It has become clear that in the sixteenth century, architecture was made more uniform in imperial projects as a result of the Ottoman Empire’s performance as a centralized state. Eventually, the fifteenth century receded into a distant past that was hard to comprehend from the point of view of the empire’s so-called Classical Age. This is true for history, reshaped by sixteenth-century historians in ways that made sense in their own present, and it is also true for the built environment, which was transformed by later uses and perceived in new ways. This aspect of the long-term development of the Ottoman Empire with its closely intertwined administrative, imperial, and artistic interventions emerges in the material politics of the architecture analyzed in this book.

I have followed the trajectory of Ottoman architecture as it unfolded from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries.