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by his son Çelebi Mehmet (Mehmed I). To the west, in Çekirge, is the beautiful complex of buildings endowed by his father, Murad Hüdavendigâr. It includes what is today known as the Hüdavendigâr Camii (Ruler’s Mosque), which was designed as a multipurpose building (as were most early Ottoman mosques), containing under one roof a zaviye (hostel for dervishes), a medrese, and the actual sanctuary itself. Next to it still stands the imaret, where twice a day those who worked in the complex, students of the medrese, dervishes staying at the zaviye, travelers (rich and poor), and the local indigent were fed free of charge. No longer in existence is the hospital. In its garden is the tomb of Murad himself and, lower down the hill, the Eski Kaplıca. In the center of the town once stood an imposing han, also endowed by this ruler, as were numerous others built by his descendants (which do survive). In short, here is an encapsulated version of early Ottoman history.

The story it tells is not the one recorded by the sixteenth-century chroniclers, who lived at a time when the dynasty had already achieved its aspiration to be recognized as the successor of the earlier great Sunni (Orthodox) Ummayid, Abbasid, and Seljuk empires. As part of that goal the sixteenth-century rulers had fully embraced orthodoxy (this also set them apart from their eastern enemy, the Shii Safavids in Iran), and the early history of their enterprise was conveniently rewritten accordingly.

Far from what they had become by the time these mythologized eulogies were penned, initially the fourteenth-century sultans ruled over a state the overwhelming majority of whose inhabitants were Christians, reflected in the fact that the services of the hospitals and soup kitchens endowed by Murad Hüdav-endigâr and other rulers were available to subjects regardless of religion. This largesse impressed several European visitors.

The facilities provided for the Muslim mystics, the dervishes, which included free lodging in the zaviyes and free food in the imarets, likewise reflected their key role in conquests of the period. Their spiritual leaders, known as Babas (Fathers) or Sultans (Rulers), led the Ottoman troops into battle, and it was the moral authority they conferred on early Ottoman rulers that enabled them to maintain the loyalty of the seminomadic Turcoman tribesmen whose support was key to early Ottoman success.

It is no coincidence that the oldest Ottoman document to survive is the foundation charter, or vakfiyye, drawn up by Orhan Gazi in 1324, endowing a zaviye for these wandering mystics, and placing its management in the hands of a converted freed eunuch named Sharaf al-din Muqbil. The document’s careful wording (reflecting the fact that the eunuch had no offspring) states that he will be succeeded as administrator of the foundation by the ablest of the children of the Christian slaves who serve the facility. This was the milieu within which Christians and Muslims, slave and free alike, mingled. It was this milieu which served to create the new race of Ottoman Turks, whose heritage is still so visible.

Viewed against this background, the surviving early Ottoman monuments of Bursa take on a special meaning. Their scope and numbers are truly impressive, even more so when we factor in the series of man-made and natural disasters of the past half millennium. Three times Muslim armies occupied, looted, and burned up half the city (Tamerlane’s army in 1403, the forces of Karamani Mehmet in 1413, and the rebels known as the Celalis in 1609-12). Earthquakes, always a bane in Bithynia (which lies across a major fault line), frequently took their toll as well. Fires, a perennial problem in a city whose residences were built primarily of lath and plaster, frequently ravaged whole quarters. Finally, in the twentieth century, the rejection of everything Ottoman in the new Republic of Turkey meant the destruction or neglect of monuments that stood as silent reminders of the past one was not supposed to remember. What is amazing is less how much is gone than how much