Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.

• Author: Crane, Howard

Among major Islamic architectural types, it is perhaps the palace which, more than any other genre, has stubbornly resisted serious and systematic study. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which are the absolute rarity of surviving examples of Islamic palace architecture and the tendency in contemporary literary sources to treat the palace in terms of hyperbole and topoi. Although the Umayyad villa rustica in Syria is relatively well known, and the vast Abbasid palaces of Samarra and their Ghaznavid analogs at Lashkar-i Bazar and Ghhazni have been surveyed, and the Ilkhanid Takht-i Sulayman and Timur's Aq Saray in Shahr-i Sabz have recently received some attention, and in the Islamic west Abd al-Rahman III's Madinat al-Zahra outside Cordoba and the Alhambra in Granada have been subjects of both archaeological inquiry and popular imagination, the description of these geographically dispersed and chronologically scattered complexes has for the most part been limited to simple physical description. Absent in the accounts of these often vast ensembles has been any real insight into the social and ceremonial activities and the ideological and iconographic purposes for which they were generated. As a result, the picture we have of the Islamic palace is for the most part a sadly two-dimensional one that fails to convey any real understanding of these monuments as vital and functioning entities, as architectural environments related to sets of specific human activities.

Of course, this deficiency can in part be accounted for by the historical remoteness of many of these buildings as well as the poverty of the primary documents and literary sources available to explain their structural evolution and the complex range of functions they were intended to serve. Even as regards later Islamic places such as the Mughal Red Fort of Delhi, or the Safavid Chihil Sutun and Hasht Bihisht and royal gardens of Isfahan, such materials are relatively scarce - which is one reason why the Topkapi Palace, the New Palace (saray-i cedid) of Sultan Mehmed II in Istanbul, is from the point of view of the historian interested in the intersection of Islamic court ceremonial and the built environment such a unique and fascinating monument.

While the Topkapi Palace has over the years been the subject of a number of studies, including Abdurrahman Seref's Topkapu Saray-i Humanuni (1910-11), Barnette Miller's Beyond the Sublime Porte (1931), N. M. Penzer's...