Imperial Ottoman

Society & Culture · Article

Mimar Sinan: The Chief Architect of the Ottoman Golden Age

The life, training, and major works of Mimar Sinan (c. 1488-1588), the chief architect of Suleiman the Magnificent who designed the Süleymaniye, Şehzade, and Selimiye mosques.

Mimar Sinan: The Chief Architect of the Ottoman Golden Age

Mimar Sinan (c. 1488/1490 – 9 April 1588) was the chief imperial architect of the Ottoman Empire for nearly half a century, and the most important architect of the classical Ottoman architectural tradition. He served three sultans — Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II, and Murad III — and his works include more than three hundred major monuments, of which the three he considered his masterpieces are the Şehzade Mosque in Istanbul, the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, and the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne.

Early life and the devshirme

Sinan was born to a Christian family in the village of Ağırnas near Kayseri, in central Anatolia, around 1488 or 1490. The family was Armenian or Greek, and Sinan was one of the thousands of Christian boys taken into Ottoman service through the devshirme system, the levy of Christian children for the palace school and the Janissary corps. He entered the Enderun, the palace school, and was trained in the engineering and architectural traditions of the empire.

As a young officer, Sinan served in the campaigns of Suleiman the Magnificent, working on bridges, fortifications, and supply lines, and he rose through the ranks of the military engineers. The campaigns took him across the Balkans, the Arab lands, and Persia, and the monuments he saw — the late antique churches of Anatolia, the Seljuk mosques of central Anatolia, the Mamluk mosques of Syria and Egypt — provided the visual library of his later work.

The chief architect

In 1538, on the death of Acem Ali, Sinan was appointed Mimarbaşı, the chief of the imperial architects, a post he held until his death in 1588. In that time he designed and supervised more than three hundred major works, including eighty-four large mosques, fifty-two smaller mosques, sixty-one medreses, sixteen hospitals, seven Sufi lodges, eight bridges, twenty-two palaces, thirty-four baths, and forty-six caravanserais.

Sinan made a careful study of the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia, the principal monumental model for the classical Ottoman mosque, and he kept a notebook of his principal works, the Tezkiretü’l-Bünyan, which remains one of the most important documents in the history of Ottoman architecture.

The three masterpieces

In his own assessment, recorded in the notebook, Sinan ranked his three principal works as follows:

  • The Şehzade Mosque (1548) in Istanbul, the mosque of the memory of Prince Mehmed, was Sinan’s “workmanship” — his first masterpiece. It was the first great classical Ottoman mosque, and it introduced the central-dome plan that was to characterize the classical style.
  • The Süleymaniye Mosque (1550–1557) in Istanbul, the imperial mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, was Sinan’s “journeymanship” — his mature work. The largest mosque in Istanbul, it is widely considered the eighth wonder of the medieval and early modern world, and its central dome, more than twenty-six meters in diameter, was the largest in the empire.
  • The Selimiye Mosque (1568–1574) in Edirne, the imperial mosque of Selim II, was Sinan’s “mastership” — his perfect work. The central dome, more than thirty-one meters in diameter and rising on eight massive piers, is one of the largest in the world.

The three are treated more fully in the broader article on Ottoman architecture, together with the Ottoman family and the imperial harem that they served.

Other major works

In addition to the three masterpieces, Sinan designed dozens of other important monuments. The Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque in Istanbul (1567), the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque in Üsküdar (1546), the Rüstem Pasha Mosque in Istanbul (1561), the Kılıç Ali Pasha Mosque (1580), the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı (1556), the Çemberlitaş Hamamı (1584), the Büyükçekmece Bridge (1567), the Drina Bridge at Višegrad (1577), and the Mostar Bridge in Herzegovina (1557–1566) are among the most important.

The Süleymaniye külliye is the most complete of the imperial complexes. It includes the mosque, four medreses, a hospital, a caravanserai, a bath, a soup kitchen, a school, a library, and the tombs of Suleiman and Hürrem Sultan. It is one of the most comprehensive examples of the imperial religious foundation in the world, and it is still in use as a place of prayer and learning. The Ottoman cuisine of the foundation’s imaret is described elsewhere in this silo.

The classical style

The classical style that Sinan developed combined a central dome, slender pencil minarets, cascading semi-domes, and vast airy interiors. The walls of the prayer hall were pierced with windows in tiers, and the interior was plastered and painted with calligraphic inscriptions, geometric and arabesque ornament, and stylized floral designs.

The style was rapidly exported to the provinces, and the buildings that Sinan designed for the Balkans, for Syria, for the Hejaz, and for Anatolia became the models for the imperial architecture of the next two centuries.

Legacy

Sinan died on 9 April 1588 and was buried in a modest tomb of his own design beside the Süleymaniye. He was the principal architect of the classical Ottoman tradition, and his works remained the models for imperial architecture in Istanbul, Edirne, the Balkans, and the Arab provinces for the next two centuries. The architects of the post-Sinan period worked within his framework, and the imperial mosques of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the Sultan Ahmed (the Blue Mosque), the Yeni Valide, the Nuruosmaniye — are all descendants of his work. The broader tradition is treated in the article on Ottoman architecture, and the Ottoman society and culture overview places the architect in the wider context of the empire.