‘The rose garden of refuge’: the fifteenth century Ottoman Palace at Edirne/Adrianople

Submission note: A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Visual Arts to the School of Historical and European Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

The thesis is a study of the Ottoman palace at Edirne/Adrianople and the life lived within it from the time the complex was built in 1451 until its final destruction in 1877. The palace played a pivotal role at various times in Ottoman history. Initially designed to serve as an imperial palace before the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the riverside compound subsequently served as a well-loved pleasure palace and military staging post for Ottoman campaigns in the Balkans. The story of the palace illustrates transitions from one imperial era to another. The study focuses on a number of episodes from the history of the palace that suggest the royal complex extended Persianate cultural ideals into the emerging Ottoman realm in southeast Europe. Models of kingship described in Persianate literary culture thrived at the court in Edirne. Yet their conception was modified by the unique cultural encounter of the Ottomans with Orthodox Christianity and centuries of Byzantine rule. This survey of the Edirne palace architecture, ceremony and patterns of daily life fills a gap in the literature to date that tends to focus on the Topkapı and subsequent palaces in Istanbul and elsewhere. The aim is to bring in to focus the ways the location, structure and life of the palace constitute an early statement of the Ottoman conception of imperial rule and what later became a distinctive Ottoman visual and cultural style. The work discusses questions of ‘space’ and ‘place’ in reference to architecture, art and literature; the process of integration and sharing of cultural material conveyed in poetic texts; and dramatic and unprecedented executions and depositions of sultans and leading court officials and sultans in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. All these questions were once associated with the so-called ‘decline’ of the Ottoman empire, but they are now seen as an opening up of the Ottoman power structure to new ways of sharing its administration and its rewards.