This interesting book examines the Muslim architecture of Asia Minor during the period from the Mongol subjugation of the Rum Seljuk sultanate (639/1243) to the end of that sultanate's existence (c. 704/1304–05) and a short period beyond. The book's programme is to place Seljuk architecture, and more widely the architecture of the period, in a scheme of differing patronage and local styles rather than attempting to force the whole phenomenon into a unified, time-driven sequence of development. Particular monuments are described in chapters devoted to the cities of Konya, Sivas and Erzurum and finally certain minor monuments in Tokat, Amasya, etc. built at the end of the Seljuk period and in the three subsequent decades.

In Konya we have to do with monuments financed during the mid-century and after by powerful, wealthy officers of the state such as Karatay (the eponymous madrasa, 649/1251); the sultans themselves were politically and economically too weak to undertake such building themselves. At Sivas the three well-known madrasas, all finished in 670/1271, are examined, again in the context of patronage (the finance minister of the Il-Khanid empire, a Seljuk wazīr etc.); here the relationship of the carved decoration on the Çifte Minare Medresesi and Buruciye Medresesi to that of the Great Mosque at Divriği is explored. Coming to Erzurum, the author dates the relatively large Çifte Minare Medresesi to 1290 or 1300 (strangely, for an author who argues for a hiatus in building between the early 1270s and early 1290s and thereafter only a series of small, unambitious constructions); she describes the Yakutiye Medresesi (710/1210–11); and concludes that a local style is at work. The thesis of the final chapter is that while in north-east Asia Minor trade with Tabriz strengthened, generating the wealth needed to construct monuments, the economic circumstances which had permitted the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the patrons of ostentatious buildings in Konya and Sivas had simply dissolved; the result was that patronage was confined to local individuals with no connection to the state though sometimes connected to Sufi organizations or akhī (social-cum-professional) fraternities; only minor buildings such as the Sünbül Baba Zaviyesi at Tokat (691/1292) could be constructed.

Much of the author's analysis of given carved decorative patterns and their relationship to the same or similar patterns in other buildings is underlain, explicitly or implicitly, by the concept of the workshop. If there genuinely were workshops, their nature is unexplained in the book. The author's argumentation seems to assume that workshops were not shops. Were they perhaps teams which moved from project to project? This would constitute a possible explanation for the recurrence of certain motifs in Sivas, for example, after their initial deployment in Konya. In this case the teams would have a perennial existence and constitution, which would change only marginally with retirement, illness, recruitment, etc. This is perhaps a plausible model. But evidence independent of the buildings is completely lacking. Alternatively a workshop was a team assembled for one given project and then dispersed. This, too, is a possible model, but again unsupported by any independent evidence. We cannot argue anything about the nature of workshops from the well-attested mobility of an artisan who on three widely dispersed buildings signed himself Kālūyān al-Qunawī (“Kālūyān of Konya”). We do not know if Kālūyān was an architect (possible but unlikely), the leader of a workshop or ad hoc assembler of workshops, or simply a craftsman enjoying a certain recognition of his skill. But at any rate if he was any kind of organizer or assembler his own mobility would not necessarily entail that he brought with him to different and geographically dispersed projects the same team. It is questionable, too, whether we can assume that the occurrence of a particular motif on two different buildings implies that the same workshop was employed in the construction of both buildings. A further vital distinction should be brought to bear on the discussion. This is the distinction between a feature or motif recurring in a second building because it is part of the relevant workshop's repertory, or part of the repertory of a craftsman in the relevant team or teams, and a straight imitation.

To this reviewer's eye the attempt to set building in north-east Asia Minor during the last decade of the thirteenth century and the following three decades in the framework of trade and other economic activity is a correct move in the interpretation of the buildings constructed in the period and region. The question arises: Why not make the same move in regard to Konya in the mid-thirteenth century and Sivas in 670/1271? Plausible answers emerge: from the Seljuk capture of Antalya in 603/1207 at least until the 650s/1250s, Konya owed its wealth, in part, to the tracks leading from Antalya and Alanya to Kayseri and Sivas, and from there either to Sinop and the Crimea or to Erzurum, Tabriz and ultimately Central Asia and China. Equally the diversion of trade from the line between Aleppo and the Persian Gulf to that between the port of Ayas in Cilicia, founded in the 1250s (its acquisition by the Mamluks, which led immediately to its closure as a port for intercontinental trade, is here dated, oddly, to 1285, p. 171), Sivas, Erzurum and Tabriz and so to the Indies and China must have been one of the impulses leading to the explosion in the erection of Muslim public buildings in Sivas.

Despite the exclusion of many buildings, the chronologically ordered, city-by-city analysis constitutes a scheme, revelatory to an extent, which explains differences of building style partly at least in terms of changes in patronage. In the book monuments are meticulously described, their inscriptions fully translated, and the inscriptions' content and phraseology explicated in full. The book gives us many insights, more than can be detailed in a short review.