İznikomid

The Ottomans of Orhan's day took Nicomedia by patience rather than assault. They held the villages on the southern shore of the gulf from 1327, their mild treatment of the country people won over many of the surrounding forts by 1333, and when famine struck the city in 1337 it gave in, becoming an Ottoman sanjak under its first governor, Süleyman Pasha. Timur's victory at Ankara briefly undid this: in 1403 Süleyman Çelebi, bargaining for his father's throne, handed the city back to the Byzantines, and it was not secure in Ottoman hands again until Mehmed Çelebi took power in 1413. Earthquakes did the rest. The quake of September 1509 brought down Süleyman Pasha's madrasa, five mosques and the sea walls, and that of May 1766 wrecked the town and put its shipyard out of use, leaving it a quiet place into the 19th century.