The long-lost manuscript of the travels of Ibn Batutah was one of those important finds that made the French occupation of Algeria so memorable an event in the annals of the advancement of learning. Its translation into French in 1843 made accessible for the first time a contemporary source of the highest value for the political and social life of the whole Moslem world during the first half of the fourteenth century. For Ibn Batutah travelled from his home in Morocco to the confines of China. He lived a while in each country that he visited, and wrote from the sympathetic and understanding point of view of a member of the Moslem clergy. Ibn Batutah visited Asia Minor between 1330 and 1340.[734]
Shehabeddin was an Arabic writer from Damascus,[735] who died in 1349. He wrote a voluminous work of twenty volumes, called Footpaths of the Eyes in the Kingdoms of Different Countries.[736] He was a contemporary of Ibn Batutah. Shehabeddin did not enjoy the advantage of visiting personally the many emirates of western Asia Minor, as did Ibn Batutah; but he states that he has based his record of these countries upon the eye-witness information furnished to him by word of mouth by Sheik Haïdar of Sir Hissar.[737] The agreement between Ibn Batutah and Shehabeddin on the state of affairs in Asia Minor during the first half of the fourteenth century is so general that one can claim for their statements, which are, in large part, the basis of this appendix, most substantial grounding.
The other sources are the Byzantine historians, the chronicler of the Catalans, the Catalan Map of 1375,[738] the annalist of Trebizond, the points of contact with the Cypriotes, the chevaliers of Rhodes, the Italian traders, the Osmanlis and the Mongols and Tartars. For a few of the emirates there are coins extant. Inscriptions on public edifices, such as mosques, pious foundations, baths and fountains, are unfortunately lacking, not only for the history of the Turkish emirates but for the Osmanlis as well.[739]
In the list that follows, twenty-six of the emirates existed during the reign of Orkhan, between the years 1330 and 1350. They are mentioned either by Ibn Batutah or by Shehabeddin, in most cases by both, as independent in their day. The others are either earlier or later than Orkhan’s reign, and comprise a portion of earlier emirates, from which they had become detached. After the Turkish emirates, given alphabetically, are placed the non-Turkish independent states in Asia Minor.
The material that can be gathered about these Turkish emirates, the two independent Christian states, and the spheres of influence of outside Christian and Moslem states in Asia Minor in the fourteenth century, would make a book in itself. In this appendix I desire to give only enough to indicate the relative strength and vitality of each state. It must be borne in mind that my object is not to write the history of these emirates, or of Asia Minor as a whole, during the fourteenth century, but to demonstrate how little of Asia Minor was really incorporated in the Ottoman possessions at the time that, and during the thirty years after, the capital of the new empire was established in Adrianople.
Adana (1)
In the Taurus Mountains, on the northern limits of Lesser Armenia, and to the south-east of Karamania, the Turcoman tribes through whom Marco Polo passed seemed to him to enjoy an independent existence. Up to the time of Murad I, they formed no state, but between 1373 and 1375 the family of Ramazan took the chieftainship. When the Mamelukes destroyed the Armenian kingdom (1375), the Ben-Ramazan dynasty established itself at Adana, on the Sarus, in the fertile Cilician plain.[740] The Ben-Ramazan emirs managed to keep from being absorbed either by the Karamanians or the Egyptians. After the complete subjugation of Karamania by the Osmanlis, they submitted to Selim I about 1510, under the stipulation, however, that the emir, Piri pasha, should hold office for life as vali of Adana and Sis. Sis was frequently coupled with Adana in the title of the Ben-Ramazan.