Eshrefids

The Eshrefids, also called the Ashrafids, were a small Turkish beylik in Anatolia during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The dynasty belonged to the wave of frontier principalities founded by Oghuz Turkish clans after the decline of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. Its capital was at Beyşehir, on the western edge of the Konya plain, and its territory lay in the lake district of south-western Anatolia. The Eshrefids are best known today for the Eşrefoğlu Mosque in Beyşehir, one of the finest surviving examples of early Anatolian Turkish wooden-columned mosque architecture. The beylik was founded by Eşrefoğlu Süleyman Bey and ended when its ruler Mubariz al-Din Mehmed was executed by Timurtash, the Mongol governor of Anatolia, in the early fourteenth century. Its lands were then contested by neighbouring beyliks and eventually incorporated into the Ottoman state. The Eshrefid period illustrates the political fragmentation of Anatolia after the Seljuk collapse, when local Turkish dynasties built small but culturally distinctive states around fortified towns and caravan routes.