Amasya

When Mongol rule faded, local lords held Amasya in turn, the last of them keeping it against Kadi Burhan al-Din only with Ottoman help, until in the early 1390s Bayezid I took the city himself and made his son Mehmed its governor. The choice proved decisive. After his father's defeat at Ankara in 1402, Mehmed fell back on Amasya and fought his brothers from its walls for eleven years, emerging in 1413 as Sultan Mehmed I and the reunifier of the empire.

From then on Amasya was a school for Ottoman princes: Murad II, Mehmed II and Bayezid II all governed it before they came to the throne. Süleyman the Magnificent often stayed here and received the Habsburg envoy Busbecq in the city, and in 1555 it gave its name to the Peace of Amasya, which ended his long war with Safavid Persia.