Mimar Sinan

Mimar Sinan was chief architect to three Ottoman sultans and designed or supervised some three hundred and seventy buildings. Born around 1489 in Anatolia to a Christian family, probably Greek or Armenian, he was taken in the devshirme levy in his early twenties, converted to Islam, and trained as a military engineer. He served as a Janissary through campaigns in Rhodes, Belgrade, Mohács, Vienna and Baghdad, building bridges, fortifications and siege works — including a bridge over the Danube and ships for a lake crossing in Iraq — and this practical structural training is the foundation of everything he built afterwards. He was appointed chief court architect in 1538, aged about fifty, and held the post for half a century. His lifelong problem was the dome. Hagia Sophia, built a thousand years earlier, was the standard against which Ottoman architecture measured itself, and Sinan's career is a sustained investigation of how to carry a great dome on the fewest possible supports and open the wall beneath it to light. He called the Şehzade Mosque his apprentice work, the Süleymaniye in Istanbul his journeyman work, and the Selimiye at Edirne, completed in 1575 when he was in his eighties, his masterpiece. The Selimiye's dome rests on eight piers and exceeds Hagia Sophia's in diameter, with the interior visible whole from any point. He also built aqueducts, bridges, caravanserais, baths, hospitals and the Mostar bridge is attributed to his pupil. He trained the architects who built the Taj Mahal's tradition. He died in 1588.

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