly because he feared the plague that had gripped Istanbul and was spreading through Anatolia; he contented himself with drawing, from the window of his room, the castle and the river rushing beneath it. The next day he also kept out of Merzifon because of the epidemic, and guessed from outside that the town was close to Amasya in size and population. John Macdonald Kinneir, who followed the same trade route in 1813-1814, did not stop at Amasya, since he turned off from Osmancık towards Samsun by way of Vezirköprü.

The Scottish painter and diplomat Robert Ker Porter came to Amasya from Tokat on the return leg of his 1817-1820 journey through Georgia, Persia and Armenia. He complains that the road between Turhal and Amasya was zigzagging and mountainous, then describes with enthusiasm his descent into the valley filled with gardens that sheltered the summer houses of the city's wealthy. On the way he saw water pouring from the rocks which, in an earlier age, had been carried to the city by an aqueduct cut into the winding face of the mountain and running for some five miles; he reports that the people attributed this channel to a lovesick artist who wished to win the heart of the beautiful daughter of one of the kings of Amasya. This story is a version of the local tradition that links the water channel to the tale of Ferhat and Şirin. As he entered the city Porter saw the ruins of an old church resembling those he had seen at Ani, part of it now used as a mosque, and Greek inscriptions on old buildings, which he had no opportunity to copy. He found the streets narrow and broken and the houses tall and overhanging, and compared them to London before the Great Fire. He passed through part of the bazaar to reach the quarter of the Çapar Han, and on leaving he stopped for a few minutes down the valley to sketch the city and its rocks.

The American missionaries Eli Smith and Harrison Gray Otis Dwight reached Amasya on 30 May 1830. They write that the mountain opposite their window was a separate mass of rock with precipices on either side, crowned with the walls of an old castle, and that in the cliff there were openings resembling dervish cells, belonging to no tradition they could identify. They add that the sun reflected from the cliffs made the summers excessively hot, but that the same heat produced abundant fruit. In their view the city was a typical Turkish town apart from its houses, which were better than those common in the region; a fine bridge joined the two banks of the river. They counted 4000 Turkish, 600 Armenian and 125 Greek houses in the city and saw in the bazaar heaps of salt brought from nearby mines. The next day they set out for Turhal.

The Scottish writer and painter James Baillie Fraser reached Amasya in the winter of 1834, in snow and rain, travelling by Tatar courier from Istanbul to Tehran. He likens the city to a statue standing in a narrow cleft; the rocks rising above it were half veiled in cloud and mist and partly covered in snow, and a conical rock was crowned by the castle. He relates that they had covered seven hundred miles in six days and that, escaping the ruined, dark stable that served as the post house, they found a place in a caravanserai. Crossing the old bridge, he saw the great water wheels that supplied the city, the kings' tombs in the rock from a distance, a fine Greek church as they left the city, and the rock-cut water channel they followed for two miles. He expresses his regret at leaving Strabo's birthplace without having had time to examine it.

Hamilton and Ainsworth

The English geologist William John Hamilton, who came to Amasya in the summer of 1836, was one of the first Western travellers to describe the city with a specialist's eye. After touring the Black Sea coast, Hamilton had come inland by way of Vezirköprü, Havza and Ladik and first descended into the plain of Taşova. He writes that this plain, which Strabo called Phanaroia, was then divided into four cantons, Erek, Taşova, Sonusa and Karayaka, and that the whole plain belonged to the Hacıoğlu family who lived at Erek. At Sonusa he failed to find the ancient remains he had hoped for, seeing only an old Turkish bath still in use, a mosque on the point of collapse and scattered fragments of columns.

Returning from Zile, two miles before the city, he noticed some twenty feet above the road the remains of an old water channel cut into the hard rock and long out of use. Where the valley widened he saw, on the far bank of the river, the castle and acropolis on top of a high rock and below the castle the caves which he did not doubt were the royal tombs mentioned by Strabo, and he entered the city at half past five in the afternoon, winding through narrow streets. The main street was lined with buildings in the Seljuk style, either ruined or used as mosques. He writes that most of the houses were built of stone, which gave the city an air of superiority over other Turkish towns, and that the population consisted of 3000-4000 Turkish, 750 Armenian and 100-150 Greek houses. For Hamilton the most remarkable things in the city were the acropolis, the ancient walls and the royal tombs; but he believed that Amasya drew its chief interest from being the birthplace of Strabo, and he quoted in full the long passage in which Strabo describes his native city. Climbing to the castle, he went some fifty paces into the passage descending underground and turned back at his guide's warning. Hamilton's two-volume work, published in 1842, has been translated into Turkish by Kasım Toraman under the title Küçük Asya.

A few years after Hamilton, the physician and geographer William Francis Ainsworth, who crossed from Zile to Amasya on 12 July during his journey of the late 1830s, writes that as he approached the city the valley narrowed steadily until it was closed by cliffs rising 800 to 1000 feet above the river. He relates that the first mountain to appear in the south was the Ferhat Dağı, with an aqueduct cut into its slope and a poetic local tradition attached to it, while to the north rose a castle whose summit was ringed with walls. According to Ainsworth, Amasya had been the capital of the kings of Pontus, and coins struck under Roman emperors from Marcus Aurelius to Severus Alexander named it the first city of Pontus. The Amasya he himself saw had a population of 18,000, including some 6000 Armenians, most of them engaged in silk production. Ainsworth also notes here that the French traveller Victor Fontanier, who had seen the city earlier, gave a figure of ten thousand households. The city was governed by a mütesellim answerable to the pasha of Sivas, and an Armenian bishop also resided there. He found the general character of the town good and mentioned the fine mansions of Turkmen and Ottoman beys, the remains of a temple and the imposing mosque built by Sultan Bayezid.

Amasya at Mid-Century

Henry Suter, the British vice-consul at Trabzon, stopped at Amasya after Tokat in October 1838 while travelling from Erzurum to Samsun. He writes that the city was eight hours from Zile and that the quarters built between the steep rocks on both banks were joined by a handsome stone bridge. He found the houses only slightly better than wooden huts and rough in appearance, and counted 3970 houses in the city, 3500 of them Turkish, 350 Armenian and 120 Greek. As a commercial official he was most interested in silk: Amasya silk was not thought good enough for the English market, a small part went to Istanbul and most of it to Aleppo and Damascus. The bazaars, on the other hand, he found orderly and reasonably well stocked.

The English missionary George Percy Badger, sent east in 1842-1844 to investigate the Nestorians, came from Ladik on 5 October and, after riding for three hours through an unbroken strip of garden irrigated by water mills turned by the current, caught sight of Amasya. In his account the riverbed here was some sixty metres wide and spanned by three bridges, two of wood and one of stone; the stone bridge was built entirely from the remains of ancient Amasya. Asking why nothing remained of the monuments described by Strabo, Badger adopts an explanation he quotes from a French writer: the stone rollers used to compact the flat earthen roofs were often taken from ancient buildings and tombs, and if one considered that Amasya had some six thousand such roofs, it was easy to see how much destruction this habit had caused. According to Badger the city was governed by a müsellim appointed by the pasha of Sivas; besides many small mosques there were two large and well-built ones. The five hundred Armenian families, under the bishop of Tokat, had three churches, and the fifteen Greek families had a church, a priest and a school. His work shows a marked prejudice against and contempt for Muslims.

The English geologist Warington Wilkinson Smyth, who travelled through the Ottoman lands between 1839 and 1844 studying mines and geology, came upon Amasya from the direction of Turhal after rounding a sharp bend in the valley. He describes the red-tiled houses, white minarets and green trees rising from the banks of the Yeşilırmak towards the foot of the steep cliffs, and on the opposite bank the huge precipice bearing the towers of Greeks, Romans and Ottomans and carved with the tombs of the Pontic kings. What impressed Smyth most were the water wheels: huge wheels fitted with large earthenware pots were turned by the current, the pots dipped into the water, rose, and emptied their contents into troughs that watered the gardens. He compared them to the Persian wheels of Egypt and wrote that in the silence of the night the groaning and creaking of the wheels mingled with the sound of the river.

Georges Perrot and the Oxford of Anatolia

The French archaeologist Georges Perrot, in the course of his research expedition in Galatia and Pontus, set out from Çorum for Amasya on 25 November 1861. He covered most of the two-day journey across dull heathland covered with dwarf juniper, and writes that the landscape became pleasant only towards the evening of the second day, when they came down into the valley of the Yeşilırmak. To him the Yeşilırmak, the "Green River", deserved its name: its clear dark-green water made a sharp contrast with the muddy grey water of the Kızılırmak. Willows and alders lined its banks, wide mulberry plantations surrounded it with hundreds of silkworm houses, and red-tiled houses rose even above the fruit trees of which Amasya was so proud. An hour before the city they crossed the Yeşilırmak by a stone bridge, and at a bend in the road Amasya suddenly appeared before them. Perrot calls it the most picturesque city they had yet seen in Asia Minor.

Perrot's description of the city has a wealth of detail that later writers often quoted. On the right bank the mountain draws back a little, leaving room below for houses and above for vineyards and small pavilions where people went to take the cool air in summer. On the left bank the twin-peaked hill carrying the old castle and its five rings of walls sets its foot in the river; only a narrow strip of land leaves room for a single row of houses squeezed between the mountain and the green water. Above this quarter Hellenistic walls mark the site of the palace of the kings of Pontus, and higher still open the great tombs cut from the rock; Perrot writes that these were, as Strabo expressly says, the tombs of the kings. At the gate by which they entered stood Seljuk buildings, and then, in the middle of a tree-planted square overlooking the river, the well-kept Bayezid Mosque. The quays lined with houses built on piles reminded him a little of the banks of the Tiber in Rome. Mills reaching to the middle of the river, great water wheels watering the gardens, several wooden bridges, and a stone bridge built of column shafts, bases and fragments of cornices, very probably dating from the Byzantine period, completed the scene.

In Amasya Perrot and his companions stayed at the house of a European merchant and industrialist who had lived there for nearly twenty years and ran a flour mill, and whom he names only by the initial "M. K...". It was the city in which they stayed longest after Ankara. The governor, Salih Pasha, received them with a ceremony in which the gendarmes were drawn up in two lines, and entertained them with sherbet, coffee and refilled pipes. Perrot relates that the land his host had bought to build a second mill had for two years been denied registration because of the reports the governor sent to Istanbul, and he sees this as an example of resistance to foreigners acquiring property.

Perrot's most quoted sentence about Amasya concerns its madrasas. In his view Amasya, despite its industrial revival, had remained a university city since Seljuk times and could be called "the Oxford of Anatolia": in a population of about twenty-five thousand there were some two thousand softas, or students, distributed among eighteen madrasas. Perrot compares these madrasas to the colleges of the English universities; each had farms in the province, houses in the city and shops in the bazaar, and gave its students a room and a weekly ration of bread, rice and oil, some even a small sum of money. Since the reign of Mahmud II the madrasas no longer collected these revenues themselves but received them through the local representatives of the Ministry of Pious Endowments in Istanbul. It should also be noted that Perrot dismissed the teaching in the madrasas as dry scholasticism and wrote that Christians made up only a quarter of the population.

Towards the End of the Century

The American missionary Henry John Van Lennep stopped at Amasya in 1864 on his way from Samsun to Tokat and stayed in the region from 15 April to 14 May. He writes that on entering the city he first saw the old castle on the summit of the mountain and then the north-eastern part inhabited by the Christians, which he considered the hottest and unhealthiest part of the city; the Turks, as usual, lived in the best quarters on both banks of the river, on gently sloping ground. The ancient work Lennep found most interesting in Amasya was the water channel cut into the hard limestone, which could be traced for some three miles south of the city. He writes that it was so well preserved that it could have been brought back into use at little cost; his companion Strohl rode his horse inside the channel for a considerable distance to show its width. It was about five feet wide, and the marks of the chisel were plainly visible.

Lennep also recorded the legend of the channel in detail: the daughter of the king of Amasya had sworn to marry no one but the man who brought the water of a certain spring to her palace, and a poor lover set about doing the whole work with his own hands, finishing it when he had reached the age of ninety-five, only to find on arriving at the palace that the princess had long been dead. It is striking that this story, known among the people as the tale of Ferhat and Şirin, was met by every Western traveller from Porter to Lennep. Lennep further writes that the house of George Krug, who had lived in Amasya for twenty-five years and ran a silk factory, stood near the site of the ancient palace of the kings of Pontus, and that remains of walls, vaults and baths still stood, although their stones had been carried off for building. Looking out from this house, he relates, one saw the broad river dividing the city in two, several bridges joining the banks, and just beyond the valley a wide plain full of gardens and mulberry groves.

The English traveller Henry Fanshawe Tozer reached Amasya on 19 July after a two-day journey from Samsun and left for Yozgat on the morning of the 21st. In the source Tozer's eastern journey is dated to 1879, while the year 1878 is given where the date of the visit is mentioned. Tozer writes that they crossed the Iris by a stone bridge and rode past many great water wheels turned by the current, which reminded him of the wheels on the Adige at Verona, except that those of Amasya were much larger. He estimated the river to be about sixty metres wide and noted that, although the water was low in the summer heat, he saw horses and men swimming in it, and that the water was turbid and whitish. The site of the city reminded him of Berat in Albania: both lay at the foot of a steep castle rock, on a river flowing between two plains. He writes that in summer Amasya was like an oven, that the heat would be unbearable but for the breeze blowing up the valley towards evening, and that the population was estimated at about twenty thousand. On leaving he looked out over the city from the house of the German consul Krug and called it the finest view of Amasya to be had.

By the end of the century the interest of those who visited Amasya was becoming increasingly scholarly. The English historian J. G. C. Anderson toured the region of Çorum, Gümüşhacıköy, Amasya and Tokat in 1899 on a research expedition devoted to the roads, inscriptions and milestones of Pontus. This expedition was the first link in the systematic studies of Pontus carried out in the following years. The French geographer Vital Cuinet's La Turquie d'Asie, published in the early 1890s, is a largely statistical work describing Amasya through figures on population, schools and production.

What the Travellers Observed in Common

Certain subjects recur constantly in the notes of these travellers, who came in different centuries and for different purposes. Almost all of them mention Amasya as Strabo's birthplace and compare the city with his description; Hamilton, Badger, and Smith and Dwight all quote the lines in which Strabo describes his native city as a deep and large valley through which the Iris flows. The royal tombs appear in nearly every account, but whose tombs they were is clear only to those who had read Strabo; Smith and Dwight likened them to dervish cells and wrote that they could not learn whether any remains of the royal period survived. The water wheels, from Ibn Battuta's vineyards and gardens to Tozer's comparison with Verona, are the most familiar image of the city.

Population figures can also be traced through these notes. Smith and Dwight count 4000 Turkish, 600 Armenian and 125 Greek houses in 1830, Hamilton 3000-4000 Turkish, 750 Armenian and 100-150 Greek houses in 1836, and Suter a total of 3970 houses in 1838. Ainsworth estimates 18,000 people, Perrot about twenty-five thousand in 1861, and Tozer twenty thousand. There are also wide differences in the figures for the Armenian population: Smith and Dwight count 600 Armenian houses and Hamilton 750, while Badger speaks of five hundred Armenian families and Ainsworth of six thousand Armenians; the figure of ten thousand households attributed to Fontanier is also far above the others. Most of these figures rest on what the traveller was told rather than on his own count, and they become meaningful only when used together with archival documents.

The number of bridges also forms an interesting series. Dernschwam had counted three stone bridges and one wooden one in 1555. Smith and Dwight mention a single fine bridge joining the two banks, Badger sees three bridges, two of wood and one of stone, and Perrot describes a stone bridge built of ancient fragments alongside several wooden ones. That the stone bridge was built of ancient and Byzantine material is an observation made independently by Badger and Perrot.

The Value and Limits of Travel Accounts

These records are valuable for documenting the architecture, economy, social life and natural setting of Amasya in different periods. Nothing survives today of the palaces Dernschwam described, and his diary is the principal text that tells us what they looked like. The way Morier, Porter and Fraser saw the rock tombs and the water channel, Hamilton's steps in the castle tunnel, Perrot's count of the madrasas and Lennep's measurements of the channel are details found in no other source. Some of these travellers were painters and included engravings of the city in their books; Ouseley drew the castle from his window, and Porter sketched the valley as he left.

On the other hand, travel accounts must be read with care. Most travellers stayed in the city a few days, some only a few hours; not knowing the language, they often took their information at second or third hand, repeated what earlier travellers had said, or exaggerated to hold the reader's attention. Some, like Wilkinson, turned their journeys entirely into fiction. Open prejudice against Turks and Muslims can be seen in the texts of Dernschwam and Badger; Perrot, too, belittles the learning of the madrasas. The information the travellers give therefore acquires its true value when weighed together with the Ottoman tax registers, the Islamic court registers and local histories.

Older accounts also state that names such as Robert Ker Porter and Victor Fontanier were among those who saw Amasya, and the notes described above confirm this. The Ottoman intellectual and pioneer of archaeology Osman Hamdi Bey is also said to have seen the city; however, no record documenting such a visit could be found. Most of these travel notes were published in the nineteenth century in London, Paris and New York and long shaped what European readers knew of Amasya. Hamilton's work also brought the Hittite capital at Boğazköy into the literature of Western art history.

Chronology

Around 1333: Ibn Battuta comes from Sivas to Amasya, then goes on to Sunusa and Gümüş.

1553: Hans Dernschwam joins the embassy sent by Ferdinand I to Süleyman the Magnificent.

7 April - 2 June 1555: The Habsburg embassy is in Amasya; a great fire breaks out in the city on 14 April.

1640 or the middle of the century: Evliya Çelebi's journey describing Amasya; the date is given differently in the sources.

1737-1741: Richard Pococke's eastern journeys; the work is published in 1745.

1787: Thomas Howel passes through Amasya on the Diyarbakır-Istanbul road.

1806: C. Wilkinson's fictional travel book is published in London.

1808-1809: James Morier comes from Tokat to Amasya.

1810-1812: William Ouseley spends a night in Amasya on his return from Persia.

1817-1820: Robert Ker Porter's journey; he passes through Amasya on his return.

30 May 1830: Eli Smith and H. G. O. Dwight reach Amasya.

1834: James Baillie Fraser passes through Amasya in midwinter.

1836: William John Hamilton examines Amasya and the plain of Taşova.

October 1838: Henry Suter stops at Amasya on his Erzurum-Samsun journey.

1842-1844: George Percy Badger's mission to the east; he is in Amasya in October.

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

1864: Henry John Van Lennep stays in the region from 15 April to 14 May.

1879: Henry Fanshawe Tozer is in Amasya from 19 to 21 July (given in one place as 1878).

1899: J. G. C. Anderson's research expedition in Pontus.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

  • Hans Dernschwam, İstanbul ve Anadolu'ya Seyahat Günlüğü, trans. Yaşar Önen, Ministry of Culture and Tourism Publications, Ankara 1987.

Other sources

  • William John Hamilton, Küçük Asya, trans. Kasım Toraman, 2013 (Researches in Asia Minor, Pontus and Armenia, London 1842).
  • Henry Fanshawe Tozer, Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor, London 1881.
  • Henry John Van Lennep, Travels in Little-Known Parts of Asia Minor, London 1870.

Online sources