In this book, Patricia Blessing takes up historical themes as diverse as politics, trade networks, religious scholarship, patterns of patronage, the organization of craft workshops, and the emergence of a uniquely Anatolian expression of Islam. Across four case studies in as many chapters, she combines historical background with the formal description and analysis of specific buildings. The result is a richly textured exploration of a historical moment through its materialized form, offering important insights to scholars of history and architecture alike.
In Blessing's first two chapters, she traces the private patronage of Saljūq and Ilkhānid administrators in Konya and Sivas after 1243 to show how this patronage tracked broader political changes. In Konya, private commissions brought monumental architecture out from the urban core, which had received the bulk of earlier royal Saljūq attention. In the absence of the Saljūq court, and at a distance from the Ilkhānid, these buildings also helped establish Sufi communities as foci of Anatolian Islamic society.
The rise of the Ilkhānate, meanwhile, had a significant impact in Sivas, the new regional capital under the Mongols, where three major madrasas were built in one year (AH 670/1271-2 CE). Taken together, these madrasas show how early Ilkhānid administrative involvement (led by Shams al-Dīn Juvaynī) and the continued legacy of the Saljūq state (represented by Ṣāḥib ʿAṭā Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī) helped generate a local hybrid decorative style translating the plastic motifs of Iranian stucco into the soft local limestone. While this discussion raises questions about the identity and availability of craftsmen, Blessing avoids crediting stylistic continuity to the activity of individual workshops. Instead, she sees the emergence of a “regional vocabulary” (103) in response to specific political, economic, and material circumstances.
Blessing's third case study, Erzerum, neatly builds on the first two. Even more so than Sivas, the situation of Erzerum changed with the shift of political gravity to Azerbaijan, and the city saw a spate of madrasa construction after Ghazan Khan's conversion to Islam in 1295. As in Sivas, the materials and decorations used in Erzerum look to nearby regions, only here influence comes more from Armenia than the Ilkhānid capital region. As in chapter 1, Blessing discusses the location of these buildings within the urban fabric of Erzerum, emphasizing their effect on the human experience. She further discusses the role of endowments (awqaf) in the social lives of buildings by comparing several examples of surviving waqf inscriptions in Erzerum with the preeminent extant waqf document from the period, that of the rabʿ-i rashīdī of Rashīd al-Dīn Ṭabīb in Tabriz.
The fourth and final chapter simultaneously sits outside the rest of the book and ties it together. Chapter 4 focuses on a series of minor foundations along Anatolian trade routes to show how patronage and workshop activity became increasingly localized in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. It seems natural to set this after the other three chapters, since the buildings treated here date generally later than those of the other chapters. However, the historical overview that occupies the first half of Chapter Four includes two discussions that help illuminate the entire book: first, that Ilkhānid involvement in the region changed in response to both Mamlūk intervention and persistent economic troubles in Tabriz and, second, that Saljūq patronage of caravanserai networks (which the Ilkhāns discontinued) had begun to demonstrate a uniform imperial Saljūq style, suggesting that the Mongol invasion interrupted a regional process of political and cultural integration.
Each of Blessing's chapters is extensively illustrated with photos and plan drawings. The choice of images for the ten color plates is not always apparent. Chapters 1 and 3 include very clear schematic maps of Konya and Erzerum that locate the buildings under discussion in relation to one another and to the broader urban geography. These help substantiate Blessing's arguments about how location affects the political and social role of these buildings. Blessing's choice to reproduce an older map for chapter 2 misses the chance to draw the book more tightly together with a uniform mapping convention and discussion of urban fabric.
Blessing makes a compelling case for Islamic architecture in Mongol Anatolia neither as a simple extension of Saljūq practice nor a prelude to Ottoman forms, but as a reflection of specific political, social, and technological circumstances. This contributes to a growing consensus that the Ilkhānid period was more an inflection point than a disturbance in an otherwise “normal” development in history and in art. We are left wondering about the first syllable of the title, which obscures the book's overall contribution, namely that the Mongol period was one of building Anatolian urban, artistic, and social forms.
