Karataş|83central Anatolia, with the cities of Amasya and Konya as their respective centers.
The Turkish polities in the frontier region fought against the Byzantine Empire
and expanded westward. The regions of Rum and Karaman served as bases of
competing political entities. Immediately after their conquest by the Turkish
invaders, Amasya and Konya became the respective capitals of the competing
Danişmendid and Seljukid dynasties. After the collapse of both dynasties, the
Karamanids captured Konya in 1277 and effectively became the rulers of the
Karaman region.
Amasya was captured by the Ottomans and enjoyed a privileged relationship
with the Ottoman royal family. Young Ottoman princes were trained as future
sultans in the city. All four of the fifteenth-century Ottoman sultans were trained
in Amasya, and each maintained a special relationship with the city. These sul-
tans granted a certain degree of autonomy to Amasya, honored the city’s scholars
and Sufis, and employed its elites in prestigious positions in the Ottoman capital.
On a more regional level, the Ottoman incorporation of Amasya and the
Rum region revived the centuries-old rivalry between the Rum and Karaman
regions in a different format. Throughout the fifteenth century, the Ottoman
and Karamanid dynasties fought for domination in Anatolia, and Amasya be-
came a very critical political and military center for the Ottomans. Following the
Ottoman conquest of Konya in 1467 and the subsequent elimination of the Kara-
manid dynasty, the rivalry between the two cities took another form as the two
competing princely factions, those of Bayezid and his younger brother Cem
(d. 1495) adopted these cities as their respective bases of operations.
By 1474, around the time Karamani and İskilibi appeared in Rum, Bayezid,
the oldest son of Sultan Mehmed II, had been the governor of the region for the
last twenty years. Bayezid was well known for his beneficence to the Halveti and
the Bayrami orders. The political context of the period suggests that Bayezid’s
protection and patronage of the Sufis was more than a manifestation of piety; it
was a strategic political move. The prospects of the sultan’s death escalated the
tension between Bayezid and Cem.
Cem’s prospects for acceding to the throne were better than Bayezid’s. Cem
was based in the Karaman region and supported by the Karamanid network
headed by the grand vizier Mehmed Pasha (d. 1481), who was the de facto ruler
while the sultan was ill in Istanbul in the preceding few years. Among the mem-
bers of the Karamanid network behind Cem was the Sufi order of the Zeyniye.
With its origin in Central Asia, the Zeyniye established itself in Anatolia first in
the city of Konya and the surrounding Karaman region in the first half of the
fifteenth century. It then expanded into the Ottoman core lands, but most of its
shaykhs and followers still had connections to the Karaman region.
The Halvetiye made its first appearance in Anatolia with the arrival of Pir
İlyas (d. ca. 1412) in Amasya, where the order also established its first contacts