Islamic civilisation is famous for its garden culture. From the earlier centuries of Islam, the gardens of the Caliphs in Samarra in Iraq and Madinat al-Zahra' in Spain exemplify not only the integration of architecture and garden, but also the importance to statecraft of gardens and vistas of the landscape. In synoptic views of Islamic garden culture, the large ensembles of palatial gardens like these are conflated with later and better preserved early modem Islamic gardens from Mughal India and elsewhere, imparting monumentality, geometric regularity, and immutability to an archetypal ‘Islamic garden’, pinioned by paradisical symbolism.1,2 In this article, I would like to examine Islamic garden culture in the medieval period (11-13th cs), an era lying between the centralised empires of early Islam (8-10th cs) and the gunpowder empires (Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans) of the early modem period (16-18th cs). In doing so, I would like to suggest a multiplicity of meanings, not to mention influences, guiding the astonishing proliferation of gardens, hunting, and chivalric culture in medieval Islamdom and the eastern Mediterranean in this period. In this article, the proliferation of an informal suburban garden provides a dynamic linking extra-paradisical concepts with garden-making, gardens and landscape exploitation, and Islamic and Christian cultures alike.
Two main factors contribute to a great difference between earlier and later Islamic states. First, contrary to the era of large, unitary states occurring before and after it, this period was typified by many and smaller principalities. Second, these states were not all Islamic: the medieval period witnessed the establishment, rivalry and alliance of small independent Islamic and Christian states in the eastern Mediterranean. This interpenetration of Islamic and Christian societies is marked by the Christian incursions into Islamic lands with the Crusader states of the Levant and the Kingdom of Armenian Cilicia, and the conquering of traditionally Christian lands, with the rise of independent Turkish Islamic states in formerly Byzantine territories in Anatolia.
It is this last that I take as my subject matter: the gardens and landscape of medieval central Anatolia. Ruled and largely populated by Greek-speaking Christians for close to a millennium, Byzantine Anatolia fell to the Turkish Islamic Seljuks in the late 11th century. The social and economic order that came with the establishment of the Seljuk dynasty in Anatolia brought with it a new garden culture. Largely imported from the eastern Islamic lands, especially Iran, where the Seljuks ruled, this culture, however, was not imposed; it was adapted to the Anatolian countryside, with its own traditions, history, and topography.