Beylik of Germiyan

Germiyan, or the Germiyanids, controlled parts of western Anatolia from about 1300 to 1429, one of the beyliks that arose from the wreck of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. The tribe appears in the twelfth-century chronicles of Matthew of Edessa and the Georgian Chronicles fighting the County of Edessa and the kingdom of Georgia, and again in 1239 near Malatya, where it was set to suppress the Babai revolt before it moved west with the Mongol invasion. Under Yakub I, who ruled from 1300 to 1340, Germiyan gained sovereignty with the Seljuk collapse and fought the Ottomans and Byzantium, a war his successor Mehmed continued to 1361. Suleiman, ruling from 1361 to 1387 in the shadow of the Karamanids, married his daughter Devletşah Hatun to the Ottoman prince and future sultan Bayezid I, and the dowry transferred much of the beylik, including the capital Kütahya, into Ottoman hands. Yakub II tried to win the lost lands back, was jailed by his brother-in-law Bayezid in 1390, escaped nine years later and, after helping Timur defeat Bayezid at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, had his borders restored. Kütahya fell to Karaman in 1411, and Yakub was reinstated by the Ottomans, who now overshadowed the beylik; with no male heir he left the beylik to Murad II in 1429. Germiyan rule left many architectural monuments in western Anatolia.